When Beau Boutan, a Cajun farmer, is found shot on a Louisiana plantation, the claimants to the killing form a wall of protection around the real murderer.

This collection is Jamaica Kincaid's earliest published writings: her inspired, lyrical short stories. These stories plunge the listener gently into another way of perceiving both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her narrative is, by turns, naïvely whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean-family, manners, and landscape-as...

Edith Hope, a successful mature novelist, has made a fool of herself over love and is sent by her friends to a Swiss hotel to come to her senses. Instead of writing a new romance novel, she finds herself preoccupied with her fellow guests.

Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

In these ten stories, Richard Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. A refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter, an unhappy girlfriend, and a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier...

Ruby Pitt shocks her well-to-do family by running off with an abusive migrant worker and later marrying an uneducated tenant farmer.

In the powerful, haunting stories of Munro's new collection, men and women, in the midst of contemporary quandaries and crises, recall the long-buried yearnings, dreams, and hard choices that have given shape to their lives. [Friend of My Youth is] a wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written and deeply felt. It is difficult to do justice to Munro's magical way with characterization or to her unerring control of her own resources, she...

A collection of short stories giving voice to the vigorous and varied life on both sides of U.S.-Mexican border.

Richard Russo's novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York -- and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years. Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent...

"At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary...