Taboos and Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, is a short story anthology, edited by Luanne Smith, Kerri Beth Neville, and Devi Laskar is an anthology focused on breaking the rules featuring stories by Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kim Addonizio alongside emerging writers. The anthology offers a scope of voices, styles, stories, and wrongdoings. From infidelity to family prejudices, from breaking the law to broken promises, from losing everything to finding em...

David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences.Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the wo...

**#1 New York Times bestseller!In this unforgettable collection of essays, acclaimed humorist David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface.**Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all so...

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with mat...

THE MAN WHO LEFT is about the importance of fathers. It's about the men who leave, and the men who stay.It's a familiar story. Father leaves his wife and children and never looks back. Theresa Weir was five when her father left his family for a better life with a wealthy socialite. Many years passed with only occasional and grudging contact by Theresa's father. When Theresa married into a successful farm family, her father resurfaced, but she couldn't help but be suspicious of his ...

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEARNew York Times Book Review • The New Yorker • Entertainment Weekly • Time • Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Slate • St. Louise Post-Dispatch • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Seattle Times • NBCC Award FinalistMary Karr’s unforgettable sequel to her be...

Named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Time, the bestselling debut literary short story collection by the extraordinarily talented Miranda July, award-winning filmmaker, artist, and author of All Fours, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.In No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the w...

**“Kirby has mastered the art of short fiction…A stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless.”—NPR“Kirby takes joy in subverting the reader’s expectations at every turn. Her characters might be naïve, even reckless, but they aren’t about to be victims: They’re strong, and brave, and nearly always capable of rescuing themselves.”—New York Times Book ReviewMargaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny, warm, and furious sto...

“Astonishing. . . . The stories are surreal, with the sharpest edge and in one way or another, each story reveals something raw and powerful about being human in a world where so little is in our control.” — Roxane GayA refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories which illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, as seen through the lens of the natural world.Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutal...

A pitch-perfect, emotionally riveting literary family saga about the fracturing of a marriage and a family: “A gripping debut” (People) from an award-winning young writer with superb storytelling instincts.Life hasn’t always been perfect for Abe and Cassandra Green, but an afternoon on the San Francisco Bay might be as good as it gets. Abe is a rheumatologist, piloting his coveted new boat. Cassandra is a sculptor, finally gaining modest attention for her ...

"Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad FeministMarie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie of...

Fifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists.Contributors include Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, T.C. Boyle, Kevin Brockmeier, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Peter Ho Davies, Janet Desaulniers, Junot...