The old advice is to "write what you know." What we know most authentically is what we feel, and after a global pandemic, escalating natural disasters, and global violence destabilized our economy and reached into our lives to disrupt even our most mundane and reliable patterns, our feelings may be a little raw. This year's finalists have channeled intense feelings in a variety of fascinating ways. Their work makes us want to sit each of them down for a long personal chat to ask how? What?...

The emotional intensity of our post-pandemic anthology has given way to a more reflective mood as many of the finalist entries explore, explain, or challenge beliefs. While nonfiction took the Grand Prize, the fiction, children's/YA, and poetry authors were likewise interested in digging deeper into perspectives on culture and humanity. If you enjoy discussing life, the universe, and everything with a stranger, you'll love this. There's a proverb that advises us to "get understanding." As ...

Love & Profanity features more than forty brief, brilliant, and unforgettable true stories from writers both renowned and on the rise. The special edition e-book also includes the winner and five finalists from the "Tell Your True Story" contest, sponsored by Switch Press and Wattpad, the world's largest community of readers and writers. In these stories you will discover strange and surprising scenes of people coming of age amidst the everyday intensity of teenage life. You will witness t...

These 23 stories take us on a twisted fun ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a one-legged International Actuarial Forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. From a new short story by William Gibson in which a teen disassociated from his body haunts his neighborhood through the decades, to Douglas Coupland’s balls-out satire of a slightly futuristic Surviv...

The internationally bestselling book of tongue-in-cheek poetry that set off a trend of feline funniness! Animal lovers will laugh out loud at the quirkiness of their feline friends with these insightful and curious poems from the singular minds of funny cats.The author of the internationally syndicated comic strip Sally Forth helps cats unlock their creative potential and explain their odd behavior to ignorant humans. With titles like "Who Is That on Your L...

2018 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, rac...

2017 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Runner-Up Depression & Other Magic Tricks is the debut book by Sabrina Benaim, one of the most-viewed performance poets of all time, whose poem "Explaining My Depression to My Mother" has become a cultural phenomenon with over 50,000,000 views. Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living. Andrea Gibson, author of Lo...

“Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.”—Dani Shapiro, author of InheritanceSixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark?When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. Th...

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee and series editor Heidi Pitlor.“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of contemporary fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a c...

**A New York Times Bestseller"Funny, subversive, and able to excavate such brutally honest sentences that you find yourself nodding your head in wonder and recognition."—Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights and Hamilton: An American Musical**Are you a sensible, universally competent individual? Are you tired of the crushing monotony of leaping gracefully from one lily pad of success to the next? Are you sick of doing ...

The bestselling, wonderfully unconventional, “warmly conspiratorial…seriously good” (The New York Times) memoir-in-letters from the Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award–winning actress that has received fabulous and wide praise. “There is no one else quite like Mary-Louise Parker…Funny, heartbreaking and profound” (ELLE).An extraordinary literary memoir, Dear Mr. You renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise Par...

A tale from the world of Steven Brust and Skyler White's novel The IncrementalistsThe Incrementalists are a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, communicate with one another across nations and time, and have a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time."Fireworks in the Rain" tells an original story not found in the no...