Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer. - From the Foreword by Joanna Scott How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world's immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than...

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best-Selling The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected - and most popular - of its kind. The Best American Short Stories 2012 includes Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Haigh, Steven Millhauser, Alice Munro, Lawrence Osborne, Eric Puchner, George Saunders, Kate Walbert, and...

In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these 21 vintage selected stories and 13 scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.

A new story collection from Edith Pearlman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award for her last collection, Binocular Vision. From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Binocular Vision, Honeydew further solidifies Edith Pearlman's place among the likes of all-time great story writers such as John Updike, Alice Munro, Frank O'Connor, and Anton Chekhov. Pearlman writes about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, but the real excitement comes from the intricate attention Pearlman devotes to the interior life of young Emily,...