From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life. Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone—his past links with radical movements give...

From one of America's most dazzling talents ("Young writers as ambitious--and as good--as Nell Freudenberger give us reason for hope." --The New York Times Book Review) comes a cross-continental love story: a brilliantly observed, warmly engaging novel about the exhilarations--and complications--of getting, and staying, wed. Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. It's a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient traditions--the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina because she is "straightforward" and doesn't "play games," each is hiding...

"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).

Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives! I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated). If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction,...