American Short

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".

Un viajante, vendedor de lencería, espera ansioso al volante la reaparición del hijo huido y recibe la milagrosa ayuda de un héroe del rock. El misterio de la luz de un cuadro, La lechera de Vermeer, devuelve a un escritor al regazo de la madre. Un joven cuenta su historia de amor después de fallecer en un atraco frustrado. Un músico de saxo encuentra el don de la música en la mirada de una muchacha.

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

There's a sayin' that if you come from my part of town, that you're from around the way. Around the Way Girls 4 is a look at the life of some street-smart women who think they have the world in the palm of their hands but are about to find out that things aren't always what they seem.

Kyron Santos, Kaylin's older brother, was used by Tasha Macklin to get back at Trae for his infidelities, a relationship that ultimately ended in pregnancy, murder, broken relationships, and mistrust. No one knew about the court-ordered sessions that Kyron was forced to attend. At least not until Mari, his woman who stuck by him throughout the majority of his prison bid, dropped the recordings off to Trae Macklin, Tasha's husband.

In "Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.

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.

This is a story from the "Great Ghost Stories" collection.

Sade: I haven't done a lot of dating since my jerk fiance cheated on me two years ago, but I have a very full life: a great family, a fulfilling job, and a home in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Then my big brother introduces me to his mysterious writer friend from LA.. I'm falling fast, but I don't know if I can risk my heart again. What if this gorgeous, sensitive guy isn't what he seems to be?

It is extremely hard to remain faithful, especially when temptation is right in front of you. This is what caused one man to yield to temptation. He had always been faithful to his wife, but just one touch from the perfect female made him lose his cool. She too was fighting her own set of demons. She was in love with a man who was still committed to another.

With the same unforgettable and distinctive prose on display in his other books, Airtight Willie & Me is further evidence that Iceberg Slim was an expert at capturing the language of the streets. Always compelling, sometimes funny, and often bleak, Slim gives us six slices of city life that will leave you thirsting for more.

Faithless is a work of experimental fiction weaving through various scenes and memories of being in love, out of love, and abused by love as told and experienced by Grace, a troubled 20-something-year-old struggling with her identity as a bisexual Korean-American. Everything is recounted as experienced - in fragments.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet whose work is best known for combining the traditions of Romanticism with a realistic portayal of a declining rural society in Victorian England. "The Fiddler of the Reels" tells the story of a love triangle. The enigmatic, brilliant and rakish violin player, Wat Ollamore, who arrives in the small South Wessex village of Mellstock, exercises a diabolical fascination with the young, impressionable Car'line Aspent.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

Ancient folklore and modern myth come together in these stories by author Craig Laurance Gidney. Here are found the struggles of a medieval Japanese monk seduced by a mischievous fairy, and a young slave who finds mystery deep within the briar patch of an antebellum plantation. Gidney offers a gay teen obsessed with his patron saint, Lena Horne, and, in the title story, an ailing tourist seeks escape at a distant shore but never reckons on encountering an African sea god. Rich, poetic, dark and disturbing, these are distinctive tales not soon forgotten.

Many people seem to think bisexual women have a magical ability to have their cake and eat it, too. Best Bisexual Women's Erotica offers a salacious glimpse into the sex lives of bisexual women as they really are-passionate, sexy, romantic. From the first captivating moment, you'll find yourself deeply involved with the characters in these stories - and so turned on you'll need some privacy just to finish each story.

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.

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

New York Times Notable Book author Charles Yu wrote the best-selling novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In his stunning, often humorous, collection Sorry Please Thank You, Yu draws on pop culture and science to make incisive observations about society - and offer touching insight into the human condition. In two of Yu’s remarkable stories, he focuses on a big-box-store night-shift employee with girl trouble and a company that outsources grief for profit.

A dramatized, abridged performance of Alice in Wonderland with Eva Le Gallienne, Bambi Linn, and Margaret Webster.