Jess Walter
Author
Description
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. Rye yearns for a steady job and a home; his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth...
Author
Description
We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father...
Description
Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Tom Perrotta explains in his introduction that "all of [these stories] took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and jolted me into that state of heightened awareness and emotional receptivity that's one of the great rewards of reading good fiction." The characters in these stories seek to discover something lacking in their life. Their stories...