“In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.” —Ben Marcus, from the Introduction

Award-winning author of Notable American Women Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today.

Sea Oak by George Saunders

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr

The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis

The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro

The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon

People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz

Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri

Down the Road by Stephen Dixon

X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott

Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby

Short Talks by Anne Carson

Field Events by Rick Bass

Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, Conjunctions, Nerve, Black Clock, Grand Street, Cabinet, Parkett, The Village Voice, Poetry, and BOMB. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. He has recently served as the guest fiction editor for Guernica Magazine. He is a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2008 he received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fiction fellowship from the Howard Foundation of Brown University, where he taught for several years before joining the faculty at Columbia.