Established in 2005, the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University was originally established to highlight a literary genre regarded as undervalued and under threat. It aimed to recognise and celebrate the very best writers of short fiction who had no prize equivalent to major literary awards like the Man Booker Prize. 19 years on, the short story is in robust health and the BBC National Short Story Award is recognised as the most prestigious for a single short story with th...

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers WeeklyWinner of the Rome Prize (John Guare Writer’s Fund)“This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty.... In short, it’s fully alive.” —Phillip LopateFor Will Boast, what looked like the end turned out to be a new beginning. After losing his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-o...

In this “elegant meditation on modern-day emotion” (San Francisco Chronicle), best-selling, prize-winning author Will Boast reimagines the myth of Daphne and Apollo.Will Boast’s long-anticipated first novel is an “outright marvelous debut [that] breathes fresh vigor into timeless questions of love and risk” (Laura van den Berg). Born with a rare condition in which she suffers degrees of paralysis when faced with intense emotion, Daphne has had few close fr...

In ten surprising, devastating stories, Will Boast explores the complex ways in which we long for a home, for connection and purpose. A Sicilian barber takes on a refugee as an apprentice and upends his own quiet village life. A lonely New York architect starts an ill-advised relationship with an aspiring congressman. The comic mayhem of teenage locals in a tourist town suddenly turns deadly serious. A shooting in northern Wisconsin involving an immigrant sets a community against itself.

A national bestseller and winner of a Living Now Book Award, Stir is an exquisite memoir about how food connects us to ourselves, our lives, and each other.At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage, and thinking about starting a family. Then one day, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and was forced to the sidelines of th...

"With humor, grace and a wonderfully deft way with words" this veterinarian's memoir is "engrossing, often amusing, and always well told." ( USA Today ).You can't always count on people, but you can always count on your dog. No one knows that better than veterinarian Jessica Vogelsang.With the help of three dogs, Jessica is buoyed through adolescence, veterinary school, and the early years of motherhood. Taffy, the...

A memoir about a woman's coming of age in the closed world of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community is "an unforgettable portrait of anguish and hope" ( People).The third of six children in a family that harks back to a gloried Hassidic dynasty, Judy Brown grew up with the legacy of centuries of religious teaching. But her world begins to crumble when her "crazy" brother Nachum returns home after a year in Israel living with relatives. Though supposedly "cure...

The New York Times BestsellerIn 2006 Jamie Tworkowski wrote a story called “To Write Love on Her Arms,” about helping a friend through her struggle with drug addiction, depression, and self-injury. The piece was so hauntingly beautiful that it quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Now, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, encouragemen...

On April 19, 1995, Kathy Sanders' life was changed forever when a bomb exploded and destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing her two grandsons Chase and Colton.For months, Kathy struggled with coping and wondered if the God she'd worshipped all her life even existed. After battling bitterness and contemplating suicide, she turned to the Lord and asked what He'd have her do. The answer was clear: Forgive your enemies.Thus Kathy forged a friendship with...

At nineteen years old, Nicole C. Kear's biggest concern is choosing a major--until she walks into a doctor's office in midtown Manhattan and gets a life-changing diagnosis. She is going blind, courtesy of an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and has only a decade or so before Lights Out. Instead of making preparations as the doctor suggests, Kear decides to carpe diem and make the most of the vision she has left. She joins circus school, tears through boyfriends, travels the world, ...

In March 2005, Ashley Smith made headlines around the globe when she miraculously talked her way out of the hands of alleged courthouse killer Brian Nichols after he took her hostage for seven hours in her suburban Atlanta apartment. In this moving, inspirational account—now a motion picture from Paramount—Ashley shares the details of her traumatic ordeal and expands on how her faith and the bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life helped her survive and bring the killer's murdero...

Former SNL writer and The New Yorker staffer Patty Marx employs the weapon she wields best--not that weapon; Patty believes in gun control. Instead, she uses her sharp-edged humor to tackle the most difficult facet of aging: the mind's decline. From forgetting her brother-in-law's name while he was wearing a nametag to hanging up the phone to look for her phone, Marx confesses to her failures, and not only to make you feel better about yourself.In Let...