Short Family

Gates' characters, young or old or neither, are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative, and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living - or assisted-dying - facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe.

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding - sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming.

Sam Theopolis entered the Woolman household like a clown with treasures up his sleeve. He kept the absent-minded Jessie from permanently checking out of reality, and he brought an inconceivable joy to Jessie's younger daughter and grandson. But just when the current of their lives seemed smooth and untroubled, tragedy struck like a squall. With eccentric characters reminiscent of Anne Tyler, Willard takes the reader on a quirky journey of the heart.

A smart, deeply satisfying romantic comedy about a woman's obsession with the return of her fiancé's ex. On the Delta Shuttle between New York and Washington, Elise finds herself sitting next to Donald—tall, with dark wavy hair, a big easy smile. She’s left the world of women's magazines in Manhattan for graduate school in D.C. He’s left investment banking to become a teacher. They are both unattached. They exchange stories. They fall in love. One year later they’re headed for an April wedding. Storybook finish? Not quite.

When Sonia, the prominent wife of a local cemetery owner, is killed in the worst accident anyone can remember, Hartley Nolan, a lifelong teetotaler, is hardly the person that police expect to find behind the wheel. After all, Hartley is something of an inspiration in a town that hasn't seen much luck in decades-he's the local boy who made it big in Chicago without ever forgetting his struggling family back home. But Tower Hill, Illinois, is a close-knit community that's alive with old rivalries, making it fertile ground for resentments.

These are some of the stories of Manorsfields' residents, their relatives and their caregivers. There is humor, poignancy, even romance, but above all they demonstrate that life is very often stranger than fiction.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world.

The recipient of the Journey Prize and Edna Staebler Award, Heather Birrell made a splash in the literary world with her first collection, I Know You Are But What Am I? In Mad Hope, Birrell employs her keen insight into the human condition to present tales featuring a complex array of characters, including a gay man caring for a friend and a science teacher faced with a shocking request.

Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from many of his novels. In "Horseman", a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer: "And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention", a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward - or not.

In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers and listeners with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings.

The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection, Alligator and Other Stories, are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman preforming burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl", or the great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians". Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of "Only Those Who Struggle Succeed", or the "dangerous" women of "The Daughters of Manāt" who struggle to assert their independence.

Nic Schuck follows up his debut novel, Native Moments, with a gritty tale of family drama. Mostly set in the fictional lumber town of Sullivan, Florida, a sleepy forgotten place on the Florida-Alabama border, Panhandlers, a novel in stories, follows Hank Ackerman as he grows up in poverty and attempts to escape the same demons that haunted his father. Sometimes dreams are all people have and it’s those dreams of far-off places that can be the difference in embarking on a life of adventure or being complacent in the life you were born into.

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans 25 years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality.

From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed National Book Award nominee, comes a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories. In these 12 deft, acutely funny, and often heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection. They question the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters; they seek their own way within isolated, and often isolating, circumstances, reveling in small, everyday epiphanies and moments of clarity.

In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together — and, no, she isn’t contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, to take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

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."

A cynical Hollywood moviemaker confronts his dead wife’s lover and abruptly realizes the depth of his own passion. As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious fifth-grader distracts himself with meditations on baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. And in the title story, an elderly nun enters a college creative writing class and plays havoc with its tidy notions of fact and fiction. The Whore’s Child is further proof that Russo is one of the finest writers we have.

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

In “The Pleasure of Her Company,” a lonely, single woman befriends the married couple next door, hoping to learn the secret of their happiness. In "Long Distance," a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned....