Десять потрясающих историй, удивительным образом балансирующих на грани между реальностью и причудливой фантасмагорией. Монахини из приюта пытаются «очеловечить» девушек, воспитанных волками, но не все поддаются перевоспитанию. А те, кто поддался, приобретают и человеческие пороки… Ледовый дворец – единственное развлечение жителей захолустного городка. Там имеется вечернее шоу для взрослых «Метель», во время которого люди предаются самым разным, в том числе и очень опасным, играм… Целая семья зарабатывает на жизнь при помощи борьбы с аллигаторами в тематическом парке… Пожилой инвалид влюбляется в волонтерку… Девочка на экскурсии застревает в гигантской доисторической раковине, в то время...

"The literary 'Oscars' features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories." - Shelf Awareness for Readers The Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as "a new classic of American fiction." Egan "possesses a satirist's eye and a romance novelist's heart" (New York Times Book Review).

On Strong Beach, an awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls' nest. By the Hox River in Nebraska, a window fuels both family pride and deadly revenge. In a godforsaken barn in what they suspect is Kentucky, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses. And in the collection's title story, "Clyde and Magreb" - he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety - settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay. Karen Russell is an audacious talent with a wicked...

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Swamplandia!, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, an imaginative and haunting novella about an insomnia epidemic set in the near future. A crisis has swept America. Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers to donate sleep to an insomniac. Under the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers the Corps' reach has grown, with outposts in every major US city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia, has spent the past seven years recruiting for the Corps. But Trish’s faith in the organization and in her own motives...

A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent. In the collection's title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In 'Haunting Olivia,' two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In 'Z.Z.'s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers,' a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. .). And 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' introduces the remarkable Bigtree...

From the author of the New York Times best seller Swamplandia! — a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — a magical new collection of stories that showcases Karen Russell’s gifts at their inimitable best. A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. A community of girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies, and escape by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s lower torso. When a group of boys...

The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline — think Buddenbrooks set in the Florida Everglades — and Swamplandia! their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve year old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamplandia!’s legendary headliner, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her brother has secretly defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their sinking family afloat; and her father, Chief Bigtree, is AWOL. To save...