Favorite writers of short fiction and others
Discover a curated list of favorite short fiction writers and their must-read books. Explore top picks for captivating stories and masterful storytelling in short fiction.
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The Boys of My Youth
by Jo Ann Beard
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of the New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage & beyond - & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.
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Ordinary Life
by Elizabeth Berg
In this superb collection of short stories, the bestselling author of Open House and Talk Before Sleep takes us into the times in women’s lives when memories and events cohere to create a sense of wholeness, understanding, and change. In Ordinary Life, Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, and no, she isn’t contemplating getting a divorce—she just needs some time to think, to take stock of her life, and she comes to a surprising conclusion. In Today’s Special,a woman recognizes the solace she finds in the simple, timeless fare and atmosphere of the local diner and, ultimately, the harmony within her own spirit that familiar comforts can evoke. In White Dwarf, the secrets of a marriage are revealed as a couple passes the time with a seemingly insignificant word-association game. And in “Martin’s Letter to Nan,” the unforgettable husband and wife from Berg’s novel The Pull of the Moon engage in a new correspondence in which a different aspect of their marriage is revealed. Elizabeth Berg’s fiction has been praised for its "brilliant insights about the human condition" (Detroit Free Press), and The Charlotte Observer has said that "Berg captures the way women think as well as any writer."Those same qualities of wisdom and insight are everywhere present in Ordinary Life.
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The Best American Short Stories 2002
by Sue Miller
A compilation of twenty American short stories originally published in magazines and periodicals issued between January 2001 and January 2002, selected for inclusion by guest editor Sue Miller.
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Trash
by Dorothy Allison
Trash, Allison's landmark collection, laid the groundwork for her critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, the National Book Award finalist that was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "simply stunning...a wonderful work of fiction by a major talent." In addition to Allison's classic stories, this new edition of Trash features "Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories," an introduction in which Allison discusses the writing of Trash and "Compassion," a never-before-published short story. First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of storytelling. A book that resonates with uncompromising candor and incandescence, Trash is sure to captivate Allison's legion of readers and win her a devoted new following.
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The Big Hunger
by John Fante
Published here for the first time, this text presents a collection of recently-discovered stories by John Fante.
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Where I'm Calling From
by Raymond Carver
The final story collection from “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) features classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier volumes. • “Among the masterpieces of American fiction." —The New York Times Book Review By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I’m Calling From, his last collection, includes seven new works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver’s life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.
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The Woman Lit by Fireflies
by Jim Harrison
The author of Dalva and Legends of the Fall has created three stunning novellas that echo the best works of Raymond Carver and James Dickey. A superb collection that evokes life lived close to the land--and a brilliant portrayal of the complex relationships of the men and women there.
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The Last Girls
by Lee Smith
Thirty-five years after a trip down the Mississippi on a raft with their classmates, four women are reunited to cruise the river once again where they plan to release the ashes of a fellow rafter, Margaret "Baby" Ballou.
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When the Messenger is Hot
by Elizabeth Crane
Features the stories of women recovering from loss, addiction, or betrayal, from a woman who decides to live on the patio rooftop of her friend's apartment, to a writer whose identity is compromised by the actress who portrays her, to a daughter who believes her mother is still alive. 25,000 first printing.
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A Brief History of the Flood
by Jean Harfenist
Acorn Lake kids swim better than they walk, and most never consider leaving Sioux County. It is precisely this small-town life that makes "A Brief History of the Flood" so extraordinary. These 11 linked stories form a startling drama about the trials of Lillian Anderson and her family as they scratch their way down a small-town Minnesota social ladder.
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The Whore's Child and Other Stories
by Richard Russo
In his first collection, a master storyteller focuses on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, Russo captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.
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Black Glass
by Karen Joy Fowler
An innovative, critically acclaimed collection of stories by the author of "The Sweetheart Season" and "Sarah Canary."
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The Story of Lucy Gault
by William Trevor
A novel set in Ireland in the 1920s charts the progress of a young girl whose entire life seems to be falling apart when the threat of arson drives the family from their country home.
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The 25th Hour
by David Benioff
The brilliant debut novel from the bestselling author of City of Thieves and the co-creator of the HBO series Game of Thrones, about a white-collar drug dealer's last night out in New York City before going to jail Adapted as a feature film by Spike Lee starring Edward Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman “Novels like The 25th Hour don't fall out of trees every day. The tone is dark and intense; its elegant style is cut on the raw side; and the characters come from places we've all been.” —The New York Times All Monty Brogan ever really wanted when he grew up was to be a fireman. Now he's about to start a seven-year stretch in the federal penitentiary for drug dealing. With just twenty-four hours of freedom to go, he prowls the city with his girlfriend and his two best friends from high school—a high-flying bond trader and an idealistic teacher. As the minutes count down, Monty seizes one last chance to stack the odds in his favor. Hurtling from the money pits of Wall Street to Manhattan's downtown lounge and club scene, from the enclaves of the Russian mob to the old immigrant neighborhoods, The 25th Hour evokes the pulsing rhythms and diamond-hard edges of a city in the raw, illusory hours between midnight and dawn. A taut and mesmerizing tale of an urban purgatory suspended between the crime and the punishment, The 25th Hour is a major player in contemporary noir fiction.
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American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. "A seminal book.” —The Washington Post One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. “A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing.... An important book.” —Katherine Dunn, bestselling author of Geek Love Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards!
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Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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Reasons to Live
by Amy Hempel
Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit.
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly
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Head
by William Tester
The eleven gorgeous stories in Head are remarkably varied in setting and cultural context: a bullying cattleman forces his two stepsons to lay fence in a Florida swamp; a haunted gay drifter hooks up with a rich young Italian in the shadow of the Vatican. Like Harold Brodkey's manic protagonists, William Tester's characters seem constantly poised on a psychic edge. Head contains some of the most daring and genuinely erotic writing in contemporary literature. By the author of the novel-length prose poem, Darling. "People speak of stories and novels as being 'plot-driven,' or, say, 'voice-driven.' If anything, Tester's stories are fear-driven. There is, in these stories, fear of women-each jittery flirtation an agony of nervous desire-fear of a cruel stepfather who routinely endangers his stepsons, fear of one's prospects. There is fear of the very act of speech, given the narrator's ruinous stutter. Yet it is the resulting clumsiness-the missteps, the need so great-that seduces us in ways some smooth operator could not."-from the foreword by Amy Hempel Marketing Plans: â_¢ Author tour in NYC, Washington D. C., Boston, and Chicago â_¢ One thousand posters mailed to key accounts William Tester is a native of Charleston and North Florida, and is the author of the novel Darling, published by Alfred A. Knopf (1992). He has degrees from Syracuse and Columbia Universities, and is the recipient of the NEA Fellowship for Fiction, the Hob Broun Prize, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, Virginia.