Quirky and always graceful, and with settings that range from San Francisco to North Carolina, from Paris to Mexico, the stories in this collection provide telling glimpses into the lives of "ordinary people made extraordinary by Adams's perception" ("Newsweek"). ...More

In the tradition of Garrison Keillor and Richard Russo comes a warm, funny fiction debut about the lives and loves of the regulars at a small-town bar. ...More

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. ...More

"A dozen stories that overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life...Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty...his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart."--Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post Book World
"Cathedral contains astonishing achievements, which bespeaks a writer expanding his range of intentions."--"The Boston Globe
"A few of Mr. Carver's stories can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction...Cathedral shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance." --Irving Howe, front page, "The New York Times Book Review
"Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it." --Thomas Williams, "Chicago Tribune Book World
...More

When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, it has become a classic. Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life." ...More

...More

This collection of stories presents a fictional terrain of secrets, estrangements, and losses that are intrinsic in Dark's characters' lives. The title story is an intense tale of a mother tending to her dying son. In "Maniacs", two sisters love the same man. And in "Close", a young father-to-be visits his childhood home and contemplates escape from his wife. ...More

In her astonishing debut, Cathy Day follows the everyday lives of the people of the Great Porter Circus, as they make the unlikely choice to winter in the town of Lima, Indiana, a place that feels as classic to readers as Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." ...More

Gathered now into one volume, Eisenberg's stories have an astonishing power and range. Her characters, whether they are walking the streets of Manhattan or seemingly abandoned in foreign countries, continually make disquieting and sometimes life-threatening discoveries about themselves, discoveries that illuminate not only their own lives but also the wider net of relationships in which they are enmeshed. Knowing, witty, and exact, Deborah Eisenberg's fiction is fashioned with a jeweler's eye for detail and a profound gift for evoking degrees of human interaction and anxiety. ...More

"Eldridge is unrelenting. Each story is painful, exhausting and provocative . . . driven by thoughts expertly rendered into dialogue . . . ÝHer obsessions¨ are bloody, naked, and screaming. It's hard not to look."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
In the seven stories and one novella collected in "Unkempt," Courtney Eldridge gives life to characters of astounding originality. Probing the darker corners of the human psyche, she shows--with a sly and unexpected sense of humor--the neurotic mind at work, the skewed perspective of an alcoholic parent, the nature of sexual conquest, and the hazards of working in retail. Fresh, funny, and candid, Eldridge's writing delivers a new and marvelous vision of life.
"Courtney Eldridge is one of my favorite living short story writers. When I read her, I feel better about literature and better about th ...More

Ellen Gilchrist creates an unforgettable group of Southern women who cavort through life, marriages and divorces and even earthquakes, in an attempt to find, if not happiness, at least some satisfaction. Outrageously funny as well as moving and tragic, Victory Over Japan is a wondrous success for Ellen Gilchrist. ...More

A BookPage Notable Title
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever. ...More

Winner-2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A Great Books Foundation Selection
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice. ...More

Cult favorite Link unfurls a second engaging, funny, and magical selection of stories, with riffs on marriage, cannons, convenience stories, superheroes, zombies, and apocalyptic poker parties. Illustrations. ...More

Another extraordinary collection of short stories by the author of "Carolina Moon" and "Crash Diet". "(McCorkle's) characters . . . ring as true as lead crystal".--"The Commercial Appeal" (Memphis). Available ...More

The author of "The Book Borrower" brings together 13 connected tales that trace a family of women across generations. ...More

From the author of "Self-Help" comes a bestselling collection of 12 stories which unfold a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America. ...More

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the i ...More

From one of the great writers of our time comes a collection of award-winning stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Her masterful language and vast love of the West are evident in these stunning portraits which have appeared in "The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's." ...More

In this sparkling collection, award-winning writer Rishi Reddi weaves a multigenerational tapestry of interconnected lives, depicting members of an Indian American community struggling to balance the demands of tradition with the allure of Western life.

In "Lord Krishna," a teenager is offended when his evangelical history teacher likens the Hindu deity to Satan, but ultimately forgives the teacher against his father's wishes. In the title story, "Karma," an unemployed professor rescues birds in downtown Boston after his wealthy brother kicks him out of his home. In "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy," which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2005, an irascible retired judge reconnects with a childhood friend while adjusting to a new life with his daughter and her American husband. In "Devadasi," a beautiful young woman raised in the ...More

In Roxana Robinson's lucid and elegant prose, her characters' inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth-not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well.
In "Family Christmas," a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents', where the formal atmosphere is shattered by a mysterious and chaotic event that she knows she's too young to understand but struggles to comprehend.
In "Blind Man," a college professor copes with the onslaught of grief after his daughter's death. In "The Face Lift," two college friends renew their bond across a great cultural divide. The sad and hilarious "Assistance" flawlessly details the tragicomic aspects of ageing-seen through the eyes ...More

This compilation of smart, hilarious stories from one of the funniest, wisest, and most surprising Southern writers of his generation is peppered with unforgettable characters--people who are trying to make sense of modern absurdities. ...More

Barbara Sutton's quirky debut collection tracks the emotional journeys of characters struggling to find harmonious relationships with the people they are expected to love and be loved by. All too often, for Sutton's characters, such supposedly sacred relationships disappoint. In the end, it is not the loved ones who are loved, but the strangers met through chance encounters--the interim mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Such unlikely friendships weave their way through Sutton's stories and create sometimes funny and sometimes tragic reflections on the accidental and often fleeting nature of love. Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's imp ...More

Child brides, misguided newlyweds, and lusty middle-aged grandmothers are just a few of the characters Abigail Thomas brings to life in these wise and witty stories about women of all ages trying to deal with their love for men, with their families, and with their own lot in life. National ads/media. ...More

From the celebrated author of "Who Do You Love" comes this collection of 12 new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, describing the change from youth to experience in taut, moving prose. ...More

Quirky and always graceful, and with settings that range from San Francisco to North Carolina, from Paris to Mexico, the stories in this collection provide telling glimpses into the lives of "ordinary people made extraordinary by Adams's perception" ("Newsweek"). ...More

In the tradition of Garrison Keillor and Richard Russo comes a warm, funny fiction debut about the lives and loves of the regulars at a small-town bar. ...More

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. ...More

"A dozen stories that overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life...Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty...his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart."--Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post Book World
"Cathedral contains astonishing achievements, which bespeaks a writer expanding his range of intentions."--"The Boston Globe
"A few of Mr. Carver's stories can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction...Cathedral shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance." --Irving Howe, front page, "The New York Times Book Review
"Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it." --Thomas Williams, "Chicago Tribune Book World
...More

When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, it has become a classic. Vintage Books is proud to reintroduce this magnificent collection.
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life." ...More

...More

This collection of stories presents a fictional terrain of secrets, estrangements, and losses that are intrinsic in Dark's characters' lives. The title story is an intense tale of a mother tending to her dying son. In "Maniacs", two sisters love the same man. And in "Close", a young father-to-be visits his childhood home and contemplates escape from his wife. ...More

In her astonishing debut, Cathy Day follows the everyday lives of the people of the Great Porter Circus, as they make the unlikely choice to winter in the town of Lima, Indiana, a place that feels as classic to readers as Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." ...More

Gathered now into one volume, Eisenberg's stories have an astonishing power and range. Her characters, whether they are walking the streets of Manhattan or seemingly abandoned in foreign countries, continually make disquieting and sometimes life-threatening discoveries about themselves, discoveries that illuminate not only their own lives but also the wider net of relationships in which they are enmeshed. Knowing, witty, and exact, Deborah Eisenberg's fiction is fashioned with a jeweler's eye for detail and a profound gift for evoking degrees of human interaction and anxiety. ...More

"Eldridge is unrelenting. Each story is painful, exhausting and provocative . . . driven by thoughts expertly rendered into dialogue . . . ÝHer obsessions¨ are bloody, naked, and screaming. It's hard not to look."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
In the seven stories and one novella collected in "Unkempt," Courtney Eldridge gives life to characters of astounding originality. Probing the darker corners of the human psyche, she shows--with a sly and unexpected sense of humor--the neurotic mind at work, the skewed perspective of an alcoholic parent, the nature of sexual conquest, and the hazards of working in retail. Fresh, funny, and candid, Eldridge's writing delivers a new and marvelous vision of life.
"Courtney Eldridge is one of my favorite living short story writers. When I read her, I feel better about literature and better about th ...More

Ellen Gilchrist creates an unforgettable group of Southern women who cavort through life, marriages and divorces and even earthquakes, in an attempt to find, if not happiness, at least some satisfaction. Outrageously funny as well as moving and tragic, Victory Over Japan is a wondrous success for Ellen Gilchrist. ...More

A BookPage Notable Title
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever. ...More

Winner-2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A Great Books Foundation Selection
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice. ...More

Cult favorite Link unfurls a second engaging, funny, and magical selection of stories, with riffs on marriage, cannons, convenience stories, superheroes, zombies, and apocalyptic poker parties. Illustrations. ...More

Another extraordinary collection of short stories by the author of "Carolina Moon" and "Crash Diet". "(McCorkle's) characters . . . ring as true as lead crystal".--"The Commercial Appeal" (Memphis). Available ...More

The author of "The Book Borrower" brings together 13 connected tales that trace a family of women across generations. ...More

From the author of "Self-Help" comes a bestselling collection of 12 stories which unfold a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America. ...More

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the i ...More

From one of the great writers of our time comes a collection of award-winning stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Her masterful language and vast love of the West are evident in these stunning portraits which have appeared in "The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's." ...More

In this sparkling collection, award-winning writer Rishi Reddi weaves a multigenerational tapestry of interconnected lives, depicting members of an Indian American community struggling to balance the demands of tradition with the allure of Western life.

In "Lord Krishna," a teenager is offended when his evangelical history teacher likens the Hindu deity to Satan, but ultimately forgives the teacher against his father's wishes. In the title story, "Karma," an unemployed professor rescues birds in downtown Boston after his wealthy brother kicks him out of his home. In "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy," which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2005, an irascible retired judge reconnects with a childhood friend while adjusting to a new life with his daughter and her American husband. In "Devadasi," a beautiful young woman raised in the ...More

In Roxana Robinson's lucid and elegant prose, her characters' inner worlds open up to us, revealing private emotional cores that are familiar in their needs, their secrets, and their longings. These people tell us the truth-not only about themselves, their relationships, and their lives, but about ourselves as well.
In "Family Christmas," a young girl takes a holiday trip to her grandparents', where the formal atmosphere is shattered by a mysterious and chaotic event that she knows she's too young to understand but struggles to comprehend.
In "Blind Man," a college professor copes with the onslaught of grief after his daughter's death. In "The Face Lift," two college friends renew their bond across a great cultural divide. The sad and hilarious "Assistance" flawlessly details the tragicomic aspects of ageing-seen through the eyes ...More

This compilation of smart, hilarious stories from one of the funniest, wisest, and most surprising Southern writers of his generation is peppered with unforgettable characters--people who are trying to make sense of modern absurdities. ...More

Barbara Sutton's quirky debut collection tracks the emotional journeys of characters struggling to find harmonious relationships with the people they are expected to love and be loved by. All too often, for Sutton's characters, such supposedly sacred relationships disappoint. In the end, it is not the loved ones who are loved, but the strangers met through chance encounters--the interim mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Such unlikely friendships weave their way through Sutton's stories and create sometimes funny and sometimes tragic reflections on the accidental and often fleeting nature of love. Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's imp ...More

Child brides, misguided newlyweds, and lusty middle-aged grandmothers are just a few of the characters Abigail Thomas brings to life in these wise and witty stories about women of all ages trying to deal with their love for men, with their families, and with their own lot in life. National ads/media. ...More

From the celebrated author of "Who Do You Love" comes this collection of 12 new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, describing the change from youth to experience in taut, moving prose. ...More