Fiction

It is June 29, 1927ÑRichard and Clarissa Dalloway's thirtieth anniversary and also a day of historical significance. Richard has arranged a surprise party for his wife. As he leaves their house in Westminster to buy flowers for the party, his thoughts turn to Robert Davies (Robbie), a young editor at Faber with whom he has been having an affair off and on for many years. Because of Richard's efforts to contain their relationship, Robbie has exposed their affair in a letter to Clarissa, who tells her husband that she "understands" And today Richard, despite his misgivings, finds himself on his way to Robbie's house-only to be shaken by the discovery that Robbie is not there.

As does the Woolf novel, Mr. Dalloway takes place within a single day, unfolding prismatically with a simultaneity of events: Clarissa walks in London and remembers her courtship with Richard; their daughter Elizabeth searches for answers about her eccentric history tutor's somewhat mysterious and premature death; and a determined and drunken Robert Davies has decided to crash Richard's party, dressed all in white satin, no less! As the novella moves toward its surprising climax, it revisits several of Woolf's celebrated characters-Sally Seton (now Lady Rosseter), Hugh Whitbread, Lady Bruton-while introducing new ones, such as the Sapphist couple Katherine Truelock and Eleanor Gibson, and the strange and beautiful Sasha Richardson.

Imaginative and formally bold as it refracts Woolf's fiction to invent a story completely Lippincott's own, Mr. Dalloway rides forward on waves of a masterfully complex and musical prose, full of wit, linguistic verve, and startling imagery.

Robin Lippincott is the author of The Real, True Angel, a collection of short stories published in 1996 by Fleur-de-Lis Press. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The American Voice, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts, and many other magazines; he was awarded fellowships to Yaddo in 1997 and 1998. Born and raised in the South, he has lived in Boston for twenty years. He is curren

The central figures in these stories range in age from a young single ESL teacher in "Todo el Mundo"-Leila, bent on resisting the advances of a fast party set of middle-aged mainland married couples in Puerto Rico-to Rosa of "Banana Boats," a Chicago Czech overheard in the midst of her reflections on a longtime marriage to a vain man of genteel Southern airs and irremediable fakery.

Like the human predicaments delineated in them, the settings of the five stories are memorably rendered. In the title story, Undella defies Baptist opinion in Ellenberg, Kentucky, when she takes up with a yo-yo salesman, an archetypal trickster who both snares and liberates her. In "The World's Room," trekking to a prehistoric hill-fort and along the stony beach of southern England in winter, Gin, a vulnerable young American poet, puzzles her way through two romantic involvements to accept the reality of her own history. Taylor-Hall devotes herself not only to satisfying the reader's hunger for story-for just the right action, gesture, event, saying-but also to the reader's pleasure in interior moments, in idiosyncratic monologue and unforgettable voices.

In portraying women of intelligence and moxie, Taylor-Hall's authorial wit is almost always perched close upon the verge of hilarity. With a wonderfully keen eye and a shrewd ear, Taylor-Hall addresses the strait gate of women's choices, giving a wise, sorrowful, and deeply funny cost-benefit analysis of erotic experience and attachments.

Mary Ann Taylor Hall's short fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Colorado Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ploughshares. It has won a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. Her first novel, Come and Go, Molly Snow, was published in February 1995. Hall lives on a farm on the county line between Harrison and Scott C

"Like emotional spelunkers, the women in Sharon Solwitz's first collection of stories tirelessly explore the dark corners of their personal relationships, bravely feeling their way along the unlighted passageways connecting husbands, wives, lovers, parents, and children. A flair for dark comedy and the ability to turn on a dime are prized qualities for these unpredictable characters; time and again, their intrepid investigations lead them into uncharted territory where bizarre dramatic action seems to be the only possible move. Solwitz's fine-toothed examinations of complex emotional states are dead on, and she has a sharp eye for details. . . . Keeping her narratives at a steady simmer, she ponders the mysteries of human intimacy, turning up the flame at the last minute for a sudden blast of revelatory action. . . . [T]he results are absorbing, a well-wrought reminder that no matter how peculiar the circumstances, we all have more in
common than we think."-The New York Times Book Review

Heather Seller's unpretentious, vernacular prose allows Georgia a persuasive mix of innocence and experience. These are miraculous stories of survival, perhaps even forgiveness. To some of us Georgia's life would be unthinkable. Sellers makes us believe it is well worth living.

"Heather Sellers writes delicious, dangerous prose. She starts you twenty-three floors up in condo squalor, nips across for dysfunction in Disney country, threatens incest in Hotlanta, and comes to grief on the Gulf. The dead-credible life of Georgia Jackson—ineffably sweet, thoroughly in love with her own luscious body, half in love with her lush of a father—skids at the edge of the surreal. Her story had me laughing through the lump in my throat. An original. A knockout debut."-Janet Burroway

Marketing Plans
Author tour in Sellers' hometowns in Michigan and Florida
Brochure and postcard mailings
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines

Heather Sellers was born and raised in Orlando, Florida and received a Ph.D. in Writing from Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, New Virginia Review, The Hawaii Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Women's Review of Books, and Sonora Review. Her story "Fla. Boys" is anthologized in New Stories from the South, 1999: The Year's Best. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999. She currently lives in Holland, Michigan, where she's an associate professor of English at Hope College.

From the short story, "Spurt"

I spent those days watching myself in every reflective surface known to Daytona Beach.

My knees weren't knobs anymore. My knees were lush transitions. My thighs shone golden-brown; my shins, paler, but long and strong. My ankles were slim, bony in a fetching way, my feet suddenly inches too long for my slaps and sandals. My hair swung in a shiny curtain behind me; my legs were in constant motion, counterpoint.

"You've had a growth spurt," my mother said. "Your shorts are way too short. When did this happen?"

"I think yesterday and/or the day before," I said. We were in

After her debut with the widely praised stories in Blood and Milk, Sharon Solwitz offers us her first, darkly radiant, full-length novel. Bloody Mary, which takes its title from the childhood game, tells the story of socially adept, 12-year-old Hadley and her protective mother. They live a privileged life in the Chicago neighborhood of Lakeview, but soon find themselves in a state of chaos and flux.

Writing with her signature, edgy prose and ironic humor, Solwitz demonstrates that happiness "isn’t our birthright" and that "we have to work for it and even then we can’t be sure." We are led to consider our own degree of complicity in the hard times that seem to fall from nowhere.

"A flair for dark comedy and the ability to turn on a dime are prized qualities for these unpredictable characters; time and again, their intrepid investigations lead them into uncharted territory where bizarre dramatic action seems to be the only possible move. Solwitz’s fine-toothed examinations of complex emotional states are dead on…."—The New York Times Book Review

Sharon Solwitz's first collection of stories, Blood and Milk, won the 1998 Carl Sandburg Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library, the prize for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her short stories, published in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares, have won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and grants and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Currently, along with her husband, poet Barry Silesky, she has worked as fiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She teaches fiction at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate

"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

"Fierce and bold, these beautiful stories provide a highly kinetic exploration of sameness and difference in terms of ethnic and racial origin. Through a romp of language—vital, outrageous, unpredictable—the fireworks of Neela Vaswani’s original genius cast shadows and illumine psyches that conventional monovisions never perceive. The stories of Where the Long Grass Bends are for readers willing to view the shape-shifting of both reality and literary form. Vaswani’s characters embrace their fates through such rigorous birthing that what has been internal finally contains and defines them."—Sena Jeter Naslund

"If it is true, as one of Vaswani’s characters claims, that a musical movement is the equivalent of a sentence, then the stories in Where the Long Grass Bends comprise an uncanny and beautiful symphony. This is a luminous collection, where each fiction evolves its own mythology. I want to live in the world of these stories just as I am afraid of this beautiful and often dark world. Neela Vaswani’s Where the Long Grass Bends is lovely, strange, lyrical, full of true mystery."—Victoria Redel

Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, this debut collection is boundless, even boundary-less, because Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks to nothing.

Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.

[A] haunting novel. . . . This book brims with the poetry of the working class, seldom sung lyrics of working men and women.—from the introduction by Larry Woiwode

“Shepherd is a master craftsman, and the subtlety of his art, the unassuming elegance of its architecture, rendered me spellbound and finally grateful. I don’t think I shall ever forget this fine book, its honest, guileless voice leading me along into the fire.”—Bob Shacochis

“A riveting exploration of what it is to be an outsider even in your own head. Shepherd has written a gripping story of childhood angst—psychologically thrilling, lyrically exact.”—Janet Burroway

Levi Revel is a boy in danger of losing his family and maybe his mind. He’s in awe of his father, Everest, a majestic dreamer, a master builder, a man with a violent, secret past. As the family moves from state to state, Levi hears solace in the voice of God, a voice that sends him preaching from treetops and roofs.

But the family begins to fall apart, and as Levi enters adolescence, he hears more troubling things: other voices, terrifying sounds, warnings. When Everest takes him on a high-speed, cross-country chase to win back Levi’s mother—by force if necessary—Levi realizes how much danger they all are in.

Tender and frightening, this debut novel takes readers across America, through the eyes and ears of a child whose family is haunted by a past they can’t outrun. From a boy lost in a world of imaginary voices and chilling destruction to a young man who can rebuild steeples, the story Levi tells is the triumph of persistence over moments of isolation and despair.

Paul Shepherd lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

“Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy. Again and again another layer of intricacy is revealed, proving that something as small as a story can be as satisfying and moving as a Russian novel.”—Ann Patchett

“These are lovely stories, rendered with a Chekhovian elegance. They span from post–World War II to the new millennium, with characters of different ethnicities, yet each story has a timelessness and relevance that's haunting and unforgettable. Yoon is a sparkling new writer to welcome and celebrate.”—Don Lee

“These are splendid stories, at once lyrical and plain-spoken and full of unusual realities. Once the Shore is a kind of fantastic Korean gazetteer that tours us confidently through unpredictable incidents and often startling conversations—Paul Yoon’s writing is erotic, haunting, original and worldly.”—Howard Norman

Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single island in the South Pacific. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction.

Publishers Weekly starred review: "Yoon's collection of eight richly textured stories explore the themes of family, lost love, silence, alienation and the effects of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on the poor communities of a small South Korean island. In the namesake story, a lonely young waiter connects with an American widow who has come to find the cave where her husband claimed to have carved their initials during his tour of duty in Korea. The narrator shifts between Jim coping with the loss of his big brother, a fisherman killed by a surfacing American submarine, and the sorrow of the widow. In "Among the Wreckage," aging parents Bey and Soni hope to recover the body of their son, Karo, killed in a U.S. military bombing test on what was thought to be a deserted island. The sad journey provides Bey an opportunity to examine his inability to show affection to his wife and only child. Yoon's stories are introspective and tender while also painting with bold strokes the details of the lives of the invisible."

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox

“Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter

Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist.

Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Like Franklin’s discovery of the electricity we do know, Monson’s luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies of the novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a key!”—Michael Martone

“Monson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no other young writer I know. Other Electricities is necessary reading.”—Robert Olen Butler

Meet “Yr Protagonist”: radio amateur, sometime vandal and “at times, perhaps the author” of Monson’s category-defying collection:

I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others’ conversations. There’s something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . .

The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost.

Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.

"These [stories] are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy—the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry—but they stick in the mind. Ray Carver would recognize these characters and situations, as would poet Philip Levine. I like to think that they would share my appreciation for this fine first book, built slowly and carefully over some years, and worth the wait."—Andrea Barrett

Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment––set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.

Jerry Gabriel studied at Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a science writer and taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including, from 2001 to 2008, Cornell University's Engineering Communications Program. Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction, selected by David Means, and the University of Nevada's Silver Pen Award.

What would have become of Nick Adams if he'd been born along the ragged edges of a new American city, one with more churches per capita than any other, and twice the suicide rate? Meet Nick Danze, the main character of David Philip Mullins's vital debut collection, Greetings from Below. The opening story finds fourteen-year-old Nick and his pal Kilburg sitting in the Las Vegas desert, drinking whiskey from Kilburg's fake leg. It's the first of many shocks in Nick's sexual education, which begins with a kiss from Kilburg he calls "practice." In later stories, Nick hires a call girl, visits a swingers' club on Christmas Eve, obsesses over obese middle-aged women, and meets the love of his life, Annie, only he's not sure he loves her and he's compulsively unfaithful. Ashamed of his behavior, he stubbornly repeats it. And lurking behind it all is Vegas, with its gilded casinos, neon-tinted suburbs, and dingy, outer-ring strip clubs. In Nick's wounded honesty and queasy self-consciousness, Mullins awakens us to the perverse power of alienation and shame.

Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks' women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

Praise for Sallie Bingham:

"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review

"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly

"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist

Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

"I was drawn to Michael Jeffrey Lee's line-up of loners and drifters, imperiled children, and haunted psychos neither because I want to hang out with these bad boys, nor because I plan to cross the street when I see them coming, but because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language."—Francine Prose, judge for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Michael Jeffrey Lee's stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee's forests are full of menace too-unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship. In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to the funk and texture of a slang that is all the characters' own. It's a masterful performance, and Lee's inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat-hyper-stylized structure and language that achieve clarity out of turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what's most important: a direct address that makes visible all those we'd rather not see.

Michael Jeffrey Lee lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he earns his living as a typist, waiter, and nightclub singer. A frequent contributor to Conjunctions, he is also an associate fiction editor at the New Orleans Review. He is at work on a novel.

"I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby."—Daniel Handler

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America.

"Amy Gustine's You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection of stories. Gustine can be brutally honest about the murky calculations, secret dreams and suppressed malice to which most of us never admit, not even to ourselves."—Karen Russell

"You Should Pity Us Instead is an unbroken spell from first story to last, despite the enormous range of subjects and landscapes, sufferings and joys it explores."—Laura Kasischke

"Amy Gustine's stories cross impossible borders both physical and moral: a mother looking for her kidnapped son sneaks into Gaza, an Ellis Island inspector mourning his lost love plays God at the boundary between old world and new. Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we've never dared visit before."—Ben Stroud

You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

Amy Gustine's short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, North American Review, Black Warrior Review, the Massachusetts Review, and many other places. She lives in Ohio.

Set in the author's homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.

"Rich in history, speech, incident, flora, fauna, vernacular, geology, politics—Matthew Neill Null's work is dazzling. . . . If anything ever happened in the state of West Virginia, Null knows the long and short of it, and will make its story sing."—Salvatore Scibona

Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his short fiction has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which received an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, the Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and more. She blogs for Salon, and lives in California.

"Heartfelt, lyrical, and moving, these stories make you feel the texture of your life alter while you're immersed in them. This remarkable book announces the arrival of a brilliant young writer."—Robert Boswell

Stories set in rural Georgia investigate small moments that illuminate life-altering struggles: a man slipping into dementia is abandoned at a diner with his granddaughters; a farmer's son discovers his love of carving wooden birds but buries his creations in shame; bait dogs are left to die, chained in the woods, when they grow too old to fight.

"Fridlund writes of families, marriage, and childhood as if our received wisdom—what we thought we knew about life and love and family—needs reparation. This is fiction as excavation, peeling away the machinery of people and converting it to narrative. Fridlund shines a spotlight on what gets hidden and unreported, and the result can be overwhelming—cutting and funny and filled with difficult truth." —Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet

"Fridlund has already proven herself to be a singular talent." —NPR

Selected by Ben Marcus as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Catapult follows Emily Fridlund's acclaimed debut novel History of Wolves. Sometimes calculating, at other times bewildered, Catapult's characters orbit around each other, enacting a deeply human tragicomedy of wit, misunderstanding, and loss. With dexterous, atmospheric, and darkly comic prose, Fridlund conjures worlds where longing is open-ended, intentions misfire, and the line between comfort and cruelty is often difficult to discern. This is a gripping collection, unsettling as much in its familiarity as in its near-gothic strangeness.

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, Zyzzyva, Five Chapters, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Fridlund's first novel, History of Wolves (Atlantic Monthly Press), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a #1 Indie Next pick.

"A phenomenal talent blazing up suddenly on the horizon. . . . precise, brilliant language that evokes without ever having to explain. . . . His transcendent vision gives us devastating glimpses."—Elle

"John McManus writes visceral prose that explodes within the tight boundaries of the short story. These narratives possess a graceful internal logic and feature a wide range of gritty characters rebelling against an indifferent and often brutal world."—Bookforum

"The stories in John McManus's Born on a Train are powered by radiant prose."—Vanity Fair

John McManus's long awaited short story collection encompasses the geographic limits of America, from trailers hidden in deep Southern woods to an Arkansas ranch converted into an elephant refuge. His lost-soul characters reel precariously between common anxiety and drug-enhanced paranoia, sober reality and fearsome hallucination. These nine masterpieces of twisted humor and pathos re-establish McManus as one of the most bracing voices of our time.

John McManus is the author of the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down, all published by Picador. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The Literary Review, Harvard Review, and many other places. He is the youngest-ever recipient of the Whiting Award.

"Paul Griner's Hurry Please I Want to Know takes the reader on a sweeping tour of America—from Iraqi soldiers to prison telemarketers, from famous cartoonists to bone procurers, from missing persons to the resurrected dead—the real, the surreal, and everything in-between. Griner seems to know everybody's secrets, and this astonishing collection sets out to reveal them."—Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake

"Paul Griner finds surprising and inventive ways to write about a wide range of sometimes uncomfortable—but always interesting—situations. The writing is careful, precise, shocking—stylistically brilliant. The stories are sometimes surreal, but convincing all the same. They take your breath away!"—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of The Girl in the Blue Beret and In Country

A stylized and otherworldly short story collection filled with sidelined characters placed at center stage. A low-ranking soldier is forced to milk a cow within enemy range. A cartoonist's daughter waits each morning to see how her father's mood dictates how he will draw her face. Grieving siblings wait to inherit one of their father's physical features after his death.

Paul Griner's first book, the story collection Follow Me, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. His next two books, the novels Collectors and The German Woman, have been published in half a dozen languages. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Playboy, One Story, Tin House, Narrative, and Zoetrope, among others. He teaches at the University of Louisville.

Praise for Sallie Bingham:

"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review

"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly

"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist

Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, "If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father-then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?"

Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, and Carolina Quarterly. One of her stories was included in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox

“Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter

Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist.

Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Whether hailing from Costa Rica or Newport Beach, New Jersey beaches or the shores of Belize, these stories, essays, and poems explore the endless variations of life at the beach. The pleasure of personal discovery that compels the writers in this volume is one readers will relish and share-as guilt-free beach reading or as an armchair vacation.

Here in abundant variety are the unique characters of coastal life-diamondback terrapins, ospreys, moray eels, and rockfish, as well as crabbers, fishermen, and "summer people"-all forms of life are described by diction that is deliciously specific, informed by both experience and passion.

This is an anthology of deep feeling for the relationships among humans as well as our relationship to nature. In "Off Season," by Sallie Bingham, a young mistress plays hostess in Key West to her new lover's wife, visiting from Chicago. In Peter Cameron's story, "Nuptials & Heathens," New Yorkers weekend on the coast of Maine.

Poems by Gray Jacobik, Chase Twitchell, Kathleen Halme, and others are lyrical surrenders to the shore's seductive allure. Peter Matthiessen recounts his experiences as captain of the Merlin, a charter fishing boat, off Montauk, Long Island.

And though there's a lot to celebrate in these pages, the conscience has not taken a vacation. Yusef Komunyakaa's poems dramatize racism at Newport Beach and depict the perspective of Thai fishermen limited by class circumstances. Literary essays by Jennifer Ackerman and Tom Horton are impassioned testaments to the need for ecological awareness.

If ever there were SOS messages in bottles, sent adrift with the desperate prayer that they would reach someone, somewhere-messages on which lives depend-here they are: uncorked.

Contributors:
Jennifer Ackerman
Ralph Angel
Emma Aprile
Sallie Bingham
Peter Cameron
Lucille Clifton
Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.
Maria Flook
Terri Ford
Debora Greger
Kathleen Halme
James Harms

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate

"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

Like a seam of coal, that mineral she knows so well, Kiki DeLancey is a valuable find, and a rare one as well: the self-taught writer who seems to have sprung fully formed out of nowhere. In the pages of Coal Miner’s Holiday (mining jargon for a forced layoff), DeLancey introduces us to the culture and characters of coal-mining towns bordering the Ohio River. Though she has a B.A. in political science and English, DeLancey never took a writing course, never had a writing mentor. She learned to write by reading such masters as William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, then writing, and rewriting her own stories. And DeLancey is, first and foremost, a storyteller. She tells the stories of unseen American immigrants–Polish, Greek, Irish, and others–who worked under the earth, in the dark and dangerous heart of the heart of the country. The result is a revelatory new voice in American fiction.

Marketing Plans:
Author tour in Northeast (New York City, Boston) and areas of Kentucky and Ohio
National radio campaign
Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines
Reader copies available to booksellers through participation in Book Sense Advance Access Program

Born Kiki Nicolozakes, Kiki DeLancey was brought up with close ties to the Greek community, with four grandparents from the island of Crete. DeLancey spent fifteen years in the coal industry, beginning as a permit clerk and finally, as Executive V.P. of Marietta Coal Company. Her stories have been published in literary magazines since 1987. She still lives where she was born and raised, in Cambridge, Ohio, now with her husband and children, where she works part-time as an investment manager, and is at work on a new collection of stories and a novel.

“From the world that could not be saved, the storyteller salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness.”—from the introduction by Carole Maso

Southern California: land of dislocation and assimilation, a place Diane Lefer knows well. In California Transit, she uses conversational prose and macabre wit to zero-in on a Mexican woman detained indefinitely by immigration officials, isolating her from her American family; a zoo employee considering what to do with a euthanized antelope’s head; and, in the title novella, a lonely woman, riding buses all day, who cannot avert the violence building within her. This collection explores the difference between justice and law through a lens unfiltered by moralistic or didactic intention. Like a surveillance camera meant to record crime, not stop it, Lefer presents a world gone wrong, not because of people’s hatred for one another but because of their impossible, unfulfilled yearning to connect.

Diane Lefer is the author of two previous collections, The Circles I Move In and Very Much Like Desire, and the novel Radiant Hunger. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an artistic associate of Playwrights’ Arena, volunteers with the Program for Torture Victims, and serves on the animal behavior observation team of the research department at the Los Angeles Zoo. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College of the Union Institute & University.

After nearly ten years, Joseph Caldwell returns to the literary scene with a rich novel of immense and resonant scope. With Dostoevskyian ambition, Bread for the Baker's Child sets out to probe the large questions of good and evil, culpability and sacrifice, and the meaning of suffering.

In this tale of two lives immutably intertwined, Sister Rachel is a nun in a failing order, a painter with a history of madness, devoted to her dying Mother General. Her brother Phillip is an accountant serving time for embezzlement, a man capable of great violence and anger who has turned his back not simply on the church, but faith as well. They have nothing in common except for a shared childhood tragedy.

Or do they? In this masterful display of structural precision, Caldwell slowly unravels the complementary nature of these two lives—at first glance hermetically sealed from one another—until their shared fate becomes a symbiotic relationship, as though they were two sides of the same coin, intersecting and reflecting one another. Through events operatic in tone and reach, Rachel and Phillip come to redefine our notions of love and kinship, and embody the human need for redemption and forgiveness.

Marketing plans for Bread for the Baker's Child:
• Author tour in Northeast area (New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C.).
• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Playwright and novelist, Joseph Caldwell is the author of four previous novels, The Uncle From Rome, Under the Dog Star, The Deer at the River, and In Such Dark Places. He twice held the John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting at Yale University's School of Drama, and was awarded The Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

Winner of the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

"This novel’s poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in—at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony."—From the Foreword by Rosellen Brown

In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of 12, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book’s narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past.

In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach.

Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow.

“Keep watching for Yolanda Barnes and her work. Her voice is her own and will be heard.”—George Garrett

Inspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vision of inner-city life. This stunning re-rendering of Eden takes place on imaginary Piedmont Street—an avenue of vital contradictions, with a pawnshop and cemetery, prostitutes and preachers, a street with no money in its pockets. Here we meet a variety of women embattled at society’s fringe—Cecile, once a schoolgirl at her history lessons of Pompeii, now a piano teacher down on her luck; Bernadette, seamstress and subject of rumor; an anonymous gardener planting dill as a curative against witchcraft and an amateur botanist studying the bird of paradise, which is both flame and woman’s hat.

Throughout this beautifully made montage, recurring images flash into focus and then recede—fire, dusk, the fearsome temper and pleasures of red (lipstick, fig and burning sun). And among them all appears the reluctant street preacher Daniel, a troubling messianic figure bothering Piedmont with warnings of hellfire.

As striking as Jean Toomer’s Cane, When It Burned to the Ground is a stark, bold lyric of place and time, an ambitious and innovative fiction. Its stories, sketches and fragments culminate into a haunting book of novelistic breadth and depth, creating a dreamlike and surreal reflection of our own strange world. It is an extraordinary and unique accomplishment.

Yolanda Barnes lives in Los Angeles, where she was born of Creole/black Southern heritage. She graduated from the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism, and received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections.

From takeoff to landing and everything in-between, this anthology is about flying and the culture surrounding this precarious method of transportation. From the awe of being airborne to the shrink-wrapped airplane meals, from the phobia of flying to the very real reason for that fear, everything is explored.

Contributors include: Diane Ackerman, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Bryan, Andrea Hollender Budy, Kelly Cherry, Alain de Botton, Richard Garcia, Lise Goett, Albert Goldbarth, Jeffrey Harrison, Brenda Hillman, Peter LaSalle, Philip Levine, Lee Martin, William Matthews, Ian McEwan, Campbell McGrath, Carol Muske-Dukes, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shahib Nye, Barbara Ras, Sherrod Santos, Bruce Smith, Susan Stewart, Terese Svoboda, James Tate, Jean Valentine, Arthur Vogelsang, Charles Harper Webb, Jan Wesley, Colson Whitehead, Gary Young

“When Susan Richards writes about horses and the interactions of the people involved with them, she brilliantly captures the characters, equine and human.”—Maxine Kumin

Strong, startling, funny—these stories are rich in their feeling for the human, natural, and sometimes supernatural world of Kentucky.

Susan Starr Richards has spent most of her life raising racehorses in central Kentucky, and writing. She has been a NEA Fellow in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and in Thoroughbred Times, as winner of their first National Fiction Prize.

Winner of the 2000 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Welcome to the strange, wonderful world of Brock Clarke. Here you will meet florists, dental hygienists, high school teachers, and peddlers of porno novelty items, all trying to be normal, good people and failing miserably. Reaffirming that "life, at its core, is embarrassing," What We Won't Do is a collection of tales about the miseries of the average, blue-collar worker who is anything but average. Here is a portrait of the Homer Simpsons and Archie Bunkers of the world, Knut Hamson style. These stories are more than insightful; they're downright funny.

"The honesty herein is not the sugarcoated sort, it's the sort that exacts revenge by goading others into doing what we can't or won't do ourselves. . . . You haven't read these stories before, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay them. That and the fact that they made me laugh, out loud, and frightened me a little, and still do."—from the Foreword by Mark Richard

Marketing plans for What We Won't Do:
• Author tour in South Carolina (Clemson, Greenville), and upstate New York (Syracuse, Rochester).
• Will coordinate additional tour with Harcourt upon release of his novel, The Ordinary White Boy, in September 2001.
• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Brock Clarke is from upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester, and is currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Clemson University. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. He lives with his wife, Lane, and their son Quinn in Clemson, South Carolina.

Jan Carew combines Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and literature of European exile to create a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights; he’s comfortable confronting anything, racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the natural world or city slum.

In her introduction to The Man Back There, Mary Gaitskill writes simply, “I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . .” The reader of David Crouse’s collection is bound to agree, but the reasons are not easily explained. Crouse crawls inside the heads of a dozen male protagonists and tells us how they think. They are not always likeable. They are often losers—their thoughts hurry ahead or dawdle behind, disconnected from what little action occurs around them.

And yet, somehow, we wince for the dog-catcher who crashes his ex-wife’s Thanksgiving dinner in “The Castle on the Hill.” We sympathize with the latch-key kid who pillages toys in a dead boy’s closet in “Time Capsule.” And in “The Long Run,” we find it hard to condemn a ninety-two-year-old senator trying to salvage his career after his ex-wife publishes a scandalous tell-all book about his life.

In this deceptively quiet collection, the truth is something that simmers up through what is not said. A hero is a man who saves himself from himself, who placates his temper with self-awareness and, most importantly, self-forgiveness. The Man Back There is a feat of empathy and razor sharp vision.

David Crouse is the author of Copy Cats, which received the 2005 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Fairbanks, where he teaches at the University of Alaska.

The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope.

Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University; she is also the creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters.

Spanning over two centuries, this inventive novel follows fictional writer Hector de Saint-Aureole and his novel, and includes imaginary responses from his imaginary readers. It is an intrepid, whimsical read that delights with its sense of play and twisting narrative.

Lawrence Sutin is the author of two memoirs, Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance and A Postcard Memoir; two biographies, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick and Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley; and a historical work, All Is Change: The Two Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West. He lives in Minneapolis.

 “Her stories have a fablelike quality, a dreaminess that lulls even as Miller explores the most contemporary issues.  Her characters seem to live on after the last word—I found myself thinking of them days after I’d finished the book, turning over what might have happened in later years....These psychologically acute stories are truly satisfying—imaginative, open-ended, haunting.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

"The latest collection from Miller skillfully explores the tension in Midwestern race and class relations....Miller's tales impart a real breadth of experience."—Publishers Weekly

“Alyce Miller has the eye and the skills for getting the short story right. . . . She writes vividly about people in various degrees of emotional extremis, and she avoids the temptation to invent resolutions for the dilemmas they’re in. She deftly captures individual psychologies.”—Norman Rush, from the introduction

In this startling new collection by prize-winning author Alyce Miller, changing images of water as a force both destructive and healing are woven throughout. Whether giving voice to the nameless wife from a tale by Chekhov or illustrating the fears driving apart black and white communities in small-town Ohio, Miller makes vivid the heart of human interaction. These stories, told from different perspectives of age, race, and gender, acknowledge a common rhythm in each of us—unsettled desire.

Alyce Miller has authored a collection of stories, The Nature of Longing (W.W. Norton & Company), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights (Anchor Doubleday), as well as more than 120 stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. Her other awards include the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, and distinguished citations in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She leads a double life as an attorney specializing in animal law and a professor in the graduate writing program at Indiana University Bloomington.