Possibilities and Paradoxes in the Craft of Fiction The pieces of a satisfying novel or story seem to fit together so effortlessly, so seamlessly, that it's easy to find yourself wondering, "how on earth did the author do this?" The answer is simple: He sat alone at his desk, considered an array of options, and made smart, careful choices. In On Writing Fiction, award-winning author and respected creative writing professor David Jauss offers practical information and advice that will help you...

Winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, Black Maps is a collection of nine finely worked stories charting the lives of human life on the brink; looking at their actions, their emotions, and how they react to the events that have pushed them to this brink.

A collection of stories from AWP Award for Short Fiction winner, David Jauss.

A Renaissance Fair is coming to the relatively quiet college town of Farberville Arkansas, which is not the sort of news that usually sets local bookseller Claire Malloy's heart racing. But with Caron, Claire's perpetually petulant teenage daughter, being pulled into volunteering (or face the horror of doing homework over the summer) and her fiancé, Police Lieutenant Peter Rosen, away, Claire finds herself drawn into the strange inner workings of the group putting on the fair.But ju...

Fifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists.Contributors include Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, T.C. Boyle, Kevin Brockmeier, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Peter Ho Davies, Janet Desaulniers, Junot...

“Elvis Cole provides more fun for the reader than any L.A. private eye to come along in years.”—Joseph WambaughWINNER OF THE ANTHONY AND MACAVITY AWARDS FOR BEST NOVEL • NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR AND SHAMUS AWARDS FOR BEST NOVELMeet Elvis Cole, L.A. Private Eye. . . . He quotes Jiminy Cricket and carries a .38. He’s a literate, wisecracking Vietnam vet who is determined to never grow up.When quiet Ellen Lang enters Elvis Cole’s Disney...

Take a journey into darkness. Visit places where one might expect to find the dark—in a house where love was shared and lost, a milky-white pool in an Australian cave, the trenches of World War I, the deep woods. You would not be surprised to find the dark in a cheap apartment on the wrong side of town, down mean streets, under a gallows-tree, along dank passageways, trapped underground, in the near future, or among the mysteries of old New Orleans. Dunes, lakes, isolated cabins, old books...

Only Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, can imagine the horror of a good and angry man who fights back against bureaucracy when it threatens to destroy his vitality, home, and memories. “Under any name King mesmerizes the reader” (Chicago Sun-Times).Barton Dawes is standing in the way of progress when his unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant wh...

Marie Barnacle should have had the perfect life. Born into wealth and prestige, she grew up in posh Lawrence Park, with its winding roads, stone mansions, and old money. But Marie’s charmed life is haunted by a dark family secret. The youngest child of Raul and Tabitha Barnacle, Marie Dorée is burdened by her parents’ attempts to burnish the faded glory of their dynasty. This dark satire follows Marie through her troubled childhood, rebellious adolescence, and her efforts to establish a li...

Now a “provocative” and “impressive” (Variety) film from director Gia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter)—starring Emma Roberts, James Franco, Nat Wolff, and Val Kilmer—the fiction debut from James Franco that Vogue called “compelling and gutsy.”James Franco’s story collection traces the lives of a group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive...

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, ...

Doreen Sizemore gets guilt-tripped by her preacher into leaving the comfort of her Kentucky hometown to help cook for a Christian youth camp on a remote island in Ontario, Canada. Doreen’s strongly held belief that “it just don’t pay to travel” seems justified when she ends up in the middle of yet another murder mystery.