"In the title story, a bystander tries to soothe a woman who seems to have cracked under the pressures of motherhood. And in several linked stories throughout, the relationship between the narrator and her husband unfolds in telling and often hilarious vignettes. Of their time and yet timeless, Wolitzer's stories zero in on the domestic sphere and ordinary life with wit, candor, grace, and an acutely observant eye."

Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

The first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, We Live in Water is a diverse suite of stories marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of America’s most talked-about writers. Stories in We Live in Water range from comic tales of love to social satire and suspenseful crime fiction. Traveling from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, to a condemned...

“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.”...

"In her first short story collection, [Smith] combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. With ten ... stories complemented by a selection of her most lauded pieces for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, [this book] explores a wide range of subjects, from first loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience"--

"These fifteen ... stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In 'A Full-Service Shelter', a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In 'Greed,' a spurned wife examines her husband's affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in 'Cloudland,' the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with...

"A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties...

In five fairly long tales, George serves up psychological detection in one, Stephen King-like horror in another, a puzzle mystery, a history mystery, and one that gives an O. Henry twist to the O. J. Simpson case.

A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away — the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder — are...