"In We Love Anderson Cooper, characters are treated as outsiders because of their sexual orientation, racial or religious identity, or simply because they look different. A young man courts the publicity that comes from outing himself at his bar mitzvah. When a painter is shunned because of his appearance, he learns to ink tattoos that come to life. A paranoid Jewish actuary suspects his cat of cheating on him--with his Protestant girlfriend."--Provided...

"Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive ... This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed 'Break it down' (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award finalist 'Varieties of Disturbance'."--Front flap.

Representing work that spans several years, this is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to...

"Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist,...

"Written in a seemingly simple narrative style, Sherwood Anderson's slice-of-life stories often explored the undercurrents of small-town life, illuminating the loneliness and frustration of that isolated world"--

Thirty creepy stories about warped technology, revengeful ants, sadistic gym teachers, and other terrifying things. Includes author's notes on how he got his ideas for these stories.

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether...

Classic tales of changing lives and loves from one of Russia's greatest playwrights, a master of the modern short story. Morality, philosophy, and science merge in "The Duel," the classic tale of transformation in which educated Russian aristocrat Ivan Andreitch Laevsky falls in love with the married Nadya Fyodorovna and runs off to the Black Sea with her. As their passion wanes, Nadya turns to other men for comfort, while Ivan indulges in heavy...

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. Ha Sŏng-nan's stories seem pleasant enough, yet there's...

Clever and haunting by turns, Ayiti explores the Haitian diaspora experience. A married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. Wise,...