In the eleven kaleidoscopic stories, McFawn traces the combustive, hilarious, and profound effects that occur when people misread the minds of others. While our misreadings may be unavoidable, they can be things of beauty, charm, and connection, reminding us of the necessity of empathy.

Death, that ending of all endings, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on death-and for planned anthologies on such topics as work, family, animals, children, and more. Most of the expected ways by which we take our leave are covered here: accident, murder, suicide, illness, old age. Perhaps less expected is how, in these stories, a matter we'd rather not think about becomes the stuff of fiction so compelling that we can't stop thinking about it. How can something so final and certain spread so much ambiguity in its wake? What did we think of the departed, and what did they think of us? How long will they be around--in our hearts and heads-even after they're gone? How will we forgive those who may have caused the death of a loved one? These fifteen stories give us many new ways of looking not only at death but at the lives that must go on in its aftermath.

These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home—thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as they offer answers.

These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

The people in these eight interlaced stories are ?bound together by the worst sort of grief,? the kind that can devour you after someone close takes his or her own life. Even so, Toni Graham reveals a piercingly funny cast, short on patience with themselves and the incongruous pieties of daily life in the Heartland.

Set on the field of play, or maybe just its memory, these stories of the sporting life range beyond the expected to include such pursuits as yoga, billiards, horse racing, cards, and boxing. Here, even iconic sports like football, basketball, and baseball get a fresh take through stories that might feature a losing coach, a woman hoopster, or a groundskeeper (rather than a star player). Whether front-and-center as a story's driving force or as a backdrop for other concerns, the skill, cunning, and aggression on display here are familiar to all of us—as players, willing or not, in all manner of contests.

Work, and the coffee-fueled day-to-day grind, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on work—and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Sometimes work is rewarding, and sometimes it’s just demanding. From the cubicle to the courtroom, from the stage to the station. These fifteen stories reflect upon the time we dedicate to the jobs we do, from the moment we begin our commute to the second we return home, and every hardworking hour in between.