Work, and the coffee-fueled day-to-day grind, 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 work—and for planned anthologies...

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and...

These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home—thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

Featuring seven stories and a novella, David Crouse’s powerful debut collection depicts people staring down the complicated mysteries of their own identities. “Who are you?” a homeless man asks his would-be benefactor in the title story. On the surface it’s a simple question, but one that would stump many of the characters who inhabit these carefully rendered tales.In the edgy novella “Click” Jonathan’s ongoing photo-documentary of a prostitute exposes how little intensity remains ...