A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

Graham Hettlinger has selected 25 of Ivan Bunin's stories and translated them afresh--several for the first time in English.

Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and Jack London, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer. In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study. Many of his stories are set in the steaming jungle of the Misiones district of northern Argentina, where he spent much of his life, but his tales possess a universality that elevates them far above the work of a regional writer. The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.

From the authors of best-selling Molvana comes another hilarious send-up of the always-culturally sensitive travel guide. Whether you'd prefer to taste the Phaic Tanese dish guoman (a local duck delicacy whereby the bird is plucked, rolled in spices, and slowly roasted over hot coals before being brought to the table and killed), or go brown-water rafting on the mudslides of the heavily deforested jungles of the north, or gain insight into the unusual customs of the Phaic Tanese people (Phaic Tanese men will often touch a blonde-headed child because so doing is believed to bring gold, and will likewise touch the breasts of a blonde-headed woman because so doing is believed to bring pleasure), Jetlag's travel guide is the essential guide for the undiscerning traveler. A fascinating land of contrasts with one foot in the past and another striding determinedly forward, Phaic Tan truly is a nation going in circles.