Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7431&N=3+6644+7484 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1737951 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1704295 Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding--sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1737970 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1708655 Presents twelve interlinked stories narrated by women that challenge traditional ideas of femininity. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1696586 A collection of humorous short stories about love and romance, including the tale of a besotted Sherlock Holmes ignoring all the clues that his girlfriends been cheating on him. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1705415 Six short stories with subjects ranging from a dejected teenager who discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagulls nest to two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove who try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1713786 In this collection of short stories, Rash turns to Appalachia to capture lives haunted by violence and tenderness, hope and fear, in stories that span from the Civil War to present day. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1694770 A collection of short works set in a range of fantastical settings explores such themes as disproportional guilt, the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges to defend and provide for loved ones. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1711918 Presents stories featuring men who make doomed forays into middle-class respectability in Southern California, from a high-school basketball player who aspires to a college scholarship, to a game-show production assistant who moonlights as a stand-up comedian. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1738552 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1714013 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1729540 A collection of short fiction offers a disquieting portrait of infidelity, faith, and family. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1711997 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1729557 Presents a collection of stories featuring such characters as a deranged male birth doula, an aerobics instructor trying to save her soul, and a doomsday hustler. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1712996 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1708654 Built around the events of the Soviet Budapest Offensive at the end of World War II, Siege 13 is a series of linked stories that alternate between the siege itself and a contemporary community of Hungarian migrs who find refuge in the West (Canada, the U.S., and parts of Europe). Dobozy constructs an intentionally faulty history of war and its aftermath. Blurring the line between right and wrong, he portrays a world in which one mans betrayal is another mans survival, and in which common citizens are caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1697996 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1740380 Damage Control displays Amber Dermonts remarkable gift for portraying characters at crossroads. In Lyndon, a daughter visits presidential landmarks following the death of her father. In Damage Control, a young man works at an etiquette school while his girlfriend is indicted for embezzlement. A widow rents herself to elderly women and vacations with them as a professional grandchild in Stella at the Winter Palace. And in The Language of Martyrs a couple houses a mail order bride on behalf of the husbands Russian mother. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685690 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1704299 Offers eleven interwoven macabre short stories that take an ominous look at grotesque characters, violent emotions, and murder. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1694697 Two novellas provide insight into the human condition as a sixty-year-old art history academic embarks on an unexpected journey of discovery and a young farm boy is drawn to the water of Lake Michigan as an escape. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1715776 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1733224 In her first collection of short stories, Laura Kasischke exposes the dark heart of the domestic?its wrapped in shabby silk, tucked away in a dresser drawer. If A Stranger Approaches You reminds us that intersection of the bizarre and the quotidian is always at play. Memorial statues and raggedy dolls seem to come to life, a man listens to the electric menace of suburban power lines while he struggles with his failed marriage, and the little boy and his dog knocking on the door might be Death in disguise. Surreal and darkly comic, these are stories that know the unexpected graces and random collisions that drive and haunt us. As one of her narrators remarks, What a thing, this life. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1743486 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1712134 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1733131 A middle-aged woman, irritated with her wealthy young neighbors yard improvements, offers a corner of her lawn to a Croatian immigrant who wants a vegetable garden. A daughter accompanies her father to Israel, where, seeing a new side of him away from her mother, she makes an unusual bargain. In twelve stories about the difficult, sometimes impermeable boundaries between friends, neighbors, and family relations, Jessica Francis Kane explores just how close we can come to love, success, happiness, and forgiveness.--P. [4] of cover. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1705743 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1693987 A collection of stories which includes Home, a wryly whimsical account of a soldiers return from war; Victory lap, a tale about an inventive abduction attempt; and the title story, in which a suicidal cancer patient saves the life of a young misfit. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1732404 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1715724 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685372 The son of dust-bowl migrants to Southern California, Eddie Burnett comes of age in the post-war suburbs, freefalling through the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies. The transformation from a boys innocence to a mans hardened wariness is captured in lyrical, emotionally raw episodes, in this gut-wrenching look at the nature of violence and dysfunction, with a hymn to the tenacity of hope, belief and conviction. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685140 To those living in the south of Sri Lanka, the civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in the northern sector seems unreal, until north and south lives intersect. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1679473 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1629612 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1576342 A collection of short stories set in locales as varied as London, Sierra Leone, and the American Midwest that captures the yearning and dislocation of young men and women around the world. In Light & Luminous, a gifted instructor of Indian dance falls victim to the vanity and insecurities that have followed her into middle age. In Tonto and the Undertaker, a widower copes with his loss by cruising Kentucky highways and burying roadkill. In The Scriptological Review a damaged young man obsessively studies his fathers handwriting in hopes of making sense of his suicide. And in What to Do with Henry, a white woman from Ohio takes in the illegitimate child her husband left behind in Sierra Leone, as well as an orphaned chimpanzee who comes to anchor this strange new family. Tania James once again introduces us to a host of delicate, complicated, and beautifully realized characters who find themselves separated from their friends and families and communities by race and pride and grief-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1616021 A debut collection of ten short works reimagines the mythology of the American West and includes stories of a foreigners arrival at a prostitution ranch, a hermits attempt to rescue an abused teen, and a womans role in a friends degrading Vegas encounter. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1519424 Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, the stories presented in Drifting House illuminate a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685153 Marking the first original publication by Todd Grimson in almost 20 years, the 13 stories compiled in this volume showcase the authors fascinating fictional canvases, peopled by authentic and sympathetic characters with settings ranging from the Amazon to the Sahara and stops in between to 1970s East Village and pre-Castro Cuba. Whether its a Hollywood starlet who goes AWOL from her movie set in the wake of her husbands suicide and in disguise embarks anonymously on a hedonistic bender or an African American man seeking the answer behind the mysterious disappearance of his friend in the heart of Muslim North Africa, each individual--whether killer, transvestite, prostitute--within these stories is striving to break free, to make new meaning of their world, to find recognition or self-definition in an otherwise bleak and unsympathetic world. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1696561 Each of the eight stories in this volume grips the reader from the first line. Each conveys the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1554193 Combines absurd, humorous, and poignant themes that reveal the fierce humanity of characters in surreal situations. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685465 Delicate and assured, the stories in My escapee illuminate unseen forces in womens lives: the shameful thought, the stifled hope, the subterranean stresses of marriage, friendship, and family. Grappling with lost memories, escaped time, the longing to be loved, and the instinct for autonomy, the stories peer inside their characters minds to their benign delusions, their triumphs and defeats -- Provided by the publisher. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1645653 Presents a collection of stories that explores how magic, myth, and folklore shape the everyday lives of people in Cornwall, from a lonely massage therapist who holds the hands of an invisible lover to a boy and his grandmother who combat despair with an old white door on a windy beach. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1628368 A collection of interlinked stories that explores the numerous betrayals, big and small, that one grapples with across a lifetime. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1565098 A collection of short stories that explores life in Eastern England, where a man builds a treehouse in preparation for a flood, a boy sets fire to a barn, and itinerant laborers sit by a lake while fighter-planes fly overhead. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1629973 Collects some of the authors short stories, including Thread, about two circus performers involved in a love triangle, and Henna, about a young teacher dealing with a student who will not write. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1665141 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1711603 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1677526 A collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate that turn a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1429735 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1671707 A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1623839 In eight new stories, gifted author Nathan Englander seems to expand the parameters of what can be achieved in the short form. The title story, inspired by Raymond Carvers masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. This and seven more stories comprise a collection that is at once beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad. (Bestseller) http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1664431 In these seven beautifully wrought variations on a theme, a series of characters trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. The stories range over centuries and continents--from eighteenth-century Vienna, where Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte are collaborating on their operas, to America in the 1940s, where a love triangle unfolds among a doctor, a journalist, and the presidents wife. A race-car drivers widow, a nursing-home resident and her daughter, a paralyzed dancer married to a famous choreographer, all feel the overwhelming force of passion and renunciation. With uncanny emotional exactitude, Wickersham shows how we never really know whats in someone elses heart, or in our own; how we continually try to explain others and to console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of the imagination. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1715962 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1617165 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685143 Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes an escape, and sometimes its just the bridge you cross to go home. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1525488 This heartrending, funny and utterly original collection of stories, exploring the clash and meld of American and Filipino culture, centers around the sometimes suffocating ties of family, the melancholy of isolation and the need to find connections. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1623912 Stories for everyone who has ever felt alone in their struggle to be true to themselves. These are honest, wry, plain-spoken tales about gender, identity and family. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1525265 In this expansive story collection, acclaimed writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala expresses her lifelong meditation on East and West. Set in India, England, and New York City, A Lovesong for India reveals what unites us across oceans, cultures, and lifetimes. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1708649 Presents a collection of six short stories, including Intelligent People Speaking Reasonably, in which two Iraq vets are set adrift in the civilian life of the Pacific Northwest, and Son of Man, in which the story of the Manson family is retold by one of its members. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1658803 Combines fifteen of the authors classic short stories with fifteen new stories in an anthology that features tales involving donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, and marriage. In these comfort-zone-destroying tales, including the masterpiece, War Dances, characters grapple with racism, damaging stereotypes, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, and the tragic loss of languages and customs. Questions of authenticity and identity abound. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685155 Shortlisted for the acclaimed 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Frank OConnor Short Story Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book Award, This Cake Is for the Party has received consistent rave reviews praising debut writer Sarah Selecky. In these ten stories, linked frequently by the sharing of food, Sarah Selecky reaffirms the life of everyday situations with startling significance. For upmarket womens fiction readers that love stories which reflect the joys and pitfalls of marriage, fidelity, fertility, and relationship woes, this collection is a conversation starter. This Cake Is for the Party reminds us that the best parts of our lives are often the least flashy. Reminiscent of early Margaret Atwood, with echoes of Lisa Moore and Ali Smith, these absorbing stories are about love and longing, that touch us in a myriad of subtle and affecting ways. With more than 10,000 copies sold in Canada, where she was named the CBC Book Awards Best New Writer, Sarah Selecky proves she is an exciting new voice with a promising future-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1544365 Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergmans powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place cant be denied. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1527872 A new collection of stories from the critically acclaimed author of CRIME-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1647336 In this work the author offers a collection of 11 previously uncollected stories, including a title piece that tracks the friendship between Elizabeth Short, famously known as the Black Dahlia, the victim of a markedly brutal murder in 1940s Los Angeles that remains unsolved, and her roommate, Norma Jeane Baker who became Marilyn Monroe. In each of these stories the author explores the menace that lurks at the edge of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of lives and maps the transformational cost of such instrusions. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1675659 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1609185 Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is an observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts humor and insight into the human condition. A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date. A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: Dont feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1562788 Award-winning horror writer and master of the macabre, Graham Masterton presents a blood-curdling array of treats: twelve stories of terror celebrating the bizarre and grotesque, guaranteed to quicken the pulse. Marvel at the mirror dug up in secret and better off buried . . . Thrill at a pair of lovers, whose promises to each other lead them down a disturbing path. Observe the haunted house . . . Come closer, dear reader -- the hour of the festival is upon us . . . http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1652925 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1582342 These sixteen stories by the much-celebrated Alix Ohlin illuminate the connections between all of us--connections we choose to break, those broken for us, and those we find and make in spite of ourselves.--P. [4] of cover. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1697958 Presents a collection of short stories with a theme of irony, including one in which a young boy in scolded by his teacher for coming to school with a neck wound. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1714222 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1649180 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1623054 A follow-up to Seven Years presents an anthology of stories that employ the acclaimed Swiss authors use of direct prose, deceptively simple narratives and deep psychological insights into the existential dilemmas of contemporary life. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1720291 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1657700 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1577895 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1657695 The fourth collection of short fiction from the Edgar Award winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1687471 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1518446 Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection--and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations. A fathers life is upended by his sons night terrors--and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of empty-nest syndrome; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes--on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that theres something off, something sinister, in his late parents house. Dan Chaons stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm--in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake--Provided by publisher. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1664432 A collection of twenty short stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1578021 Collects the authors early short stories, infused with satire and fantastical elements and showcasing his efforts to expose the tyranny of the Salazar regime in his native Portugal. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1629987 A collection of eleven short stories by Karen Brown which features the lives of women, from childhood to late middle age, who seek happiness and connection in the wrong places. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1685151 Like a little Freud in your fiction? C.P. Boykos new collection is a dream come true. Perversely funny new work. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1678399 Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of todays most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. In this stunning collection, Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect.--from cover, p. [4] http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1680071 A collection of short fiction includes Narrowing the Divide, in which an escaped lab rat shares a philosophical conversation with a human; Cargo, in which a failed actor is reincarnated as a vengeful snail; and The Black Weasel, in which a bartender travels with a suspicious drifter. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1650288 This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obssessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1518183 The author of the sensational national best seller For the Relief of Unbearable Urges returns with a commanding new collection of short stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank establishes Nathan Englander beyond all doubt as the heir to Roth, Malamud, and Babel. A tour de force. The title story, inspired by Carvers masterpiece, is a comic classic, a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. Camp Sundown is an outlandishly dark story of vigilante justice undertaken by a troop of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave who recognize a fellow vacationer as a former Nazi guard. Free Fruit for Young Widows is a small, sharp study in evil. Sister Hills chronicles the history of the Israeli settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur war through the present, a political story constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. A great leap forward from one of our most audacious and important writers, and a sensational literary event-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1661995 Though Hugh Sheehy?s often tragic, sometimes gruesome stories feature bloodied knives and mysterious disappearances, at the heart of these thoughtful thrillers are finely crafted character studies of people who wrestle with the darker aspects of human nature?grief, violence, loneliness, and the thoughts of crazed minds. Sheehy?s stories shine a spotlight on the bleak fringes of America, giving voice to the invisibles who need it most. A dismal assistant teacher spiking her coffee after school is suddenly locked in a basement with a student who has just witnessed his father?s murder. A seventeen-year-old girl at a skate rink whose name no one can remember is motherless, friendless, and sure she will be the next to go. The heartbroken victim of a miscarriage dreams of her fetus?s voyage through the earth?s plumbing. The estranged addict son, certain of his innate goodness, loses himself in a blizzard and fails his family again. Sheehy?s characters learn that however invisible they may feel and whatever their intentions, their actions incur a cost both to themselves and those around them. They struggle to tame or come to terms with the forces they meet?the tragedies?that are far larger than their small existences. In this debut, Sheehy illuminates the all-but-silent note of adult loneliness and how we cope with it or, perhaps, just move past it. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1559122 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1548518 An explosive fiction debut from an astonishing new voice: darkly funny, wildly original stories about the power of love, and the love of power--two urgent human desires that inevitably, and often calamitously, intertwine. The unforgettable opener, The Infamous Bengal Ming, is narrated by a misunderstood tiger whose affection for his keeper goes horribly awry. In Demons, a woman tries to celebrate Thanksgiving after the sudden death of her husband, even though his corpse is still sprawled on their living-room floor. In The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan, an ex-CompUSA employee sets up a medical practice in a suburban strip mall armed only with textbooks from the local library and fake business cards. The heroes--and anti-heroes--of I Am An Executioner include a railroad manager in a turn-of-the-century Indian village, the newlywed executioner of the title, and an elephant writing her autobiography--the creations of a riotous, singular imagination that promises to dazzle the universe of American fiction-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1527875 Straub creates characters as recognizable as a best friend, and follows them through moments of triumph and transformation with wit, vulnerability, and dazzling insight.--P. [4] of cover. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1652962 A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1679468 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1615018 Reply All, the third collection of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception. A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave everyday; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chiefs words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks hes fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own nobility by hiring a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcast their affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets. The ways in which humans fool themselves are infinite, and while these stories illustrate this sad fact in sometimes excruciating detail, the aim is not to skewer the misdirected, but to commiserate with them and blush in recognition.--P. [4] of cover. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1664117 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1682561 Presents a collection of short stories starring characters who are desperate yet full of hope and longing to connect with others and themselves. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1277575 A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing--but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1427558 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1432619 A collection of short stories, this book features a narrative that, while unified by a dark theme (bullying), is diverse and surprisingly optimistic. The voices that recount the stories differ significantly, yet all resonate with the clarity of unmistakable truth. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1425554