"In more than forty collected stories, immigrants living in St. Louis write compelling accounts of their earlier lives"--Provided by publisher.

Ten “stark, realistic” short stories from the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author ‘told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose” (The Boston Globe). Dagoberto Gilb wrote most of the stories in Before the End, After the Beginning while he recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2009. The result is a powerful and triumphant volume that tackles common themes of identity, mortality, and the physical limitations which arose during his own illness. Taking readers throughout the American West and Southwest, from Los Angeles and Albuquerque to El Paso and Austin, these ten stories cover territory close to Gilb’s heart—a mother and son’s relationship in Southern California in the story ‘Uncle Rock’ or a man looking to shed his chaotic past in ‘The Last Time I Saw Junior’—while describing the American experience in his raw, inimitable style. With this new collection, Gilb offers what may be his most extraordinary achievement to date with “an authenticity that’s unimpeachable” (San Antonio Express News).

This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of an old and a new Australia. A woman on a passenger ship in 1958 gets involved with a young, wild Barry Humphries. A man looks back to the 1970s and his time as a member of Australia’s least competent scout troop. In 1988, a teenage boy recalls his sexual initiation, out on the tanbark. In 2015, two sisters text in Kmart about how to manage their irascible, isolated mum. Then, in the near future, a racist demagogue addresses the press the day after his electoral triumph. As the cities heat up and lose their water, a lady from one of the ‘better suburbs’ makes every effort to get her family into an exclusive gated community. Outstandingly original, bitingly satirical and written in a remarkable range of voices, A Couple of Things Before the End is a powerful vision of where we are – and where we may be headed. ‘These voices, so superbly heard and rendered, threw me into fits of laughter and slyly broke my heart.’ —Helen Garner ‘Astonishing ... an inventive collection of missives from the end of history. Complicated and savage and difficult and funny and melancholy, it’s both harsh and a caress. How do we speak and write into a future? I think Sean O’Beirne is showing us one way of doing it.’ —Christos Tsiolkas ‘O’Beirne inflects his identifiably Australian characters with a darkly comic and empathetic voice ... altogether, this collection invokes [our] questionable past, ironic present and disturbing future.’ —Books+Publishing

Presents true stories about real-life monsters, doomed domains, and strange disappearances, many attributed to ghosts and other supernatural encounters.

'Askildsen's dry, absurd humour is not unlike that of Beckett... His short stories are packed with irony, and the dialogue is sharp and expressive' TLS Spare, taut and told with flashes of pitch-black humour, the short stories of Norwegian master Kjell Askildsen capture all the strangeness of modern existence. In this selection of tales, spanning the whole of his brilliant career, unnerving encounters occur, lonely individuals try to connect, families and relationships are fractured, and we are confronted by the fragility and absurdity of life. 'Full of compelling strangeness. Lives surge through a few brittle pages, suppressed loves and resentments threaten to erupt' Independent

Have you always known what you wanted to be in life? What are some “watershed moments” that made you who you are? When did you get on track to become a successful CEO? It started with three questions at Davos. The younger Peter Vanham looked to the answers from the elite leaders he asked to validate his own career choice, and the rich, private wisdom he received revealed more about building a career than he’d found anywhere else. He shares it all with you in Before I Was CEO. For everyone who lays awake at night wondering if they’re heading up or down the corporate ladder, this collection of personal stories from a remarkable group of the most accomplished men and women in business today proves everyone can put themselves in the C-suite by taking a variety of different paths—it’s all how you do it. Some found opportunity through adversity and others came by their big-break moments through serendipity. A group of them walked away from corporate life and lived in other ways and all of them made calculated moves to advance their careers. In their own words, read how it all unfolded, the tough decisions they wrestled, the risks and rewards they saw, and how it all came together. You don’t need a royal pedigree or Ivy League education to reach the top as long as you: • Value family, leave home, and make informed decisions based on your dreams • Take the first thirty-five years of your life to discover what you’re interested in and don’t rush to be a CEO • Strategically deal with failure, remember the lessons you learned, and adapt to situations you can’t change You aren’t the first person to be at the crossroads you’re standing in, and with the motivating and instructive stories in Before I Was CEO, you may be answering a young journalist’s questions at Davos one day.

The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results. Advance praise for Before and After “In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. With a journalist’s keen eye and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book.”—Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris