From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories. Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.

This book is a collection of 26 short stories throwing light on various aspects of human life. In these stories we come across a village bare foot doctor in Abdul Razak. Abdul Wahab a snake catcher, a con man collecting subscription of subscription for renovation of a temple, a college politician and several other interesting characters. We have an encounter with childless couple meeting sages and astrologers to know whether they will bear a child. We also meet fake swami, Swami Saralji. Scenes of rural life are met in search of medical herbs. The end of an affair, Bheema and Seema. There is a story about Inspector Patel and his plans Maya tai and her school children. Besides these, there are several others which will tinger in the memory of readers for several years to come.

“This immigration story is universal.” —School Library Journal, Starred Dan Yaccarino’s great-grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with a small shovel and his parents’ good advice: “Work hard, but remember to enjoy life, and never forget your family.” With simple text and warm, colorful illustrations, Yaccarino recounts how the little shovel was passed down through four generations of this Italian-American family—along with the good advice. It’s a story that will have kids asking their parents and grandparents: Where did we come from? How did our family make the journey all the way to America? “A shovel is just a shovel, but in Dan Yaccarino’s hands it becomes a way to dig deep into the past and honor all those who helped make us who we are.” —Eric Rohmann, winner of the Caldecott Medal for My Friend Rabbit “All the Way to America is a charmer. Yaccarino’s heartwarming story rings clearly with truth, good cheer, and love.” —Tomie dePaola, winner of a Caldecott Honor Award for Strega Nona

Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the 20th century. In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd into the real in his usual epiphanic and engaging style. Delving into such themes as the perils of the unfulfilled existence and the relationships among politics, sex, art, and life, this collection will delight both old fans and new readers.

Russell Charles Leong shows an astonishing range in this new collection of stories. From struggling war refugees to monks, intellectuals to sex workers, his characters are both linked and separated by their experiences as modern Asians and Asian Americans. In styles ranging from naturalism to high-camp parody, Leong goes beneath stereotypes of immigrant and American-born Chinese, hustlers and academics, Buddhist priests and street people. Displacement and marginalization — and the search for love and liberation — are persistent themes. Leong’s people are set apart, by sexuality, by war, by AIDS, by family dislocations. From this vantage point on the outskirts of conventional life, they often see clearly the accommodations we make with identity and with desire. A young teen-ager, sold into prostitution to finance her brothers’ education, saves her hair trimmings to burn once a year in a temple ritual, the one part of her body that is under her own control. A documentary film producer, raised in a noisy Hong Kong family, marvels at the popular image of Asian Americans as a silenced minority. Traditional Chinese families struggle to come to terms with gay children and AIDS.

Like the author of this remarkable collection of thirteen linked stories, the protagonist, Nadia, was born and raised in Egypt, educated in England, and immigrated to the United States. Samia Serageldin draws her characters out with subtlety and control, moving from the narrator’s grandmother’s garden house in Cairo to the suburbs of North Carolina, yielding powerful portraits of cultural dislocation, faith, and multigenerational conflicts. As the narratives shift in time and place, they unfold through memory. In “The Zawiya,” Nadia reflects on the change in women’s space from the coiffeur’s salon to a religious pulpit as she revisits a childhood ritual. In the title story, Nadia offers a vivid sketch of her grandmother Nanou, “a force of nature” who, as an early widow, single-handedly raised six children and ran the household. At a time when few women experienced such independence, Nanou had a potent influence on the young narrator. Told with compassion and clarity, Serageldin’s stories reveal one woman’s exploration of identity, finding it in both the sweeping backdrop of Egyptian history and the quotidian exchanges with friends and family.

Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In "Dandelion," a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In "Doctor Sveta," a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In "Companionship," a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER "A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope," and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they "cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now."