Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

From the warm and colorful imagination of New York Times bestseller Mary Engelbreit comes a delightful romp through an Easter wonderland! Ann Estelle dreams of wearing a hat covered with ribbons and flowers for the neighborhood Easter Parade. But when her mother gives her a straw hat instead, she wonders how she can be the Queen of Easter with something so plain. Never one given to despair, Ann Estelle rolls up her sleeves and gets to work—with the help of some surprise spring visitors! Lavishly illustrated and positively bursting with spring colors, this picture book is a magical and heartwarming journey from the queen of holidays herself—Mary Engelbreit!

The first of Chekhov's works to be published in a serious literary journal, `The Steppe', with its masterly account of a spectacular thunderstorm, signifies his maturation as a writer of short stories. While the majority of his tales focus on the privileged classes, this selection shows that Chekhov never forgot his origins as the son of a failed provincial grocer, and characters as varied as the brutal soldier in `Gusev', the downtrodden old constable in `On Official Business', and the bemused peasants in `New Villa' testify to the power and flexibility of his art.