This is a collection of short stories by a reputed writer of yester-year. The stories have charm, realism and deep character studies.

When Mrs. Sorensen’s husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch.” In “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. “Dreadful Young Ladies” demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination. In “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake,” a witch is haunted by the deadly repercussions of a spell. “The Insect and the Astronomer” upends expectations about good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, love and longing. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella “The Unlicensed Magician” introduces the secret magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead—with thematic echoes of Barnhill’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. With bold, reality-bending invention underscored by richly illuminated universal themes of love, death, jealousy, and hope, the stories in Dreadful Young Ladies show why its author has been hailed as “a fantasist on the order of Neil Gaiman” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). This collection cements Barnhill’s place as one of the wittiest, most vital and compelling voices in contemporary literature.

'The way I see it, a country with a stupid shape like this one can't have too much smart people in it.' On the contrary, as Reuben's diatribe reveals, 'paper-bag shaped' Trinidad is full of schemers and dreamers. Maharaj's characters struggle heroically, though sometimes comically and oddly, to make their mark on the earth. It is as if the more frustrating their outward circumstances, the more intense their inner lives. Bashir Ali, the librarian, has developed an intimate relationship with his books, and a passionate hatred of their borrowers. 'Bhaji and rice! You put bhaji and rice on top of Virginia!' Hoobnath Hingoo, the metalwork technician, imagines a dire fate for the arrogant young engineers who lord it around the oil refinery. 'Barbecue the whole side of them. Grill them nice and black. Afterwards we could have a sale. Grill engineers. Going cheap. Eat as much as you like...' And of course there is Roop, the writer, who wants to escape from his gas station 'to write that book... about everything I ever thought of since I born.' Anyone who enjoys the comedies of V.S. Naipaul will find great pleasure in Maharaj's elegant and arresting style, but they will also find in Maharaj a profound empathy and understanding of his characters and their world. In the process, he gives a rewarding and insightful portrayal of the Indo-Trinidadian world in the late 20th century. Rabindranth Maharaj was born in Trinidad. He now lives and teaches in Toronto. Several further collections of his stories have been published in Canada.

A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host. Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.

From a forbidden glance on a Miami night to a killer's slow burn on a Detroit street, no one mixes passion, scheming, and violence better than Elmore Leonard. But before he did it in Miami Beach or Motor City, Elmore Leonard did it on the American frontier. "The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories is a raw, hard-bitten collection that gathers together the best of Leonard's Western fiction. In stories that burn with passion, treachery, and heroism, the American frontier comes vividly, magnificently to life. In "The Tonto Woman," a young wife, her face tattooed by Indian kidnappers, becomes society's outcast--until an outlaw vows to set her free. . . . In "Only Good Ones," we meet a fine man turned killer in one impossible moment. . . ."Saint with a Six-Gun" pits a doomed prisoner against his young guard--in a drama of deception and compassion that leads to a shocking act of courage. . . . In "The Colonel's Lady," a brutal ambush puts a woman into the hands of a vicious renegade--while a tracker attempts a rescue that cannot come in time . . . and in "Blood Money," five bank robbers are being picked off one by one, but one man believes he can make it out alive. The wild and glorious spirit of the West comes alive in the hands of America's greatest storyteller. Etching a harsh, haunting landscape with razor-sharp prose, Elmore Leonard shows in nineteen brilliant stories why he has become the American poet laureate of the desperate and the bold.

Much admired in Europe, Landolfi has been called "the Italian Kafka"; he is often linked with the Surrealists, and in the intellectual quality of his fantasy there are certain affinities with Borges; but beyond these superficial comparisons, his is a truly unique--and fascinating--art. It is based in a prodigious imagination, a very curious sense of humor and a rare command of irony.

A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

Twelve stories deal with a young woman who decides to break with her smug fiance, a suicide inquest, a woman who murders her husband, a greedy merchant, a declining family of landowners, and a tactless host.

In her vivid and sly, gentle and wise, long-anticipated first collection, Delia Sherman takes seemingly insignificant moments in the lives of artists or sailors—the light out a window, the two strokes it takes to turn a small boat—and finds the ghosts haunting them, the magic surrounding them. Here are the lives that make up larger histories, here are tricksters and gardeners, faeries and musicians, all glittering and sparkling, finding beauty and hope and always unexpected, a touch of wild magic. Praise for Delia Sherman's previous books: "Multilayered, compassionate, and thought-provoking."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Fantastic in every sense of the word, Sherman's second novel (Through a Brazen Mirror) is a skillfully crafted fairy tale that owes as much to E.T.A. Hoffman as to Charles Perrault. . . . The Porcelain Dove is no dainty vertu but a seductive, sinister bird with razored feathers."—Publishers Weekly Delia Sherman was born in Japan and raised in New York City. Her work has appeared most recently in the anthologies Naked City, Steampunk!, and Queen Victoria's Book of Spells. She is the author of six novels including The Porcelain Dove (a New York Times Notable Book), The Freedom Maze, and Changeling, and has received the Mythopoeic and Norton awards. She lives in New York City.