A fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love—the best and worst thing in the universe—written by the creator of BoJack Horseman with his hallmark scathing dark humor “Transcendent tragicomedy.... Prepare to be devastated and made whole again.” —The A.V. Club Featuring: • A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding. • A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact. • A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified. And fifteen more tales of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

Mrs. Louise Mallard, afflicted with a heart condition, reflects on the death of her husband from the safety of her locked room. Originally published in Vogue magazine, “The Story of an Hour” was retitled as “The Dream of an Hour,” when it was published amid much controversy under its new title a year later in St. Louis Life. “The Story of an Hour” was adapted to film in The Joy That Kills by director Tina Rathbone, which was part of a PBS anthology called American Playhouse. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

A young Vietnamese-Australian named Nam, in his final year at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, is trying to find his voice on the page. When his father, a man with a painful past, comes to visit, Nam's writing and sense of self are both deeply changed. Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is a deeply moving story of identity, family and the wellsprings of creativity, from Nam Le's multi-award-winning collection The Boat. 'A tight and densely emotional journey that sucked me in and contained as much power as the lengthy title.' Killings, the Kill Your Darlings blog

Closed off and grieving her best friend, fifteen-year-old overachiever Verdad faces prejudices at school and from her traditional mother, her father's distance since his remarriage, and her attraction to a transgender classmate.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America is the definitive biography of this major American writer of novels and short stories, whose work includes the modern classic Winesburg, Ohio. In the first volume of this monumental two-volume work, Walter Rideout chronicles the life of Anderson from his birth and his early business career through his beginnings as a writer and finally to his move in the mid-1920s to “Ripshin,” his house near Marion, Virginia. The second volume will cover Anderson’s return to business pursuits, his extensive travels in the South touring factories, which resulted in his political involvement in labor struggles and several books on the topic, and finally his unexpected death in 1941. No other existing Anderson biography, the most recent of which was published nearly twenty years ago, is as thoroughly researched, so extensively based on primary sources and interviews with a range of Anderson friends and family members, or as complete in its vision of the man and the writer. The result is an unparalleled biography—one that locates the private man, while astutely placing his life and writings in a broader social and political context. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Winner, Biography Award, Society of Midland Authors

When Jonathan Kolatch's imagination is set free to wander, you never know where it might perch. Whether exploring the logistics of taking a Japanese bath, revisiting the remains of an evacuated Jewish settlement in Gaza, debunking the Dx game doctors play, or analyzing the economics of a chocolate chip cookie, he sees the world through a unique Kolatchian perspective. Blurring the lines between the factual and the fanciful, close to home or far away, Jon Kolatch makes us care about people we ve never met and consider things we ve never thought about. For Kolatch, debating whether to sell an aging car segues naturally into a contemplation of human immortality, and a chat with a West Bank rabbi over coexistence with neighboring Arabs begets a visit to a Palestinian legislator bent on scuttling the rabbi s peace dreams. From his earliest years, Jon Kolatch found himself following unconventional paths. Of thoroughly urban stock, when his parents acquired a modest tract of land two hours north of New York City, he found himself immersed in rural life: planting fruit trees, tinkering with recalcitrant lawn mowers, challenging poison ivy. Thus began a bipolar existence weekdays in the big city, weekends in the stix that continues to this day. Country themes inspired some of his earliest published pieces in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Conversant in Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, French, and Arabic, Kolatch dons a second suit when visiting abroad, preferring out-of-the-way places where he can invite himself into a stranger s house and survey the local scene. Sometimes his worlds intersect, like when a frustrating vibration problem with a newly purchased tractor led him to write in Japanese to the general manager of the Kubota Tractor Company, in Osaka, Japan. The result: a one-of-a-kind device to solve the problem, an audience with the G.M., and a personalized tour of the tractor plant. Whether wandering through the serene backcountry of Wajima, Japan, or negotiating the danger-fraught markets of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, Jonathan Kolatch s boundless energy and fearlessness of the unknown coupled with his ability to ingratiate himself with non-English speakers by communicating in their native tongue give him the access needed to tell his story. At the Corner of Fact and Fancy is a place where the serious and the lighthearted meet. You ll find it a sparkling place to visit.

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself. In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, a woman mourns the loss of her husband and son at the hands of one of history’s most notorious criminals. And in appealing to their executioner, she reveals the desperate sadness of a broken heart and a working-class life blown apart.

ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE. A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book…Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).