Short Story Collections

In this "tour de force" ( New York Times Book Review ), the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Circle demonstrates his mastery of the short story. “These tales reinvigorate … the short story with a jittery sense of adventure.” — San Francisco Chronicle Including the stories:"Another" "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust" "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" "On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home" "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" "She Waits, Seething, Blooming" "Quiet" "Your Mother and I" "Naveed" "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her" "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"

Dave Eggers has been partly responsible for a rejuvenation of short fiction in the USA, and these short stories are as original and witty as any of his longer works. Contents "You Know How to Spell Elijah" "This Certain Song" "What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes" "The Weird Wife" "This Flight Attendant (Gary, Is It?) Is On Fire!" "True Story -- 1986 --Midwest -- USA -- Tuesday" "It is Finally Time to Tell the Story" "A Circle Like Some Circles" "On Making Someone a Good Man By Calling Him a Good Man" "The Definition of Reg" "How Long It Took" "She Needed More Nuance" "The Heat and Eduardo, Part I" "Of Gretchen and de Gaulle" "The Heat and Eduardo, Part II" "Sleep to Dreamier Sleep Be Wed" "On Seeing Bob Balaban in Person Twice in One Week" "When He Started Saying 'I Appreciate It' After 'Thank You'" "You'll Have to Save That For Another Time" "Woman, Foghorn" "How Do Koreans Feel About the Germans?" "Georgia is Lost" "They Decide To Have No More Death" "Roderick Hopes"

In the grand tradition of Neapolitan ice cream, ZZ Top, and Cerberus, the tri-headed guardian of Hades, this set combines individual, short fiction collections by three talented practitioners of the short-short form. Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is a series of crystalline recollections of her childhood misadventures; Eggers’ How the Water Feels to the Fishes brings a deadpan absurdism to the intimacy and vision of his earlier work; and Unferth’s rollicking Minor Robberies unleashes a horde of off-kilter characters and their indelible misadventures. Each author’s work comes in its own hardcover, foil-stamped volume, and the three volumes are housed in an elegant slipcase.