American Short

A collection of the year’s best science fiction and fantasy short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author of the Silo series Hugh Howey and series editor John Joseph Adams. Hugh Howey, bestselling author of Wool and the Molly Fyde series, selects twenty pieces that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year and explores the ever-expanding and changing world of science fiction and fantasy today.

When Desa Rae Jenkins ended her tumultuous relationship with Roc, it seemed like the appropriate thing to do; but now she's second-guessing her decision. Roc moved away to Kansas City, leaving street life back in St. Louis up to the brothas who can handle it. He continues to live his life on the edge, though, and when he returns to St. Louis, Desa Rae shows up at his doorstep to reconcile. Roc is reluctant to go there with the one woman who ripped his heart from his chest.

Many people know how frustrating it can be when you spend a lot of time learning something without seeing results. This book is prepared to get the best results in the shortest time without learning advanced grammar and trying to memorize many unused words from the dictionary. Learning with stories in from our perspective the best way to immerse yourself in the language.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively.

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture.

"Stay Scheming": Karlie Houston is broke, betrayed - and running from a bounty on her head. Turns out the real owners of the payday loan office she ripped off weren't cool with her idea of employment bennies. "Who Can You Trust?": Struggling bank teller Porsha has no time for Cinderella fantasies. She's working overtime to keep her tragedy-struck family off the streets. But her new boyfriend, Game, is smart, seductive - and sure-thing successful. So why not work his rock-solid plan to steal from her bank?

Comprising two distinct short novels - Monroe's Nightmare in Paradise and Bad Luck Shadow from critically acclaimed Victor McGlothin - Borrow Trouble is a hot double-feature that perfectly showcases each author's unique style.

Gospel comedy queen Pat G'orge-Walker regales listeners with the hilarious antics of Sister Betty and her South Carolina friends, big-hearted Ma Cile and redhaired Sister Connie Fuse. But things don't really start shakin' until on-the-make Deacon Laid Handz, manhungry Sister Carrie Onn, and conniving Reverend Knott Enuff Money get into the act. And yet for all of its rollicking humor, this book is brimming with profound and, at times, pointed truths about church life.

Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-19th century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations - like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.

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.

Charles thought he had it all - until a devastating betrayal and the shattering loss of his family drove him to living on the streets. Beatrice is the first person who's truly cared about him in a long time. Little by little, he's finding reasons to care about rebuilding his life. Drawn to Charles and the temptation of a second chance, Beatrice is faced with the hardest of decisions. But his insight, secrets - and the reminder of a profound past encounter - will give her unexpected inspiration, gratitude, and the strength she needs to find her way - perhaps in time for Christmas.

"Black Is Blue" by Victor L. Martin delves into the life of a corporate woman who falls in love with a thug and finds out just how easy it is to stray from the straight and narrow.

Eighteen and hungry, Wiz's only addiction to drugs is the money it makes. But Crystal changes all of that and shows him just how powerful a woman can be, in "The P is Free" by LaShonda Sidberry-Teague.

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.

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.

Karlie Houston hasn't seen a raise in forever, but the payday loan office she manages is raking in the cash. So why not get what she's rightfully owed by masterminding a heist? Once her lover Sidney's boys hit all the company's locations at one time, there's a fortune to split. But suddenly bodies start dropping - and Karlie better devise the perfect plan to survive.

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.

In folktales, the trickster can be the wise one or the fool, the one who fools or the one who is fooled. That is why children of all ages enjoy hearing these tales. The psychology of childhood is pretty much the same everywhere, giving these enjoyable stories universal appeal.

How does a Mexican American, the son of poor immigrants, leave his border home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern, old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds that seem so empty.

Eight exciting classic American Tall Tales! This collection includes the famed stories of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Stormalong, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, and Joe Magarac.