Winner of the Crystal Kite Award, this touching story explores what it mean to be a good friend, how you should react to a bully, and makes the events of September 11th, 2001 personal. In this story about growing up in a difficult part of America’s history, Jake Green is introduced as a cross country runner who wants to be a soldier and an American hero when he grows up. Before he can work far towards these goals, September 11th happens, and it is discovered that one of the hijackers lives in Jake’s town. The children in Jake’s town try to process everything, but they struggle. Jake’s classmate Bobby beats up Jake’s best friend, Sam Madina, just for being an Arab Muslim. According to his own code of conduct, Jake wants to fight Bobby for messing with his best friend. The situation gets more complicated when Sam’s father is detained and interrogated by the FBI. Jake’s mother doubts Sam’s father’s innocence. Jake must choose between believing his parents and leaving Bobby alone or defending Sam.

A gorgeous story about devotion and dreams coming true at any age. Ali and his great-grandmother live happily together in a tiny clay house at the edge of the desert. But lately, Ali has begun to notice how his great-grandmother has aged. And one day, he asks if her lifeês dreams have come true. All except one, she says. She had a dream to see the sea, but now she is too old. So, the next morning, Ali sets off to make his great-grandmotherês final dream come true. Heês going to bring the sea to her. Children everywhere will recognize their own best selves in Aliês heroic act of kindness.

Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In "Dandelion," a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In "Doctor Sveta," a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In "Companionship," a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER "A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope," and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they "cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now."

A wickedly delightful collection of stories establishing Amis as one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation. "Martin Amis is a force unto himself.... There is, quite simply, no one else like him."—The Washington Post "Martin Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." —The Wall Street Journal Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the short story form. In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire—the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."