"Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan's earliest to her most recent work. In "So Late in the Day," Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in "The Long and Painful Death" a writer's arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll...

"A master storyteller at his best--the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story. Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the...

"Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted...

In his stories, Saunders explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. Wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned, the stories challenge and surprise as they encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. -- adapted from back cover "The 'best short story writer in English' (Time) is back with a masterful collection...

The National Book Award finalist explores contemporary gender realities in a collection of short fiction that traces the experiences of diverse characters at various stages of life. With sons and lovers, seducers and friends, husbands lost and regained, or husbands who were never husbands at all, how many men can a woman's lifetime hold? What does it mean to be a man and a woman together; or a man and a woman, once together and now apart? Krauss's...

"The best collected short fiction of Mark Anthony Jarman published over the last four decades."--

This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of...

In this collection of short stories, Berlin showcased the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. She finds beauty in the darkest places... and darkness in the seemingly pristine. -- adapted from jacket

The three laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov changed our perception of robots forever when...

The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories - including one never-before-published novella. These brilliantly crafted stories of deception, murder, dangerous games, and love gone wrong - irrefutable evidence that Laura Lippman's riveting fiction will more than satisfy any crime reader. Print run 75,000. "In a suspenseful collection of stories featuring fierce women--including...