American Short

Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of the best of this new scholarship.

Here are four unforgettable stories by Yann Martel, the New York Times best-selling author of Life of Pi. In the exquisite title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the 20th century.

You can’t have faith with the spirit of fear. The ancestors cannot reach you if you aren’t strong enough to believe. REINA is excited about leaving her hometown of Houma, LA. Away from the legends, stares, and whispers that run rampant about her family. She just wants to get away and feel normal for once in her life. Her parents OSCAR and ESMERALDA fear losing their daughter to her independence, not knowing a more menacing force awaits her. After settling into the private university in Alabama, she embraces her freedom. A day trip with one of her roommates, NIKKI, turns into a nightmare...

Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history.

A rural town finds itself under the authoritarian sway of a tree that punishes children. A pair of old friends navigate their fraught history as strange happenings escalate in a Mexican restaurant. A pair of narcissistic friends wreak havoc on an activist community. An aloof young man finds himself living through his lover’s memories. And a day of LARPing takes a cosmic turn.

The lure of the American West is in the spirit of adventure, in the majestic expanse of unconquered wilderness and in rugged individuals on a quest for identity and sometimes for survival. Owen Wister's unsmiling Virginian... Dorothy M. Johnson's, "A Man Called Horse": These are a few of the colorful, even legendary characters who populate The American West in Fiction, a collection of stories edited by Jon Tuska.

Hot Mr. Scrooge is my neighbor. Hope The man loathes Christmas. What person doesn’t warm up to the best holiday of the year? The cabin I purchased mentioned it needed light work, not a gut renovation. Looks nothing like the picture. The brooding beast next door said he’d help spruce up the place if it will get me to leave him alone. Deal. Because who wants to be around the Grinch longer than they have to? Even if he’s tall. Has a gorgeous face you can stare at all day. And a body you’d love to mount on your sleigh repeatedly. Then I wondered could I help Mr. Non-Christmas ...

I never thought I'd be the kind of guy to obsess over a woman, but then I saw her behind the candy shop counter. Her bright blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, and bubbly personality make everyone around her smile. I know she’s out of my league, but I can't help myself. So, I start watching her every move. I guess you could say I’m stalking her. But I can’t help it because Emily is my obsession, and somehow I’ve got to make her mine.

From one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists comes Certain American States, whose insightful and lonely stories beg you to discover the emotional universes hiding at their cores. Catherine Lacey brings her narrative mastery to Certain American States, her first collection of short stories. As with her acclaimed novels, she gives life to a group of subtly complex, instantly memorable characters whose searches for love, struggles with grief, and tentative journeys into the minutiae of the human condition are simultaneously gripping and devastating.

Hired hand.Hired gun.The legends often precede him.And death follows behind.John Coburn wanders the Nebraska rough country, the windburned Wyoming range, and far beyond as the stranger men call The Peregrine. Collected here for the first time are the author's first, original John Coburn short stories: Last Day At Red Horizon, Regina's War, Borrowed Time, Devils Nest, Founders' Song...and more! Together with a new introduction, this is the first volume in the Old NebraskaTrilogy that includes Peregrine Returns and Holt County Collected.

Confession: I like being frisked by rough, sexy, crooked cops because they are always excited to find my BIG surprises. Arnold is a straight college frat boy with a criminal past that desires to be manhandled by muscular, sexy police officers. He has one in mind, Officer Stuart. Arnold fantasizes about Officer Stuart pinning him against the wall, frisking his body, and finding a surprise so big he made him his boy toy for the night. He gets butterflies in his stomach, and his little friend between his legs inches down his basketball shorts at the thought of him. He wants Officer Dennis ...

With heart-stopping stories by Zane, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, Joy M. Copeland, Robert Fleming, Terence Taylor, Francine Lewis, Brandon Massey, and 12 other established or up-and-coming writers, Dark Dreams is a must-have contemporary anthology for fans of the supernatural.

Everlasting is the sixteenth novella in the ongoing story of the Andersen family. Livia Andersen was a woman who held her family together with a quiet smile and an iron will. It’s been months since her death and her children and grandchildren she leaves behind continue to grapple with the shifting changes in their lives now that she’s gone. Some look back at what else has been lost to them and struggle to make sense of it. Claire Andersen Slavik has invited Ethan Gilchrist to visit her lakeside resort so that he can research his family’s history in the area. She knows it’s important...

A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.

Rodeo star Chance Whitaker returns home after an injury, tasked with managing his family’s struggling ranch and wedding venue. There he crosses paths again with Seren Goodwin, his gorgeous former classmate who now runs the local floral shop. Though Serena initially bristles at Chance’s cocky charms, trusting him means taking the ultimate risk. As a relentless unwanted suitor threatens Serena, Chance is determined to break through her walls and prove he’s always been her best match in their quaint small town. But will this playboy-turned-rancher win her heart for good?

A mother and daughter negotiate the Oregon Trail with grisly results; an elementary teacher watches the carnage of the Challenger explosion spill over into her own classroom. A possible prospector traveling west is drawn to an isolated inn where no one walks away hungry; a 1950s housewife shares the gruesome repertoire of behavior expected of a proper lady. Prohibition and women’s suffrage, the Civil War and the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination conspiracy and the Y2K hysteria.

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Lost in the City features 15 poignant short stories, each set in Washington, D.C. Far removed from marble monuments and the offices of rich politicians, the nation's capital that Jones captures is inhabited by self-willed African-Americans struggling to live their lives as best they can.

Lunchtime Chronicles: The Nooner was written by USA Today Bestselling Author Reana Malori Forbidden desire can be sexy. Joy was not frigid. Her ex-boyfriend made that claim just before he walked out the door —after she discovered he was cheating. But something about his words lingered long after their disastrous relationship ended. Focused and career-driven, she had no time for men who couldn't handle her in the bedroom or outside of it. Loneliness was not a good bedfellow, and she was tired of not having someone by her side at night. It was fun exploring her newly awakened desires alone....

I am THAT wife. I am Suzy Homemaker. I don't go anywhere; don't do much of anything. I stay home, I cook, I clean, I take care of my man. I am faithful to my man. I am a fraud. I'm not happy, least not completely. I am unfulfilled. I'm missing something. My husband is a great man but he doesn't get my motor running or my heart racing. And when was the last time he made my panties wet? Has he ever made my panties wet? Our sex life, when it happens, is vanilla at best. But I make it work, you know? Because that's what wives do. But then one day, I am accosted by a sexy, demanding, enticing ...