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584 books match the query 'Short Stories (single author)' and 41 start with s

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Safe Places

Kerry Dolan

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Exploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the twelve stories of Safe Places navigate the fault lines of existence. Shifting from New York and Chicago to the American West and the Australian outback, Kerry Dolan’s characters move through an uncertain and unpredictable world, confronting situations that are alternately menacing, tragic, and funny. An aspiring anthropologist falls under the sway of her fortuneteller. An American tourist catches opal fever in an Australian mining town and binds herself to a man she despises. Two hitchhiking teens take a ride with a mysterious stranger, while an unstable graduate student stalks the object of his affections across Berkeley. Assured and distinctive, the voice-driven stories of this debut collection capture the restless heart of characters in a state of flux, as they try—and frequently fail—to move beyond chance and circumstance.

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Safe as Houses

Marie-Helene Bertino

University of Iowa Press, 2012

Safe as Houses, the debut story collection of Marie-Helene Bertino, proves that not all homes are shelters. The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In "Free Ham," a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. “Has my ham done anything wrong?” she asks when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it.

In "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph," a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy "North Of." In “The Idea of Marcel,” Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over.

The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn’t Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies?

All homes are not shelters. But then again, some are. Welcome to the home of Marie-Helene Bertino.

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Sanctified and Chicken-Fried

The Portable Lansdale

By Joe R. Lansdale

University of Texas Press, 2009

Master of mojo storytelling, spinner of over-the-top yarns of horror, suspense, humor, mystery, science fiction, and even the Old West, Joe R. Lansdale has attracted a wide and enthusiastic following. His genre-defying work has brought him numerous awards, including the Grand Master of Horror from the World Horror Convention, the Edgar Award, the American Horror Award, seven Bram Stoker awards, the British Fantasy Award, Italy's Grinzane Prize for Literature, as well as Notable Book of the Year recognition twice from the New York Times.

Sanctified and Chicken-Fried is the first "true best of Lansdale" anthology. It brings together a unique mix of well-known short stories and excerpts from his acclaimed novels, along with new and previously unpublished material. In this collection of gothic tales that explore the dark and sometimes darkly humorous side of life and death, you'll meet traveling preachers with sinister agendas, towns lost to time, teenagers out for a good time who get more than they bargain for, and gangsters and strange goings-on at the end of the world. Out of the blender of Lansdale's imagination spew tall tales about men and mules, hogs and races, that are, in his words, "the equivalent of Aesop meets Flannery O'Connor on a date with William Faulkner, the events recorded by James M. Cain."

Whether you're a long-time fan of Joe R. Lansdale or just discovering his work, this anthology brings you the best of a writer whom the New York Times Book Review has praised for having "a folklorist's eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur's sense of pace."

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Satan's Stones

By Moniru Ravanipur

University of Texas Press, 1996

Women writers occupy prominent positions in late 20th century Iranian literature, despite the increased legal and cultural restrictions placed upon women since the 1978-1979 Islamic Revolution. One of these writers is Moniru Ravanipur, author of the critically acclaimed The Drowned and Heart of Steel.

Satan's Stones is the first English translation of her 1991 short story collection Sangha-ye Sheytan. Often set in the remote regions of Iran, these stories explore many facets of contemporary Iranian life, particularly the ever-shifting relations between women and men. Their bold literary experimentation marks a new style in Persian fiction akin to "magical realism."

Reports from Iran indicated that Satan's Stones had been banned there by government authorities. While its frank explorations of Iranian society may have offended Islamic leaders, they offer Western readers fresh perspectives on Iranian culture from one of the country's most distinguished writers.

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Scavengers

Stories

Becky Hagenston

University of Alaska Press, 2016

A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father—a seemingly rational man—believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has just survived a near-fatal accident flees to St. Petersburg, Russia, to wander through museums and palaces and simply try to forget. Hansel (yes, that Hansel), all grown up, tries to be a good father. A young girl begins to suspect that the séances being held in her basement just might not be as harmless as they seem.

These are the people and situations—where the familiar and bizarre intermix—that animate Becky Hagenston’s stories in Scavengers. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, characters find themselves faced with a choice: make sense of the past, or run from it. But Hagenston reminds us that even running can never be pure—so which parts of your past do you decide to hold on to? A brilliant collection from a master of short fiction, Scavengers is surprising, strange, and moving by turns—and wholly unforgettable.

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Seeing through the Sun

Linda Hogan

University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

Keen observation and vivid imagery mark this collection of poems by a Chickasaw Indian. Linda Hogan's subjects are often drawn from events of everyday life—gathering wood, watching her daughters sleep, witnessing changes in the weather, awaiting nightfall. But beneath the surface of these daily happenings runs a powerful undercurrent, a sureness of life's basic rhythms and a sensitivity to the pressures of survival.

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Selected Poems

Joseph Langland

University of Massachusetts Press, 1991

This book offers a selection of sixty-five poems from forty years of distinguished and prize-winning publication by Joseph Langland. These poems speak in a strong, natural voice that has mastered the craft and moves confidently within it. In them, one hears speech and music together in a wide-ranging world of ideas.

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Selected Prose

New and Revised Edition

John Milton, Edited by C. A. Patrides

University of Missouri Press, 1986

Although John Milton is best known for his poems such as Paradise Lost, his prose works, including Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings, and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, are important in their own right. In this selection of Milton’s prose, C.A. Patrides presents the best possible texts of complete works in a format designed to enable students to understand Milton the thinker as well as to judge for themselves the achievements of Milton the artist in prose.

First published in 1974, C.A. Patrides ‘s edition of Milton’s prose has proved invaluable to students and scholars of Renaissance literature because it includes mostly the complete texts of Milton’s prose works. Now, in this new and updated edition, Patrides has revised his introduction and his bibliography to reflect advances in Milton scholarship in the past ten years. In addition, the selections have been expanded to include passages from Milton’s theological treatise De doctrina Christiana.

For sale only in the USA and Philippines.

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Selected Stories

A. F. Veltman

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Five tales of social satire from a forgotten sensation of nineteenth-century Russian literature

In 1830s and ’40s Russia, A. F. Veltman’s eccentric writings were a fixture on the bookshelves of the reading public. In his era, his work influenced writers including Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. The five stories collected here, united by themes of social satire, display Veltman’s characteristic pivots between the tragic, comic, and grotesque.

“Erotida” riffs on the genre of the society tale with linguistic puns and a bizarre plot resolution. In “Roland the Furious,” provincial officials mistake a traveler for a high-ranking government functionary. “Travel Impressions, and, among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums” plays on the travelogue genre and includes what may be the first description in Russian literature of journey by railroad. “A Traveler from the Provinces; or, A Commotion in the Capital” parodies the Moscow literary salons of Veltman’s day. Finally, “It’s Not a House, but a Plaything!” toys with yet another storytelling convention of the time—the Russian folkloric tradition of “house spirits.”

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Senseless Women

Sarah Harris Wallman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman's debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. A lonely music teacher at a Nashville Christian academy awaits the miracle of love; a Jane Doe recalls the affair that sustained, and ended, her; a new mother brings life into the world during a bleak election party; young girls are exploited by a nightclub owner in death, as in life. Alone or in weird sisterhood, some of these women are senseless because they refuse to feel, others because they've been deprived of stimuli and attention. As these twelve stories prove, there's no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape. This is Senseless Women.

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Settlers of Unassigned Lands

Charles McLeod

University of Michigan Press, 2015

In these seven stories spanning the Midwest to California, Charles McLeod brings us characters estranged from their homelands and locked in conflict with their past and present selves. In “How to Start Your Own Midwestern Ghost Town,” an unnamed narrator hatches a plan to capitalize on rural decay. A porn star trying to transition to the mainstream does an interview with a German reporter in “The Subject of Our First Issue Is Art.” In the title story, a closeted heroin dealer follows a ghostly girl into an Oakland graveyard. And in “Rancho Brava,” the conductor of a focus group about corporate salsa keeps getting interrupted by visitors from the Old West. Alternating between the comic, the tragic, and the neurotic—and often all three at once—McLeod’s second collection transports readers from the American mainstream to the dark edges of cities and the heartland’s lost, forgotten towns, into the lives of people trying to decipher if they can escape their pasts, and at what cost.

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Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories

Yamamoto, Hisaye

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's forty-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In addition to the contents of the original volume, this edition brings back into print the following works:
- Death Rides the Rails to Poston
- Eucalyptus
- A Fire in Fontana
- Florentine Gardens

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Sex for the Millennium

Extreme Tales

Harold Jaffe

University of Alabama Press, 2026

An innovative work of experimental prose examining the entanglements of media, authority, and embodied experience.

Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales by Harold Jaffe is a provocative collection of experimental narratives that push the boundaries of form, language, and subject matter. Blending fiction, satire, and cultural commentary, the book presents a series of fragmented “extreme” episodes that explore the intersections of desire, power, and media in contemporary society.

Jaffe uses the concept of sex as a central metaphor rather than a literal focus, exploring how desire can be shaped, controlled, and commodified within larger social and political systems. Rather than following a traditional plot, Jaffe constructs a shifting landscape populated by characters caught in systems of control shaped by institutions, technology, and consumer culture. The stories examine how identity and intimacy are mediated by external forces.

Jaffe's work reflects postmodern literary traditions, using disjointed narratives and abrupt tonal shifts to unsettle the reader. His writing challenges social norms and exposes the underlying mechanisms of authority and manipulation at work in everyday life. With dark humor and intentional provocation, Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales offers a critique of modern culture, inviting readers to confront questions about autonomy, authenticity, and the influence of media in shaping human experience.

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Sex with Strangers

Michael Lowenthal

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

A fiercely honest exploration of the risks and rewards of contemporary relationships—and hookups—Sex with Strangers embraces the dizzying power of attraction across the spectrum of passion and infatuation. In this fearless collection, lust and loneliness drive a diverse cast of queer and straight characters into sometimes precarious entanglements.

Recognizing that any partner is unknowable on some level, Michael Lowenthal writes about how intimacy can make strangers of us all. A newly ordained priest struggles with guilt and longing when he runs into his ex-girlfriend. A woman weighs the cost of protecting her daughter from a man they both adore. A teenage busboy has a jolting brush with a famous musician. A young man tries to salvage a long-distance relationship while caring for his mentor, an erotic writer dying of AIDS.

In edgy, disquieting stories, Lowenthal traces the paths that attraction and erotic encounters take, baffling and rueful as often as electrifying. This fraught and funny volume forces us to grapple with our own subconscious desires and question how well we can ever really know ourselves.

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Shadows and Clouds

Marcus Stewart

Omnidawn, 2023

Stories that question our experience of time, truth, and memory.

Through the stories in Shadows and Clouds, Marcus Stewart invites us to consider how things are not always as they appear or as we remember them, instead locating reality in the imagination and the dream world. While animals understand the world without words, humans create our experiences as stories, translating past and future into tales told in the present. Stewart's stories take the notion of storytelling and expand to a consideration of how truth, misremembering, logic, lying, and uncertainty play together to affect our experience of reality. In an alternate reading of time, Stewart poses the suggestion that you may already have a future memory of reading this book, and reading the stories backward may bring us back to the present.

Shadows and Clouds is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook / Novelette Contest, chosen by Theodora Ziolkowski.

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Shamara and Other Stories

Svetlana Vasilenko

Northwestern University Press, 1999

This collection features Svetlana Vasilenko's novel Little Fool, nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. Rich in folklore, legend, and history, the story follows the transformation of Ganna, a girl from the Volga shores, into a modern-day Madonna. Also included are the novella "Shamara" and several short stories, including the acclaimed "Going After Goat Antelopes."

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Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

With Variant Readings and Annotations

Sherwood Anderson

Ohio University Press, 2000

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago advertising writer from Ohio, a failure as a businessman, husband, and father, published a small yellow book of short stories intended to “reform” American literature. Against all expectations, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life achieved what its author intended: after 1919 and after Winesburg, Ohio, American literature would be written and read freshly and differently.

Winesburg, Ohio has never been out of print, but never has Anderson’s book been published in the form and with the editorial care that the work has needed and deserved. The present text, authorized by the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust, is an expert text. The editor has relied on years of experience in editing Sherwood Anderson and has consulted all Anderson manuscripts, typescripts, letters, and diaries and all editions of the book to present the masterpiece in its intended state.

New to this expert edition of Winesburg, Ohio are historical and cultural annotations, documentation of changes in the various editions, identification of the Ohio originals for Anderson’s characters, and maps bearing the streets and buildings of the real town of Clyde, Ohio, which is the basis of Anderson’s fictional account.

Included as well are unique photographs of Anderson and Clyde, Ohio, illustrations that deepen knowledge and feeling for the author’s actual hometown and time, revealing Winesburg, Ohio to be an intensely local narrative—very much an “Ohio” book—and yet a book that has found and held worldwide attention.

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Shiny Objects

Dianne Benedict

University of Iowa Press, 1982

A successful professional painter and art instructor for years, Benedict was dissatisfied that she could paint petal-perfect flowers and expensive portraits of wealthy clients, but could not capture the light on the garden at dusk or the tender hands and faces of her own children. Seven years ago she walked into a poetry workshop and found "the window I needed for my imagination." She never painted another painting, and has never stopped writing. She got her BA in English and her MFA in writing at Goddard College, taught workshops, won scholarships, and recieved grants and awards for her fiction. her stories have appeared in INTRO and fiction international, and the title story in this award-winning collection was published as an Atlantic Monthly First.

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Short Stories

Five Decades

Irwin Shaw

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Featuring sixty-three stories spanning five decades, this superb collection-including "Girls in Their Summer Dresses," "Sailor Off the Bremen," and "The Eighty-Yard Run"-clearly illustrates why Shaw is considered one of America's finest short-story writers.

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Sin Eaters

Stories

Caleb Tankersley

University of Alaska Press, 2022

Winner of the 2021 Permafrost Prize in fiction

Magical, heartfelt, and surprisingly funny, Sin Eaters paints a tumultuous picture of religion and repression while hinting at the love and connection that come with healing. The powerful stories in Caleb Tankersley’s debut collection illuminate the shadowy edges of the American Midwest, featuring aspects of religion, sex and desire, monsters and magic, and humor.

Tankersley’s characters—including swamp creatures looking for love, pothead pastors, ghosts obsessed with TV, and a Jesus made of rust—arrive at the crossroads of pleasure and hunger in a world that is equal parts playful, hopeful, and dark. In “Never Been More in Love” a man must come to terms with his wife’s degenerative illness. “Uncle Bob” explores suicide attempts as a family heirloom. And the titular story follows a woman who must accept her monstrous role to find redemption for herself and her small town.

Sin Eaters is a fight for authenticity in a world that is mysterious, muggy, and punctured by violence. This stunning collection full of complex themes will both challenge and delight.

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Sleep Tight Satellite

Stories

Carol Guess

Tupelo Press, 2023

Central to Sleep Tight Satellite is the theme of queer chosen family. This positive form of connection contrasts with violent pseudo-communities formed by policing, government control, and technological surveillance. Characters struggle to survive the pandemic, but their survival skills were honed long before the Covid-19 outbreak. There’s a gritty realism to the odd jobs characters take to survive, and the ways they create loving communities of mutual aid.

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Slut Lullabies

Stories

Gina Frangello, Rebecca Makkai

Northwestern University Press, 2026

The collection that cemented Frangello’s reputation as a writer on the power dynamics of sexuality, gender, and the body

Through beauty, horror, humor, and chaos, Gina Frangello’s electric stories mine the human experience. A gay Latino man whose pious relatives are boycotting his commitment ceremony becomes caught up in hypocrisy and splendor when his lover’s Waspy mother hires a glitzy wedding coordinator. A desperate teen “seduces” her teacher in order to blackmail him into funding her young stepmother’s escape from their violent home. A wife turns to infidelity and drugs to distract her from chronic pain following an accident. A teenage boy attempts atonement in Amsterdam after having exploited and betrayed his naive girlfriend at home. A socialite must confront her dark past as her husband’s deteriorating illness erodes both her bank account and social standing.

Intimate and raw, this new edition of Frangello’s short fiction includes two previously unpublished stories. A foreword by Rebecca Makkai explains how Frangello’s incendiary work has opened the door for writing about deeply flawed and fascinating women.

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Small Bird Tell Me

Stories Of Greek Immigrants

Helen Papanikolas

Ohio University Press, 1994

Helen Papanikolas has been honored frequently for her work in ethnic and labor history. Among her many publications are Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, Peoples of Utah (ed.), and her parents' own story of migration, Emily-George. With Small Bird, Tell Me, she joins a long and ancient tradition of Greek story-tellers whose art informs and enriches our lives.

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Small Craft Warnings

Stories

Kate Braverman

University of Nevada Press, 1998

The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman’s characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman’s language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.

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Snapping Lines

Jack Lopez

University of Arizona Press, 2001

A construction worker takes up with the pregnant daughter of an acquaintance and finds he doesn't control the relationship as much as he thinks he does . . .

A couple searches for a lost dog along the beach because the dog is more important than their relationship . . .

A drunken man picks up a girl hitchhiker and remembers what it once felt like to have feelings for someone else . . .

What does it mean to be male in a world in which old borders no longer exist? How can a man have a relationship if he doesn't even know who he is—and what better way to find out than by committing to a woman? Snapping Lines brings familiar and new stories together in a collection that explores the lives of loners searching for love. Jack Lopez writes about people who have adopted a stoical indifference to a world in which they always seem to find themselves on the losing end. These stories explore Latino male identity and the forces that shape it: friends, family, and lovers; culture, place, and relationships. They focus on men—often working men in the building trades—who construct their lives through their work and live in perpetual limbo because they don't know who they are. Men who stumble onto the relationships they need almost by accident. Men who try to control their relationships but fail.

Written in spare, electric language and energized by memorable scenes, these stories enlighten as much as they entertain. When you have read Snapping Lines, you will come to see the faces of strangers in new and familiar ways.

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Softie

Stories

Megan Howell

West Virginia University Press, 2024

2025 PEN America Finalist, Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

2025 National Book Award Honoree, "5 Under 35"

2025 Gold Medal, Independent Publishing Book Awards (IPPY): Short Fiction

In beautifully melancholy stories of magical realism, the women and girls in Softie transform their bodies and test their sanity, trying to find meaning in the loneliest of places.

A former child star haunted by a past she can't remember. An Afro-French girl with an obsession for ear lobes. A loner whose only friend is hiding a terrible, otherworldly secret. Each of these stories shares situations that are sometimes fantastical, sometimes commonplace, but always strange. From a Corsican vacation town in its off-season to hospital rooms and a seedy hotel suite in Chicago, experience the every day come fully untethered from reality.

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Solitudes

Goffredo Parise

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Goffredo Parise's quest to capture the essence of human sentiment in prose-poem form resulted in the publication in 1972 of SILLABARIO N. 1, which contained 22 stories with titles proceeding alphabetically. Characterized by the same clarity found in ABECEDARY, SOLITUDES is a series of exquisite miniatures that form a bittersweet exploration of the joy and the melancholy of life.

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Some Final Beauty and Other Stories

Lisa Alvarez

University of Nevada Press, 2025

Some Final Beauty and Other Stories showcases women and Chicanx characters whose resistance, reconciliation, and strength vigorously affirm community. Author Lisa Alvarez captures the spirit of empowerment in the struggle for justice faced by marginalized communities in a nation defined by politicians from Reagan to Trump.

From the vibrant streets of Southern California to the arid Nevada Nuclear Test Site, these thematically linked stories explore self-discovery, rebellion, and solidarity as complex personalities and values meet at the intersection of art, love, relationships, activism, and identity. A Mexican American returns from WWII to encounter Paul Robeson. A Spanish Civil War veteran befriends a recovering addict. Young 1980s female activists take to the streets. A big-city Latino mayor discovers the limits of ambition. A grieving aunt confronts her dead niece’s toxic lover.

Both the author and her characters interrogate finality while insisting on the beauty of everyday human engagement, often steeped in Hispanic culture, and stubbornly demanding joyful civic participation. Alvarez constructs more than a sharp, empathetic and funny sociological survey of experiences. She crafts a chronicle of lives lived with purpose, resilience, and the hope of a better future.

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Some Kinds of Love

Stories

Steve Yates

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.

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Song of the Cicadas

Anne Mong-Lan Pham

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

In this striking first collection of poems, the grainy strangeness of the modern world is transformed into a place at once knowable and enduring. Mông-Lan conveys the certainty that even when the world stops making sense, decency and beauty somehow survive. From Saigon to San Francisco, she combines the earthly and the ecstatic, the animal and the sublime, to create lyrics that tempt and haunt.

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Sound of Holding Your Breath

Stories

Natalie Sypolt

West Virginia University Press, 2018

The residents of The Sound of Holding Your Breath could be neighbors, sharing the same familiar landscapes of twenty-first-century Appalachia—lake and forest, bridge and church, cemetery and garden, diner and hair salon. They could be your neighbors—average, workaday, each struggling with secrets and losses, entrenched in navigating the complex requirements of family in all its forms.

Yet tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A brother, a family, and a community fail to confront the implications of a missing girl. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. And in the title story, the shame of rape ruptures more than a decade later.

Accidents and deaths, cons and cover-ups, abuse and returning veterans—Natalie Sypolt’s characters wrestle with who they are during the most trying situations of their lives.

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Special Election

Stories

Brock Clarke

Acre Books, 2025

With his tenth book, celebrated author Brock Clarke once again demonstrates his mastery of the story form.

In Special Election, ingenious fictions target our all-too-familiar preoccupations and vulnerabilities—belonging, (dis)engagement, the struggle for self-worth, the difficulty of loving and being loved, the banality and absurdity of existence. Brock Clarke’s rapier wit, inexhaustible imagination, and brilliant leaps of illogic transform his characters’ desperation and distress into tragicomic delight. In the title story, Lawrence Welk is ousted from heaven to run for governor in present-day North Dakota. In “One Goes Where One Is Needed,” we follow the former Provisional Coalition Administrator of post-liberation Iraq, now a youth ski instructor at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. In “The Slim Jim,” the protagonist finds himself (literally and figuratively) very slowly choking to death on a frozen microwavable burrito.

“There is something wrong with me,” states the narrator of “The Big Book of Useless Saturdays.” This could be said of all the characters in Special Election, and through loopy misdirection and mordant observation, Clarke devotes himself to showing his characters and his readers exactly what is wrong. Yet the sharpness of his attention and lavish ludicrousness of his storylines belie a sneaking affection for this imperfect, disappointing world filled with imperfect, disappointing humans. Though Clarke has been compared to such greats as Barthelme, Bellow, and Saunders, the nine stories in Special Election vibrate at a frequency all his own, showcasing the strengths of one of our most gifted comic writers.

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Spider Woman Stories

G. M. Mullett

University of Arizona Press, 1979

"The adventures of Spider Woman and her twin grandsons and other characters are much more than exciting stories. They indicate the importance of traditions, social life, and customs among the Hopi... These abridged and expurgated accounts can be read by children and adults alike, not only for their cultural value but also as fine literature."—Arizona Highways

"This is a fine introduction to Hopi mythology and values. It recreates an authentic poetic spirit and makes the reader eager to read more Hopi tales." —New Mexico Humanities Review

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Square Moon

Supernatural Tales

Ghadah Samman

University of Arkansas Press, 1999

Marking collisions of culture and character, these ten short stories arise at the frontiers where Arabic tradition melds with both the modern European world and a Gothic strata of the supernatural. The resultant mix sparks tensions between the sexes, between identities, and between experimental forms of storytelling and strict narrative.

In Samman’s fiction, matchmakers still come to call but lovers go bungee jumping. A schizophrenic has a discussion with one of his personalities about murder and relationships with women. Avoiding ghosts both real and imagined, a war exile confronts class structure; the art of Paris; and the trials of being a woman, an Arab, and a writer in a country and culture not her own. The spirit of a strangled lover tells the story of his murder and of the web of love, beauty, lust, and loathing that brought about his demise.

First published in Beirut in 1994 and now ably rendered into English, Samman’s The Square Moon mixes the ghoulish with the everyday, the playful and witty with the terrifying, intermingling surprise endings, uncommon turns of plot, and the strange but realistic details of the characters’ lives.

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St. Christopher on Pluto

Nancy McKinley

West Virginia University Press, 2020

*2021 Colorado Book Awards Finalist, Literary Fiction*

MK and Colleen get reacquainted while working at different stores in a bankrupt mall. Way back, the women went to Catholic school together and collaborated on racy letters to a soldier in Vietnam who thought they were much older than seventh graders—a ruse that typifies later shenanigans, usually brought on by red-headed Colleen, a self-proclaimed “Celtic warrior.”

After ditching Colleen’s car to collect the insurance, they drive from one unexpected event to the next in Big Blue, MK’s Buick clunker with a St. Christopher statue glued to the dash. The glow-in-the-dark icon guides them past the farm debris, mine ruins, and fracking waste of the northern brow of Appalachia. Yet their world is not a dystopia. Rather, MK and Colleen show why, amid all the desperation, there is still a community of hope, filled with people looking out for their neighbors and with survivors who offer joy, laughter, and good will.

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Starship Tahiti

Poems

Brandon Dean Lamson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

The poems in Brandon Dean Lamson's first volume, Starship Tahiti, explore imprisoned bodies and the tension between captivity and imagination. Beginning on Rikers Island, the book traces a creation myth in reverse, moving from prison to the spacious arches of Grand Central Station to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

Lamson examines themes of violence, gender, and identity in various real and imagined settings where inmates read Antigone, Howlin' Wolf sings in a black barbershop, and Metallica records burn on a Viking altar. Throughout these shifts, the poems construct fractured narratives that subvert linear storytelling. The layering of voice and imagery in this collection transgresses boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and between the communal and the personal. As the speaker of “Portland Bardo” says, “The fragile, in between state of larvae hatching / is no less desirable than full bloom in a city of roses, if such a city can ever be found.”

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