"With their perfect sentences about the weather and the land and the
terse, necessary people who live on it, these may be some of the best
stories about such matters you've ever read." —Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered"
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"It's hard to pigeonhole Percival Everett. Working between the
traditions of the academy and the African American tall tale, he writes
with a sharp satirical voice." —Playboy
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"Laura Kalpakian's new collection of short stories feels both
old-fashioned and surprisingly fresh. That her characters sometimes
manage to unleash their suppressed passions is the thrill at the core
of her anachronistic and often quirky work." —The New York Times Book Review
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“Alyson Hagy writes about the historic and contemporary
ghosts of Wyoming as if she has lived there for two hundred years. . . . She
inhabits each character completely, tells the hard and heartbreaking tales of
their barely redeemed lives with compassion and clarity, in prose as lyric and
arresting as the great state itself.”
"A wonderful story collection, so brilliantly vivid, it is like a trip
to this pocket of the world so steeped in history and folklore. You can
hear the surf and smell the cut bait. And you can enter the lives of a
host of colorful characters, each expressing his or her own kind of
longing as well as a connection to this lush place."—Jill McCorkle
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“The prodigiously talented Jeffrey Renard Allen is without question one of our most important writers. His novel, Rails Under My Back, kicked ass, and these tough beautiful stories are a gift. You cannot finish this collection without being dazzled by Allen’s manifold talents.”
“With turns to the wild, clever, and magical
that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a
beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new
voice.”
"Nine loosely tales weave the experiences of three generations of
Japanese Americans in San Francisco into a subtle, appealing tapestry."
—Publishers Weekly
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"Tess Gallagher is an excellent writer of prose who savors the elegance of simplicity
and whose stories resonate and linger." —The New York Times Book Review
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“The characters in The Man from Kinvara are men, women, and children who observe the world in terms of story, which is to say, they view themselves, and others, as part of a larger meaningful narrative. The stories are rife with generosity or compassion, and the characters possess great sentiments without the residue of sentimentality, and possess also a curious, uncommon dignity, operating with a worldview that relies upon hope as its fuel.”
"Belle Boggs infuses these stories of sometimes hardscrabble, dreams-deferred lives with a finely crafted, absolutely confident elegance. Boggs is a writer who knows how deep and how hard we can love and live. Her characters are too real to ever forget."
"The humor in the stories, as well as their thrill of realism, comes
from a nabokovian precision of observation and transformation of plain
experience into enchanging prose." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"The author’s writing is
lucid, and each story is different enough to showcase the diversity of her
style….an emerging writer to watch." —Library Journal
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"Pieces for the Left Hand consists of 100 very short stories. . . in which not a word is wasted, and not one of which could be cut. Despite the self-deprecating title, the collection is anything but offhand: it is a rigorous display of storytelling verve, quantity, and control. . . It is his most perfect work so far."
"This is a beautiful book—poetic and candid. I'm putting it into heavy
rotation, and I'll read it once a year for the next 20 years." —Sherman Alexie
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“I admire the work of Benjamin Percy for its sheer ferocity and compassion, for its deep empathy for people at the hard edges of rage and grief and fear. The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there’s a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy’s world. You never know where you will end up at the close of a Percy story, but you can be sure that he’ll actually take you somewhere.”—Dan Chaon
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"Sea Dogs is casual and deft, as if the stories were handed over by a
brilliant friend who has nothing to prove but has seen it all.
Smashing. Bensko has gone to a whole new mode of storytelling." —Barry
Hannah
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“Ingalls combines gothic horror themes with an unadorned style.…Her
vision evokes a world where psychosis and extreme violence stalk the
American dream.”—Time Out
"There are many reasons to savor Stern's stories—they remind us of
worlds and folkloric traditions long faded from memory, as well as of
the imagination's wilder side—but perhaps the most telling of all is
the sheer pleasure they provide." —Washington Post Book World
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