Jim Shepard

Aron, one of the children of the Warsaw Ghetto who smuggle and trade things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, is rescued by a Jewish-Polish doctor who instills within him the importance of revealing to the world the atrocities they have all suffered.

A New York Times Notable Book: A lethal accident turns life into a waking nightmare for a mother and her son in this gripping novel of secrecy and dread Abandoned by her husband, Joanie Mucherino and her eleven-year-old son, Todd, struggle to cope while dealing with their comically tactless and intrusive Italian family. Further complicating things, Joanie now seems available to Bruno Minea, an old family friend whose two-decade passion for her has...

"These ten stories ring with voices belonging to--among others--English Arctic explorers in one of history's most nightmarish expeditions, a young contemporary American negotiating the shockingly underreported hazards of our crude-oil trains, eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, and two mid-nineteenth-century housewives trying to forge a connection despite their isolation on the frontier of settlement. In each case the personal...

A collection of short stories judged to be the best in America and Canada for 2013 presents a selection of short fiction, along with essays by the three judges and commentary from the twenty prize winners.