Anthologies

The Fall 1989 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by James Carroll. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Acclaimed novelist and nonfiction writer James Carroll compiles this volume of stories and essays subtitled "The Virtue of Writing." This edition of Ploughshares is devoted to the morality and ethics of fiction. As Carroll says in his introduction, "The ploughshare is the sharpened blade of the plow, the thing that cuts the furrow. But it is also, in our culture, a moral symbol. The founders of this magazine made a moral and political statement when they chose its name, and it is that aspect of the meaning of Ploughshares that this issue emphasizes. It is dedicated to the idea that writing, and in particular, the writing of fiction, is a morally serious enterprise; and more than that, that fiction inevitably involves us in a mode of thinking which is, at its core, thinking about morality." With fiction from Tony Ardizzone, Jennifer Egan, Alice Hoffman, Ward Just, George Packer, Pamela Painter, and Annie Dillard. INTRODUCTION James Carroll ESSAYS "Volcano," by Annie Dillard "On 'The Company We Keep,'" by Robie Macauley FICTION "In the Garden of the Djinn," by Tony Ardizzone "The History of Rodney," by Rick Bass "The Pseudonym," by Paul Buttenwieser "Spanish Winter," by Jennifer Egan "The Wrecker," by Jeffrey Goodell "A Wave of the Hand," by Judith Grossman "Sleep Tight," by Alice Hoffman "She's Not Dead, Belle," by Ward Just "Dog Stories," by Barbara Nodine "Snails," by George Packer "Confusing the Dog," by Pamela Painter "In a Father's Place," by Christopher Tilghman "The Body Politic," by Theodore Weesner

They imbued their art with the truth about love and sex and seduction. They pushed erotic writing to the center stage of American fiction. They took risks, fed our imaginations, and explored our fantasies. Drawn from the works of dozens of the best contemporary American writers, The Good Parts is American writing at its most unabashedly erotic.Contributors include: * Saul Bellow * Harold Brodkey * Philip Roth * Don DeLillo * Scott Spencer * William Styron * Joan Mellen * Kathy Acker * Rebecca Goldstein * Joyce Carol Oates * Lynne Sharon Schwartz * Elizabeth Tallent * Pat Califia * Toni Morrison * Michael Chabon * Robert Boswell * E.L. Doctorow * Mary Gordon * Oscar Hijuelos * Susanna Moore * Pam Durban * Dani Shapiro * Frederick Busch * Mary Caponegro * A.M. Homes * Charles Johnson * Jane Smiley * Robert Olen Butler * Siri Hustvedt * Susan Sontag * Amy Bloom * Steve Erickson * Amanda Filipacchi * Anna Monardo * Maria Flook * Dale Peck * Joan Wickersham * Lynne McFall * Gwendolyn M. Parker * Charles D'Ambrosio * Jennifer Egan * Anchee Min * Rick Moody * Charlotte Watson Sherman * Paula Huston * James McManus * Mary Gaitskill

"Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction" ( The Atlantic Monthly ), an exciting selection of the twenty best short stories, with brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges—David Guterson, Diane Johnson, and Jennifer Egan—on their favorite story. Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories. An accomplished new series editor—novelist and short story writer Laura Furman—has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story. The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff Lush Bradford Morrow God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers The Story Edith Pearlman Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle Meanwhile Ann Harleman Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light The High Road Joan Silber Election Eve Evan S. Connell Irish Girl Tim Johnston What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Kissing William Kittredge Sacred Statues William Trevor Two Words Molly Giles Train Dreams Denis Johnson

This book is a collection of conversations between writers and their mentors, taken from the pages of The Believer, along with previously unpublished conversations. These conversations are not limited to issues of writing and craft, but instead offer unfettered exchanges on a wide range of topics — from Buddhism to infinity, politics to mountain climbing. The interviews feature the serious-yet-casual Believer approach to the standard, often formal, interview format. David Foster Wallace, for example, fields the question, “Do you want to talk about your history with various forms of tobacco?” while George Saunders reflects upon this oft-pondered mystery: “What’s up with the crows in Syracuse?” Interviews include Zadie Smith talking with Ian McEwan; Jonathan Lethem talking with Paul Auster; Adam Thirlwell talking with Tom Stoppard; Susan Choi talking with Francisco Goldman; ZZ Packer talking with Edward P. Jones; Dave Eggers talking with David Foster Wallace; Julie Orringer talking with Tobias Wolff; and Ben Marcus talking with George Saunders.

Making the Trees Shiver is an eclectic collection by some of today's most notable literary icons and the talented next generation of young writers from NY Writers Coalition's creative writing workshops. Featuring writing from the first six years of the Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival, Making the Trees Shiver celebrates community writing at its finest: expansive, authentic and full of life. Like Fort Greene Park itself, these pages are noisy at times, chilling at others, but always full of spectacular views.

The books that we choose to keep -- let alone read -- can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf , dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among many others. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.

“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 ).

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in— Brown v. Board of Education , Roe v. Wade , Miranda v. Arizona —need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education , in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

NEW & NOTEWORTHY ~ THE NEW YORK TIMES With a Foreword by Susan Orlean, twenty-three of today's living literary legends, including Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, Laila Lalami, and Michael Chabon, reveal the books that made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives in this intimate, moving, and insightful collection from "American's Librarian" and recipient of the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service Nancy Pearl and noted playwright Jeff Schwager that celebrates the power of literature and reading to connect us all. Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. Illustrated with beautiful line drawings, The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors—the creative artists whose imagination and sublime talent make America's literary scene the wonderful, dynamic world it is. A love letter to books and a celebration of wordsmiths, The Writer’s Library is a treasure for anyone who has been moved by the written word. The authors in The Writer’s Library are: Russell Banks TC Boyle Michael Chabon Susan Choi Jennifer Egan Dave Eggers Louise Erdrich Richard Ford Laurie Frankel Andrew Sean Greer Jane Hirshfield Siri Hustvedt Charles Johnson Laila Lalami Jonathan Lethem Donna Tartt Madeline Miller Viet Thanh Nguyen Luis Alberto Urrea Vendela Vida Ayelet Waldman Maaza Mengiste Amor Towles