Frank O'Connor's hilarious tale of a tiny boy's war against his paternal rival in "My Oedipus Complex" sits beside Ann Packer's touching portrait of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child's birth. At the other end of the lifespan, John Updike's "My Father's Tears," Jim Shepard's "The Mortality of Parents," and William Maxwell's "The man who lost his father" bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other.
In between, we en...
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Stories of Motherhood gathers more than a century of literary celebrations of mothers of all ages. These short stories by a wide range of great writers illuminate the many facets of our most elemental human relationship, from birth to death and everything in between.

Lydia Davis and Harold Brodkey explore dizzying encou...
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Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and ...
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The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal Party," Joy Williams's "The Wedding," and Lorrie Moore's "Thank You For Having Me"--encompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, hon...
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As Scheherezade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire.

In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between waking and dreaming. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest," from Washington Irving's comical...
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Annie Proulx and Bret Harte transport us to the ranches of the Old West and Rudyard Kipling to the polo fields of India. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous Thoroughbred disappear, and Raymond Carver gives us a vision of runaway horses in the mist. Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Babel, and Ted Hughes explore the human passions horses can unleash. From th...
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The chilling classic stories gathered here offer a remarkable variety of approaches to the theme of haunting. Revenge comes from beyond the grave in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body-Snatcher," while visions of the dead come between the living in Henry James's "The Friends of the Friends." P. G. Wodehouse gives us a farcical take on the haunted house in "Honeysuckle Cottage," and in L. P. Hartley's "W.S.," a writer is fatally stalked by his own aggrieved creation.

Here ...
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Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Ian Rankin, this collection works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and '30s to the genre's source in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the brilliant and eccentric (Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Poe's C. Auguste Dupin) to the deceptively unlikely (G. ...
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*Selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post*

The Story of Hong Gildong is arguably the single most important work of classic Korean fiction. A fantastic story of adventure, it has been adapted into countless movies, television shows, novels, and comics in Korea. Until now, the earliest and fullest text of this incredible fable has been inaccessible t...
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In a volume that is penetrating, introspective, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, one of the great men of letters of this age-or any age-holds forth on life, art, sex, politics, and the state of America's soul. From his coming of age in America, to his formative war experiences, to his life as an artist, this is Vonnegut doing what he does best: Being himself. Whimsically illustrated by the author, A Man Without a Count...
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