A Search For Excellence Has Brought To Readers Some Of The Best Stories Being Written In Indian Languages. To Celebrate The Crop Of The 90S, Katha Invited Five Giants Of Indian Cinema To Choose The Best For Us From 150 Award-Winning Stories From 15 Languages. The Best Of The Best Are Represented Here.

As The Nation Celebrates Its Fiftieth Year Of Independence, Katha Prize Stories Presents A Stunning, Often Electrifying, Perspective On The Plurality Of Experiences That Is India.

For the past three decades, William Abrahams has selected the O. Henry Award winners. Building on a tradition that spans over three quarters of a century, The O. Henry Awards has been "widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction" (The Atlantic Monthly). Every year, Abrahams has chosen a diverse group of stories and writers to creat a collection that includes perennial favorites as well as an increasing number of lesser known writers, many of whom have gone on to become seminal voices in current American fiction. Prize Stories 1996 is both William Abrahams's thirtieth anniversary as Editor of this landmark collection and his last, which gives this collection a special resonance. The twenty or more stories selected for this honor each yhear are culled from a broad range of American magazines both large and small, offering the reader the full sweep and variety of today's fiction. As in previous years, Prize Stories 1996 concludes with a contributors' notes section including comments by the writers on the inspirations behind their stories, providing readers with a unique entrÚe into the writers' creative processes. Representing the excellence of contemporary fiction writing, these stories demonstrate the continuing strenghth and vitality of the American short story.

A collection of short stories from celebrated author William Trevor in which he shines a light on the day-to-day life of Ireland and its citizens. From his debut collection, “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake,” published in 1968, to “Family Sins” (1990), William Trevor has crafted the short story to perfection, giving us brilliant and subtle stories full of the reversals, surprises, and shadowy truths we discover in life itself. To read this volume is not just to encounter an extraordinary literary stylist, but to understand life as surely as though we were looking through the eyes of his protagonists and—deeper still—into their hearts. William Trevor: The Collected Stories includes the tales from his seven previous books, as well as four stories that have never appeared in book form in America. They depict the comforts and frustrations of life in rural Ireland, the complexities of family relationships, and the elusive grace of love. They portray the almost invisible strands that bind people to each other as well as the chains that imprison them in solitary yearning.

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and how it shaped the nation while steering it through the Great Depression and the outset of World War II. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.