Claire Messud described Erin McGraw's last collection of stories as "at once laugh-out-loud funny and utterly serious, [exploring] life's profundity through its details." This is even more true with McGraw's new collection, Joy. In these very short stories, narrators step out of themselves to explain their lives to us, sometimes defensively, sometimes regretfully, other times deceitfully. Voices include those of the impulsive first-time murderer,...

Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire

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"Friendship, love, and misplaced hope drive the characters who populate a new collection of Maeve Binchy stories never before published in the United States." -- Publisher annotation.

"A sharp, funny, and honest collection of real-life stories from Kelly Ripa, showing the many dimensions and crackling wit of the beloved daytime talk show host"--

One day while looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary, Burrows was stopped in his tracks by an example sentence that seemed like a tiny piece of fiction which had wandered out of another book and settled down in the dictionary. Now he has created a collection of very short stories-- some barely one page long-- composed entirely of example sentences from various dictionaries. Genre-bending and wildly inventive, they create a giddy celebration...

Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past.

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

"Contains a total of sixty stories, thirteen of them gathered from works of non-fiction. They cover the entire span of Twain's writing life, [published] from 1865 to 1916, six years after his death ... The stories are arranged chronologically according to the years of first publication, and alphabetically within a given year." A note on the text

"Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date"-- In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat...