Presents a collection of wide-ranging, evocative short stories, including several inspired by the author's family history or featuring protagonists whose lives are shaped by irony.

Stories ranging from the farcical to the mythic present the doings and darings of an aging Latin ball player, an Elvis Presley look-alike, a survivalist, and other figures of our times

"The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories roam the world, from Nigeria to Venice, from an erupting volcano in Iceland to a brothel in the old Wild West. They feature a dazzling array of characters: a young American falling in love in Japan, a girl raised by snake-handling fundamentalists, an old man mourning his late wife, a fierce guard...

"A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton PrizeSet 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...

Presents a collection of fifty-six familiar and unfamiliar stories by such writers as Washington Irving, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, and Kate Chopin.

The adventures of Christopher Robin and his friends, in which Pooh Bear uses a balloon to get honey, Piglet meets a Heffalump, and Eeyore has a birthday.

In Time enough at last, Burgess Meredith plays a bank teller and avid reader who is the lone survivor of an H-Bomb attack and finally finds the time to read. In The monsters are due on Maple Street, hysteria grips a small community as residents suspect a power failure has been caused by invaders from outer space disguised as humans. In Nightmare at 20,000 feet, William Shatner sees a gremlin on the wing of his plane. In The odyssey of flight 33, air...

"In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life. Each short chapter begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell...