San Antonio College Library

Fifteen stories. They include The Cook, which deals with abandoned children being used as donors for body organs, and To Reach This Season, in which a homosexual adopts a boy from the Third World.

A lush and rowdy collection of stories set in a rural Michigan landscape, where wildlife, jobs, and ways of life are vanishing. "American Salvage" is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century.

A debut in fiction by a writer from Alabama. In Winter Bodies, a man shaves off the body hair of his ailing wife, The Change in Union City follows the decline of a small town, and in Orbit, two children describe how their father abandoned their mother.

Steve Almond returns with his second short-story collection. Once again he has produced a funny, bracing, sometimes shocking, always imaginative collection of stories and characters: a young magazine editor enduring a bizarre blind date; a couple who are sure that they have been given implants by space aliens; a young boy desperate to please his father with his baseball prowess, who ends up fatally wounding another boy during a game; a creative-writing...

Presents a collection of short stories set in various locales around the world, including "Casualty," "Baboons," and "Lunch with Mother."

"Most of the stories in 'Graphics' (a collection dedicated to Joseph Conrad) are mystery or detective shorts, some with fantastic elements. "The Wind in the Lilacs" and "A Book in a Running Brook" contain short fairy tales with talking objects. "Ask and It Shall Be Given" features a blind boy who asks for the return of his sight on Christmas; an angel appears and gives him the ability to see into the hearts of people and this leads to an acceptance...