American Short

Make your heart merry and unwrap these delightful stories of seasonal romance.

Josie Tucker is in a pickle. She's a rising food critic in the blogosphere, but she can't eat. Her testy stomach is always in knots - is it anxiety, a food allergy, or something else? With a Boston blueblood matron funding her adventures, and a trio of loyal friends, Josie finds herself in scrape after bizarre scrape, barely escaping by the skin of her neck.

From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, comes this collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful. In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the handsomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is arrested for the "crime" of homosexuality.

The first collection in the ongoing series of fantasy stories from the world of Esowon. You'll find dastardly beasts, tortured monks, and unexpected lovers in a set of tales that'll transport you to lands lost to time. Delve into these companion novellas to The Kishi, an African fantasy based on Angola folklore.

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past memories of war and its aftermath; of murder, arrest, re-education camps, and new economic zones; of escape and shipwreck and atrocity are ever present in these wise and compassionate stories.

Set in Northern New Mexico, an astonishing, beautifully rendered debut about living in a landscape shaped by love, loss, and violence. With intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade's unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters torn between their desires to escape the past and to plumb its depths.

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need", winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

Two more snarky Josie Tucker mysteries! Dead Man on Campus (book three): A mysterious letter-writer causes havoc on the idyllic Bader University campus. After a professor receives numerous poison pen letters, more and more threatening in nature, Josie Tucker is on the case...grudgingly. Full Slab Dead (book four): When snarky food critic, Josie Tucker, heads to Austin, Texas, to wax philosophical about the local barbecue joints, she stumbles on to a decades' old missing person case.

When Four Stories by American Women was first published by Penguin Classics in 1990, it understandably reflected the second-wave feminist interpretations of that time—a period marked by an impressive recovery of what were then considered to be minor American writers. This updated and expanded volume, Twelve Stories by American Women edited by Arielle Zibrak, offers a more diverse selection of writers—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, María Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Ša, Sui Sin Far, and Barbara E. Pope.

In this moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise”.

Álex Ayala escribe acerca de unos jubilados que cumplen heroicamente su última misión en la vida: vigilar una estatua de John Lennon para que nadie robe sus características gafas. Y también lo hace sobre los habitantes de un pueblo de Bolivia que comercian con sus recuerdos sobre las últimas horas de vida del Che Guevara. En otro capítulo se habla del sastre Sillerico, quien ha gozado del dudoso honor de ver en paños menores a la mayoría de los presidentes de su país.

A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique stories set among the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines - now with a new preface by the author, Monstress stands as a landmark of American multicultural short fiction. Lysley Tenorio's tales are framed by tense, fascinating dichotomies: tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, pop culture and high culture, the American and the Filipino.

This debut collection is a complicated love letter to Washington, DC, and to those who call it home: a TSA agent who's never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, and a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. These characters navigate life's "training school" - with lessons on gentrification and respectability - and fight to create their own sense of space and self.

Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high-stakes. In "The Thousands", people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge". A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal".

Critics have compared her work to that of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, but J. California Cooper has a warm, witty style that’s definitely her own. Each of her short stories is a gem of downhome wisdom, polished with a bit of gossip, some heartbreak, and lots of humor.

Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice.

Un nuevo libro de relatos del ganador del Premio IMPAC y el Premio Alfaguara de novela por El ruido de las cosas al caer.

Poet Jean Toomer’s short-story and poetry collection.

Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires.