The 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction returns with a collection of 14 short stories, rife with characters who will stay with you well beyond the last page Edward P. Jones, the bestselling and prize-winning author of 'The Known World', returns to the form that first inspired him - the short story In this collection, Jones returns to the city that inspired his first book, 'Lost in the City'. This is the story of Washington DC, a city full of bustling life, bursting forth from the banks of the swampy Potomac. These are the stories of the city's ordinary inhabitants, its labourers and lawyers, sailors and nuns, children and pensioners - people who in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally complex. Casting his net wide, Jones explores the American Dream on an epic canvas, from the dawn of the twentieth century until modern times. His memorable cast of characters find themselves caught between the old ways of the agricultural America of their past and the temptations of the big city, struggling against the inequities locked within slavery's legacy. Both witty and poignant, touching and shocking, this collection is sure to make a lasting impression and further confirm Jones as one of the masters of the genre.

One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolano, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolano's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolano's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors" takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead. These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolano's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.

Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In "Fine Just the Way It Is," she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate.

"Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief."

Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.

In Die groot sand en ander stories kry die leser die geleentheid om verhale te lees wat onder meer in Ster, Die Brandwag, Republikein en Huisgenoot verskyn het. Die titelverhaal, Die groot sand, speel af in die genadelose Namibwoestyn waar twee diamantsmokkelaars hul buit gaan haal. Na ’n moordende staptog kry hulle die diamante, maar ’n sandstorm steek op. Onder die gekerm en geloei van die wind besef een van die smokkelaars dat daar net genoeg water oor is vir een man … Trek die koffiekan nader en lees ook oor ’n olifantjag in Angola, oor die vul wat treine gejaag het en die fabel oor die leeumannetjie wat Oukat moes opvolg.