Hattertown, Connecticut. Leo " Half" Napoli mourns his dead hat factory worker father while daydreaming of being the first man on the moon and thereby " partaking of something of the infinite." Meanwhile, he and his fellow Back Shop Boys (their fathers all worked in the dangerous, mercury-fume-laden back shops of hat factories) seek to learn the identity of the mysterious Man in Blue, who wanders the town collecting odd items in his rucksack. Elected to spy on him, Half ...

Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or "Brock Jones, PhD," as he's known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father's lakeside A-frame. But instead of reporting him dead, Stewart decides to become him. As he sees it, he's not taking his brother's life; he's saving it. In turn he will at last gain an audience for hi...

WINNER: 2021 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARD Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or "Brock Jones, PhD," as he's known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father's lakeside A-frame. But instead of reporting him dead, Stewart decides to become him. As he sees it, he's not taking his brother's life; he's saving it. In...

"A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel." —Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan SontagFall, 1970. At the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford in Frye boots, with long hair, and a passion for his students that was intense and unorthodox. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin with a burning need to feel unique....

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...

The stories in Drowning Lessons engage water as both a vital and a potentially hazardous presence in our lives. "You can touch water," says Peter Selgin, "you can taste it and feel its temperature, you can even hold it in your hands. Still it remains elusive, ill-defined, shaped only by what surrounds or contains it."With empathy and wit Selgin introduces us to characters navigating the choppy waters of human relationships. In "Swimming" an avid swimmer fights the stasis i...

Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris!In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable.A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertake...

One of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st CenturyThe world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.With an introduction from Lydia DavisLucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fict...

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life.The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the ide...

In this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding.**"Arresting lyricism and beauty" —**The New York Times Book ReviewWho says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes—it would be too awkward—and you...

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Anthology"One of the best anthologies of horror and suspense of all time."—Rocky Mountain NewsFrom award-winning author and “master anthologist”* Al Sarrantonio, 999: Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense is a specially curated collection of evocative fiction that probes the depth of human fears and frailties. From otherworldly entities stalking prey to psycholog...

________________'Assured and ambitious' - Guardian'A young writer who succeeds in imagining the world afresh' - Independent'Confirms her as a significant new talent … sharp, illuminating' - Independent on Sunday________________From the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize comes a delicate and startling collection about the ad...