Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as...

"You’ll see how beautiful it is in the morning—jungle all around us," says one of the characters in Anne Raeff’s story collection, referring to the way that the jungle that threatens can also provide solace. The jungle in these stories is both metaphorical and real, taking the reader from war-torn Europe to Bolivia and from suburban New Jersey to Vietnam. Raeff examines how war and violence, like the jungle, seep into our lives, even when we are no longer in danger and long after the war i...

When I was younger, I wished I had been born in a concentration camp like my mother, instead of in boring Englewood Hospital. I used to imagine all the prisoners crying mutely with joy while my grandmother lay swallowing her screams so the guards wouldnt hear. So writes Deborah Gelb, the teenage daughter of the title character, in her opening chapter. Deborahs voice is complemented by that of Ruth Mondschein Claras mother, who recounts her life story to Tommy, a patient at the AIDS hospice w...

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...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYNPR • The Seattle Times • The Globe and Mail • Kirkus Reviews • Daily Mail • The Vancouver SunFrom the author of The Italian Teacher and The Imperfectionists comes a brilliant, intricately woven novel about a young woman who travels the world to make sense of her puzzling past.Look in the back of the book for a conversation between Tom Rachman and J. R. Moehringer

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “...

The extraordinary true story of survival, hope and empowerment from a Holocaust survivor.THE AWARD-WINNING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER‘Edith’s strength and courage are remarkable in this memoir…an incredible example of forgiveness, resilience and generosity.’ - Sheryl Sandberg, bestselling author of Lean In‘I can't imagine a more important message for modern times. Eger's book is a triumph’- The New York T...

Born to hardworking immigrant parents in sunny suburban Los Angeles, Stephen Newman never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the grey skies of north London, would marry Andrea for convenience and stay married, and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realise that they have always existed in a fool's paradise...

Since the publication of Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. Her ferociously funny, soulful stories tell of the gulf between men and women, the loneliness of the broken-hearted and the yearned-for, impossible intimacies we crave. Gathered here for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition is the complete stories along with three new and previously unpublished in book form: Pape...

From the hilarious Booker-shortlisted author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'He reflected in future retrospect on the evening and foretold every gesture, every word. "I can't do it," he said. "I can predict everything that will happen from the moment they arrive to the little kiss on the cheek goodbye and I just can't goddamn do it."'The Dinner Party immerses us in the comic and strange realities of modern life, as we journey th...

'The best short story writer in the world' Susan Hill'This book is a spectacular literary revelation' Sunday TimesThe collected stories of an award-winning, modern classic American writer who has been compared to Alice Munro, John Updike - and even Anton ChekhovTenderly, incisively, Edith Pearlman captured life on the page like no one else. Spanning forty years of writing, moving from tsarist Russia to the ...

A long-lost painting stolen by the Nazis turns up at a Boston pawnshop—and leads to a string of murders—in this "fast-paced and tightly written thriller" ( The Seattle Times).In April 1945, the Nazis, reeling and near defeat, frantically work to hide the huge store of art treasures that Hitler has looted from Europe. Truck convoys loaded with the cultural wealth of the Western world pour in an unending stream into the compound of the vast Altaussee salt mi...