Bøker i Iowa Short Fiction Award-serien

"The characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life which they find unbearable, and the stories chart their (often tragically misguided) attempts to relieve their suffering through attempts to connect with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). The collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism ... to a Kafka-esque fairy tale, ... from fabulist 'weird fiction' ... to a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals in the form of a re-envisioning of an episode from The Odyssey--this time from a decidedly unheroic perspective. ... The collection also shows stylistic range"--

The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.

At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Big things happen in this collection. But it's also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography.

How does one live a good life? If you're Pat Graves, you change your name to Cecile Collette, move to Cleveland, and join three churches and the Rotary Club. For Cecile, it may be possible to make Michigan and everything else she touches beautiful, but she'll come to grief when she tries to redesign another human being.

In Sari Rosenblatt's collection, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. Rosenblatt's comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. The ten shimmering stories in this collection offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

From a lightning death on an isolated peak to the intrigues of a small town orchestra, the glimmering stories in this debut collection explore how nature - damaged, fierce, and unpredictable - worms its way into our lives.

In the spirit of Tove Jansson, William Blake, and Calvin & Hobbes, The Lightning Jar contains a volatile mix of innocence and experience, faith and doubt, nostalgia and a sense of all there is to gain by accepting reality on fresh terms.