These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

Death, that ending of all endings, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction series.More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O’Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on death–and for planned anthologies on such t...

This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to s...

A STUNNING NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING AUTHORS OF ALL TIME!The #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever."I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime ...

In this Christmas romance novella, a struggling veterinarian isn’t about to let a wealthy man steal her home . . . but he might steal her heart.Some people think owning buckets of money gives them the right of way. Well, if cosmetic king Peter King thinks he’s going to buy struggling veterinarian Andi Evans’s family property out from under her, he's got another thing coming. This Christmas, Andi is not in a giving mood . . . but is she ready to receive something he...

In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe, and no cow is sacred. With the legendary essayist’s signature biting wit, this collection skewers family dysfunction, awkward childhood memories, and the absurdities of modern life.A do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery. A man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world. A teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral. A bitter Santa abuses the elves.W...

Myron Vale sees ghosts. One hundred billion of them, to be precise.In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. In fact, he may just be the only one. His strange ability the result of a gunshot to the head while serving as a Portland police officer, a few years later he recovers to forge a new life as private investigator catering to both the living and the dead.His biggest prob...

**NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREFunny and heartbreaking, this New York Times bestselling debut perfectly captures the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty.**Harley Altmyer should be in college having the time of his life. He should be free from the backwards Pennsylvania coal town he calls home, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s constantly reminded of just how messed up everything i...

The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman."Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place...

Small-town police chief Arly Hanks takes on the New York Police Department to save her mother from a murder rap in this madcap police procedural.When her marriage went up in smoke, Arly Hanks left Manhattan and never looked back. As police chief of Maggody, Arkansas, population 755, Arly is a glorified traffic cop, and she couldn't be happier. But when Arly's mother, the indomitable Ruby Bee Hanks, is invited to a baking contest in New York, Arly is forced to return...

People love their pets--cats more so than any other (or so the cats would like to think). And if there is anything cat-lovers enjoy almost as much as stroking their beloved feline friends, it's reading about cats. In the tradition and style of her previous smash hits, Callie Smith Grant brings readers a brand-new collection of uplifting stories about the amazing creatures that warm our hearts--and our laps! With stories from Melody Carlson, Jill Eileen Smith, Robert Benson, Kathi ...

Women and their horses—a symbiotic relationship based on trust, camaraderie, friendship, and love. In Why We Ride, Verna Dreisbach collects the stories of women who ride, sharing their personal emotions and accounts of the most important animals in their lives.This collection of stories includes the heartfelt thoughts of a range of women—those who rode as children, those who spent their girlhood years dreaming of owning a pony, and those who have made a lifelong hobby or c...