“A work of pop linguistics . . . [that] synthesizes . . . grammar, branding, cognitive science and Web theory . . . with intelligence and friendly wit.”—New York Times Welcome to the age of the incredible shrinking message. Your guide to this new landscape, Christopher Johnson reveals the once-secret knowledge of poets, copywriters, brand namers, political speechwriters, and other professional verbal miniaturists. Each chapter discusses one tool that helps short messages grab attention, communicate instantly, stick in the mind, and roll off the tongue. Piled high with examples from corporate slogans to movie titles to product names, Microstyle shows readers how to say the most with the least, while offering a lively romp through the historic transformation of mass media into the media of the personal.

America's most influential writing teacher offers an engaging and practical guide to effective short-form writing. In How to Write Short, Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed-from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services. With examples from the long tradition of short-form writing in Western culture, How to Write Short guides writers to crafting brilliant prose, even in 140 characters.

Each of Lara Vapnyar's six stories invites us into a world where food and love intersect, along with the overlapping pleasures and frustrations of Vapnyar's uniquely captivating characters. Meet Nina, a recent arrival from Russia, for whom colorful vegetables represent her own fresh hopes and dreams . . . Luda and Milena, who battle over a widower in their English class with competing recipes for cheese puffs, spinach pies, and meatballs . . . and Sergey, who finds more comfort in the borscht made by a paid female companion than in her sexual ministrations. They all crave the taste and smell of home, wherever—and with whomever—that may turn out to be. A roundup of recipes are the final taste of this delicious collection.

Edited byRichard Ford and featuring stories by Russell Banks, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff,Jhumpa Lahiri, JohnCheever, and many others, Blue Collar,White Collar, No Collar is a profound and groundbreaking anthologyexploring resonant themes of employment, service, and daily obligations asunique windows into our culture, our society, and our very humanity. With ashare of proceeds going to assist the literacynonprofit 826Michigan, this unforgettable collection of short fiction from manyof contemporary literature’s most powerful authors limns the diverse meanings of work in American culture today, even as itlooks to the future of the American workforce and its capacity to succeedcreatively tomorrow.

A new collection of stories by National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men. Can she outplay them? In the award-winning "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother. Which of them will win? In "Split/Brain" a woman who has blundered into a lethal situation confronts the possibility of saving herself. Will she take it? In "The First Husband," a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage, and exacts a cruel revenge, years after the fact. In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents' control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand.

The electrifying, "cutting-edge" (USA Today) debut work of fiction from Ron Currie, author of the forethcoming novel The One-Eyed Man (March 2017) Ron Currie’s gutsy, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly combining outlandish humor with big questions about mortality, ethics, and human weakness, Ron Currie, Jr., holds a funhouse mirror to our present-day world. God has inhabited the mortal body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of his death soon begins to spread. Faced with the hard proof that there is no supreme being in charge, the world is irrevocably transformed, yet remains oddly recognizable.

The author of the acclaimed Indiscretion returns with a searing tale of love, passion, and obsession—the story of one man's all-consuming desire for a beautiful, bewitching, and elusive woman "At night she is often in my dreams, always just out of reach, across a table, laughing, climbing a stair, disappearing into the next room, or on the verge of love, until something causes me to wake up unconsummated, aware of her continued absence in my life even if she was still with me every day. I remember when I first met her. It changed my life." Since he was a shy, protected young man, Wylie Rose has been drawn to the alluring, unconventional Bonet siblings, the children of a bohemian Spanish painter and an American heiress. But none affects him more than the enchanting Cesca, a girl of shimmering, incandescent beauty with a wild, irrepressible spirit. Wylie's friendship with her brother Aurelio, a budding painter of singular talent, brings him near Cesca's circle. A young woman confident in her charms, Cesca is amused by Wylie's youthful sensuality and trusting innocence. Toying with his devotion, she draws him closer to her fire— ultimately ruining him for any other woman. Wylie goes willingly whenever Cesca so tantalizingly reappears in his life, despite the emotional chaos left in her wake. Long ago, Wylie's father warned him about the Bonets. "They're beautiful, talented, rich. It's all very seductive. But they'll take everything and give nothing in return." One day Wylie will make an unexpected choice—a decision that will haunt him and echo through their lives. Spanning several decades, moving through the worlds of high society and art, and peopled with poignant characters, Girl in the Moonlight takes us from the wooded cottages of the Hamptons to the dining rooms of Upper East Side Manhattan to the glamorous nightlife of Paris and Barcelona. As he vividly brings to life Wylie and Cesca's tempestuous, heart-wrenching affair, Charles Dubow probes the devastating depths of misguided passion and the nature of true love.

When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus. No-Man’s Lands is Huler’s funny and touching exploration of the life lessons embedded within The Odyssey, a legendary tale of wandering and longing that could be read as a veritable guidebook for middle-aged men everywhere. At age forty-four, with his first child on the way, Huler felt an instant bond with Odysseus, who fought for some twenty years against formidable difficulties to return home to his beloved wife and son. In reading The Odyssey, Huler saw the chance to experience a great vicarious adventure as well as the opportunity to assess the man he had become and embrace the imminent arrival of both middle age and parenthood. But Huler realized that it wasn’t enough to simply read the words on the page—he needed to live Odysseus’s odyssey, to visit the exotic destinations that make Homer’s story so timeless. And so an ambitious pilgrimage was born . . . traveling the entire length of Odysseus’s two-decade journey. In six months. Huler doggedly retraced Odysseus’s every step, from the ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in Ithaca. On the way, he discovers the Cyclops’s Sicilian cave, visits the land of the dead in Italy, ponders the lotus from a Tunisian resort, and paddles a rented kayak between Scylla and Charybdis and lives to tell the tale. He writes of how and why the lessons of The Odyssey—the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love and family—continue to resonate so deeply with readers thousands of years later. And as he finally closes in on Odysseus’s final destination, he learns to fully appreciate what Homer has been saying all along: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part critical reading of the greatest adventure epic ever written, No-Man’s Lands is an extraordinary description of two journeys—one ancient, one contemporary—and reveals what The Odyssey can teach us about being better bosses, better teachers, better parents, and better people.

Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to. How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them? In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.

Originally published in hardcover in 2010.