A Russian ship trapped in ice, the first Confederate submarine, and the world's worst summer camp are just three of the settings for Ethan Rutherford's tales of expeditions gone awry.  A Discover Great New Writers selection.

This preternatural collection of short stories touches on the stages of life in four parts: birth, gestation, conception and love. Ghosts of Civil War generals, phone sex-crazed families and “love-arms” (fall in love, grow an extra arm) populate these quirky, tender tales.  

Staged everywhere from a plane crash to a carnival ride, Susan Steinberg’s pointed short stories present remarkable women overcoming turmoil and grief.

Ron Rash's short stories effortlessly shuttle readers through time --  from a Depression-era chain gang to the life of a late-night radio DJ.  But they remain deeply rooted in the  Appalachian mountain world he's captured in novels like The Cove and Serena.

These rousing "Short Stories of the Long War" are uniquely resonant, as fiction penned by Iraq and Afghanistan-stationed soldiers and their spouses.  Foreword by Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), with contributions from David Abrams (Fobbit), Phil Klay (The New York Times), and Brian Turner (NPR). 

Physician and short story writer Louise Aronson puts her stethoscope to the heart of a San Francisco hospital.

Jennifer Haigh delivers interwoven tales of working class humanity in the coal mining country of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, sharply returning to the world of her revered 2005 novel Baker Towers.  Spanning decades, Haigh magnifies a community's will to endure economic grief and heartbreak in each artfully crafted tale.

The fourth story collection from the fertile mind of George Saunders brings outrage and absurdity, from suburban serial killers to criminal lab rats in a futuristic prison.  Yet each tale evokes Saunders' deep sympathy for these souls lost in the twenty-first century funhouse.

Set in the world that master storyteller Alice Munro has made her own, the countryside and towns around Lake Huron, this collection of short fiction sheds light on the small moments that define us: strange dreams, unforeseen accidents, homecomings that take unexpected turns. These are timeless gems from an inimitable voice.

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates never fails to immerse us in her fiction, and in these tales her talent for exposing the darkness underlying the ordinary world proves as gripping as ever. From a noir-inflected Los Angeles to heartbreak on a maximum-security cellblock, Oates is in top form: heady and headlong reading pleasure.

The opening story in Matthew Battles's electric collection, "The Dogs in the Trees", documents the inexplicable appearance of arboreal canines. Further gorgeous fantastika follows, producing a volume sure to draw comparisons to Borges and George Saunders.

A collection of dazzling early fables from the Nobel Laureate's pen.

Thirteen funny and memorable short stories by master of the form Helen Simpson (Constitutional) journey into the comedy of the modern world, and return bearing larger truths. Her characters are people we know -- single women, businessmen, couples breaking up -- who are struggling with issues with which we all struggle: family, love, mortality. Simpson knows how to take readers to new destinations -- and doesn't stint on the amusements along the way.

John Mortimer's death three years ago, and the subsequent cessation of new Rumpole adventures, can be ameliorated slightly by the appearance of this volume, an expansion of The Best of Rumpole that adds seven stories to the seven which Mortimer himself selected as his prime cuts. The bewigged barrister shines here, triumphing in case after case against impossible circumstances.

This aptly named teensy tome, edited by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with help from his online creative collective, hitRECord, is packed with illustrated stories so short they can often be read in a single breath. Some of the stories and pictures in this slender volume are worthy of longer contemplation and repeat reading. Others are good for a chuckle. All of them push the boundaries of what we think of as short fiction.

In his first collection of short fiction, Daniel Woodrell returns to the Missouri Ozarks of his haunting "country noir" Winter’s Bone -- recently adapted as a ruggedly powerful film. These brief, explosive tales are like muzzle flashes in the night, momentarily illuminating a rogues gallery of characters who would be the “bad guys” in any other book. But Woodrell -- whose early novel, The Ones You Do, was a B&N Discover Great New Writers selection -- assembles these short takes into a compelling mosaic of life on the wrong side of the tracks.

Combining Jim Thompson-level darkness with Richard Ford-style insights into character and place, Frank Bill delivers a set of stories that dive into an economically depressed Midwest-via-Dante, chronicling a desperate realm of drug deals, murders, and familial bitterness. These are the rural noir tales behind the missing headlines the mainstream media won't print.

America's first Gilded Age produced Mark Twain, Henry James, Willa Cather, and a flock of other notables. Will our current climate of economic imbalance, ruinous vanity, joyous nihilism, and wild-eyed millennialism produce a similar wealth of literary talent? Only posterity can say for sure. But this volume of stories from such luminaries as Junot Diaz, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley sets the bar admirably high.

If the Coen Brothers filmed Flannery O'Connor's stories using the ghost of Grant Wood as set and costume designer, the resulting film might resemble the tales in this career-launching collection from Alan Heathcock, a writer distinguished by his poetic treatment of the quotidian violence that underpins too much of American life.

These posthumously uncovered stories from the great philosophical fantasist and humorist hail from the early part of his career, when he was writing for the "slick magazine" marketplace. Consequently, they exhibit more whimsy than savagery, and an Eisenhower-era perspective on life—albeit infused with Vonnegut's trademark lateral thinking.

Having displayed equal finesse with both short and long fiction (especially the sublime novel, Feast of Love), Charles Baxter here offers 23 allied stories detailing the lives of his sober and good-intentioned but still somewhat afflicted Midwesterners, crafting a sympathetic portrait of the region that's part Garrison Keillor, part Sherwood Anderson, and part Alfred Hitchcock.

Colm Tóibín probes the destinies of immigrants and those returning home in nine stories that trace the ghostly contours of the past onto lives distanced from it by loss and longing.

A new edition of James Salter's deservedly revered story collection affords readers a fresh opportunity to admire the poised and quietly virtuosic prose of a modern master. Read more...

Following up his award-winning debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, with a collection of off-kilter stories, Doug Dorst displays a sly affection for eccentrics and outlaws, including the elderly wave-rider of the title piece. Read more...

Fantastic—in both senses—and all-new fiction from the likes of Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O'Nan, Chuck Palahnuk, Jodi Picoult, Peter Straub, and the volume's editior, Neil Gaiman, distinguishes this imaginative collection. Read more...

The perennially rediscoverable mid-20th-century Swiss master Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten; Selected Stories) reputedly was guided by the motto, "To be small and to stay small." Aptly, he wrote in minuscule scripts on receipts and other scraps of paper—an entire story could be inscribed on the back of a business card. This volume reproduces such works in all their tiny glory. Read more...