American Literature Anthology

Today’s fans of science fiction and fantasy have an appetite for stories that address a wide variety of voices, perspectives, and styles. There is an openness to experiment and pushing boundaries, combined with the classic desire to hear about spaceships and dragons, future technology and ancient magic, and the places where they intersect. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and Diana Gabaldon, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 explores the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

In this intense and brilliant book, Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing experience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the listener on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it's landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited.

Akashic Books’ acclaimed series of original noir anthologies has set a high standard for portraying cities and their neighborhoods in all their dark and violent splendor. Now, Mexico City Noir surpasses that standard with phantasmagorical tales of double-dealing, corruption, violence and self-delusion.... This collection is such a varied literary feast.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley details a beautiful erotic interlude in an otherwise sordid real estate deal; Mary Gaitskill celebrates the unexpected ardor of one middle-aged couple; Steve Almond reminisces about the best one-man/three-girl Ecstasy party ever; Nelson George recounts the erotic escapades that befall a young man who accompanies a celebrity athlete when he picks up a gaggle of girls; and Carol Queen explores the joys of making love with summer fruit.

The American Classics Collection is a century-spanning collection of 17 classic novels, short stories, essay, and poetry by American authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Kobna Holdbrook-Smith; Nathan Osgood; Robert G. Slade; Jonathan Keeble, and more. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including Ernest Hemingway; Mark Twain; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edith Wharton; Frederick Douglass; and H.P. Lovecraft, amongst a host of others.

In the third installment of his acclaimed anthology series, master of crime fiction Lawrence Block has gathered together the best talent from popular fiction to produce an anthology of short stories based on masterpieces of American art. Among the star-studded lineup of writers you'll find Jerome Charyn, Jane Hamilton, Christa Faust, John Sandford, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Charles Ardai, Barry Malzberg, and Janice Eidus.

Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history.

These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" ( The Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of [Ellison's] lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan).

From her first days at Virginia’s Hampton University, impressionable, creative Nia falls smitten with Chris Eidos Alleyne, an athlete and a scholar. “Love is sweet nothings and beautiful promises”, Nia writes in her journal. What her girlfriends know, and her mother doesn’t, is that Chris’s expression of love is deeply physical. Wielding powerful charisma, Chris soon has Nia abandoning innocence for experience.

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning.

The stories in this collection are drawn mainly from those tribes which lived in the northern and central areas of North America. These represent the linguistic groups gerneally referred to as Algonquian, Iroquois, and Sioux. A final chapter covers the tales of the northwest Pacific Coast.

This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.

Headlined by New York Times best-seller Carl Weber, three authors bring listeners tales of power, greed, and ambition set in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods.

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure - from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama - Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it - or perhaps because of it - they shine.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence - and discovering he likes boys.

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and 15-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church - a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

This is the second collection of short stories relating to the fictional sea-sprayed Canadian village of Avonlea. Anne Shirley appears in a few, but most concern other characters from the Anne Shirley series, including Diana Barry and members of the Meredith and Blair families. Published in 1920, these tales of hidden hopes and cherished dreams are sure to enchant fans of Anne of Green Gables.