Contains ten short fiction stories in which Greg Hrbek explores what it means to be human and inhuman.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek’s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories is a collection that explores what it means to be human—and inhuman. These ten stories have won an array of honors—and whether set in the historical past or in a speculative future, each is wildly imaginative and shockingly real. In “Sagittarius,” selected for The Best American Short Stories, a mother and father search a dark forest for their missing newborn, who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous creature. In “False Positive,” a ghostly girl visits her biological father ten years after being aborted in utero. In “Bereavement,” a marriage is falling apart following a child’s accidental death, but a combination of myth and technology provides hope for a second life. Fantastic, horrific, painfully familiar, these stories are the work of a consummate storyteller.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance. At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.

Just down the highway from Connecticut's Gold Coast is the state's rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu's Domesticated Wild Things: the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all. These are the children of immigrants who found boarded-up brass mills instead of the gilded streets of America; they're the teenaged girls raised in the fluorescent glow of Greek diners, the middle-aged men with pump trucks and teratomas. These are people who have fled, or who should have. And if they are indeed familiar, it is because Aliu writes what is real, whether we ourselves, her readers, have seen it up close or not. And her stories make sense in a way that matters. A young mother buys into a real-estate investment seminar offered on an infomercial, only to be put back into her place by a bully in foreclosure. A closeted wrestler befriends a latchkey seven-year-old neighbor who harbors secrets of her own. A YMCA counselor tries to reclaim shoes stolen by a troubled young camper. What they share is a biting humor, an eye for the absurd, and fumbling attempts at human connection, all rendered irresistible--and as moving as they are amusing--by a writer whose work is at once edgy and endearing and prize winning for reasons any reader can appreciate.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Brown’s Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of women and men grappling with the loss and pain of everyday existence, people inhabiting a suburban landscape haunted by ghosts: a mother who leaps from a ridge, a mistress found at the bottom of the Connecticut River, a father who dresses in a pale blue-custom suit—and disappears. The dead leave behind postcards, houses, bottles of sherry, bones. They become local legends, their stories part of the characters’ own: an expectant mother in an isolated cottage on Long Island Sound uncovers an unsettling secret in her backyard; a troubled housewife is lured to a dinner party by a teenage girl whose mother has vanished under mysterious circumstances; a woman and her lover swim the pools of their neighborhood under cover of darkness; a young heiress struggles with mortality and the abandonments in her past. These stories capture the domestic world in all its blighted promise—a world where women’s roles in housekeeping, marriage, childbirth, and sex have been all too well defined, and where the characters fashion, recklessly and passionately, their own methods of escape.

After ten years of selecting great books from writers, new and established, Prairie Schooner celebrates the first decade of its Book Prize series by offering this collection of excerpts from each year's winners in fiction and poetry. Writers such as Brock Clarke, Anne Finger, Rynn Williams, and Paul Guest open windows to ordinary and fantastic experience showcasing the liveliness and power of contemporary literature. Greg Hrbek's darkly comic, genre-bending tales stand alongside Ted Gilley's stories about achieving bliss through pain and John Keeble's reflections on community and the difficulty of love. Here Shane Book's poems serve as an elegiac witness to suffering, while Kathleen Flenniken's poems consider ordinary women constructing their own significance, and Kara Candito's explore sex, loss, and human passions. Whether the topic is fantastic or quotidian, childbirth or monsters, South American airplane disaster or suburban Wisconsin, this writing carries us to the furthest reaches of human experience.

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments -- Black Jesus -- Brim -- A Savior, Belief, Tupac, and Balloons -- We Buy Gold -- The Hurt Will Make You Stronger -- Chew -- Take Me to the Water -- In the Middle of Everything There Are Ribbons of Light -- String Theory -- A Brief Excerpt from the History of Salt -- Ephemeros -- Dog People -- Barbers -- End of the World -- Ways to Mourn an Asshole -- Rites -- They Only Look Like They're Smiling -- The Immolator -- There Are No Ninjas in the End -- Hold 'til Warm -- Ravished -- Not Like You, Not at All -- The Annie Oakley Gun Training for Women -- Scars -- Run Away Screaming