"If thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number...you would think a civilized society could come up with a way for us to skip it." -- from "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" by Bruce Coville No one will want to skip any of the twelve short stories and one poem that make up this collection by some of the most celebrated contemporary writers of teen fiction. The big bar mitzvah that goes suddenly, wildly, hilariously out of control. A first kiss -- and a realization about one's sexual orientation. A crush on a girl that ends up putting the boy who likes her in the hospital. A pair of sneakers a kid has to have. By turns funny and sad, wrenching and poignant, the moments large and small described in these stories capture perfectly the agony and ecstasy of being thirteen.

The common denominator in this collection of stories is that somebody dies in each of them. A husband dies under mysterious circumstances, a wife in a house fire, some are devoured by supernatural beings, others by a serial killer, one due to complications from an insect bite, and an army is dispatched by a swarm of snakes. The stories cross multiple genres, explore human connections, as well as different ways of thinking about and coping with death. Most of the stories were conceived while walking my dog through the cemetery in the final months of my husband's illness, reading epitaphs and scanning the headstones for unusual names. The cemetery was on my way home from work and was easy to access. It had the added benefit of having lots of lanes, few people and, normally, no other dogs, which made it an ideal place for me to walk mine. I did not expect when I first started stopping there for it to lead to such creative productivity, but that is what happened, and this collection is one of the results. I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library, Some Trick is now in paperback Finalist for the Saroyan Prize for Fiction For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”

“I’ve read her Thirteen Stories many times, and I’m always awed by how much comedy, pathos, satire and lyricism she manages to squeeze into her stories.” —Sue Monk Kidd A strong sense of place—in this case Mississippi—along with often larger-than-life characterizations of ordinary folk with all their glorious eccentricities and foibles, and above all a completely distinctive voice, come together in Eudora Welty’s fiction to offer us a world that is sometimes sad, sometimes comic, often petty, and always compassionate. Here is a baker’s dozen of Welty’s very best, including: “The Wide Net,” in which a pregnant wife threatens to drown herself, despite fear of the water, and a communal dragging of the river turns into a celebratory fish-fry; “Petrified Man,” revealing the savagery of small-town gossip; “Powerhouse,” Welty’s prose answer to jazz improvisation and the emotional heart of the blues; and “Why I Live at the P.O.”, the hilariously one-sided testimony of a postmistress who believes herself wronged by her family. With her highly tuned ear and sharp insight into human behavior, Eudora Welty has crafted stories as vital and unpredictable as they are artful and enduring. “Miss Welty has written some of the finest short stories of modern times.” —The New York Times “Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices.” —Anne Tyler

These tales of passion are full of peril, a recurrent awareness of mortality, the gaps that separate all people and threaten to separate them further from those they love.".

"More engaging than any new fiction in years." —Chuck Palahniuk An unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place. Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.