Fans of Nelson's three short-story collections (one of which, The Expendables, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction) will not be disappointed in her first novel, a provocative portrayal of the psychology of domestic crisis. This is the story of a bizarre and compelling friendship between Evan Cole, a clinical psychologist with a somewhat dysfunctional family, and Paddy Limbach, a roofer who has no idea how to keep a roof over his family's heads. Their attachment begins when both their fathers die within moments of each other at the same hospital. Theirs is an attraction of opposites: invited to Evan and Rachel's house for dinner, Paddy and Didi bring wine coolers, which hardly...

Michael Chabon once said, "I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again.?? And now she has blessed us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully formed. In the title story, "Funny Once,?? a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In "The Village,?? a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries...

Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson's most accomplished and emotionally riveting work. Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again....

“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. “It’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world. In “Miss Lora,” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles...