Hilarious and colorful episodes in the lives of families... many depicted from a kid's-eye-view... are the theme for this compilation. Being part of a family is often trying, and stranger than any fiction, but never dull and always worth it in the end. Join these very different families as they face the shrinking of parents, the preemptive guilt of First Confession, the secret worlds of children, and more!Included are:Shirley Jackson's CharlesRead by L...

Now available for the first time in audio as a digital download, a selection of stories from Grace Paley.Whether writing about relationships, little girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated job-seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play, GRACE PALEY captured the loneliness, poignancy, and humor of the human experience with matchless style. This volume collects a selection of her stories, including:-From The Little Dis...

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, GRACE PALEY'Grace Paley's is exceptional' KASIA BODDY, GUARDIAN'Her unladylike gutsiness and friendliness are nonpareil' EDMUND WHITE, OBSERVER'They are stories full of the stories we all tell and live by, tall stories as well as short' SALMAN RUSHDIEHere are all Grace Paley's classic stories in one volume. From her ...

A teacher, activist, feminist and masterful writer of short fiction and essays, Paley was also an accomplished poet. Combining her two previous collections with unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of a direct, attentive, and always unpredictable poet. Whether describing the vicissitudes of life in New York City or the hard beauty of rural Vermont, whether celebrating the blessings of friendship or protesting against social injustice, her poems brim with compassion and ...

When You Meet a Black BearThis booklet is a rock bottom sysnopsis on what one needs to know about the black bear if you plan to spend time in their environment. The best advice is to acquire an extensive natural history of the creatures you fear, such as cougars, grizzlies and wolverines. That is, read all the books you can find on the subject until one day you have just read another book on handling any encounters and you have learned nothering new. You will then ...

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the vio...

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...

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.T...

'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 ...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed...

Ten bestselling authors inspired by New York City's iconic Grand Central Terminal have created their own stories, set on the same day, just after the end of World War II, in a time of hope, uncertainty, change, and renewal….A war bride awaits the arrival of her GI husband at the platform…A Holocaust survivor works at the Oyster Bar, where a customer reminds him of his late mother…A Hollywood hopeful anticipates her first screen test and a chance at stardom in t...