Will Butterfield can't believe it. His 75-year-old mother, Holly, is drunk and threatening to jump off the roof. Again.

Holly and Fiona, another elderly relative, won't stop tormenting Will and his wife Elizabeth with their bizarre (though often amusing) antics. Between Will's worries about his bookstore, The Heart's Ease, and Elizabeth's troublesome high school students, dealing with "the crazies" has become just too much.

But then something unexpected happens -- Henry Ward, a neighborhood handyman, meets the two old women, and he, his daughter Alison, and grandchildren are drawn into the Butterfields' lives in surprising ways. Both a comedy and a love story -- a first for Bausch -- Thanksgiving Night is about the real meaning of family, and one particular clan that has many reasons to be thankful.

"Wives & Lovers" is a collection of three short novels from the author whom the "Boston Globe" calls "one of the most expert and substantial of our writers."

"Requisite Kindness" -- published here for the first time -- tells the story of a man who must come to terms with a life of treating women badly when he goes to live with his sister and dying mother. "Rare & Endangered Species" demonstrates how a wife and mother's suicide reverberates in the small community where she lived, and affects the lives of people who don't even know her. Finally, "Spirits" is about the pain that men and women can -- and do -- inflict upon each other. These three very different works illuminate the unadorned core of love -- not the showy, more celebrated sort but what remains when lust, jealousy, and passion have been stripped away.

Richard Bausch is a master of the intimate moment, of the ways we seek to make lasting connections to one another and to the world. Gew writers evoke the complexities of love as subtly, and few capture the poignancy of the sudden insight or the rhythms of ordinary conversation with such delicacy and humor. To read these twelve stories--of love and loss, of families and strangers, of small moments and enormous epiphanies--is to be reminded again of the power of short fiction to thrill and move us, to make us laugh, or cry. In these profound glimpses into the private fears, joys, and sorrows of people we know, we find revealed a whole range of human experience, told with extraordinary force, clarity, and compassion.

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, shorter edition features 73 works-many of them new to this edition-by 69 authors, offering a broad collection of short stories with the most thoughtful annotations and apparatus on the market. With a new "Authors in Depth" feature, an extensive Reviews and Commentaries section, and expanded coverage of Writers on Writing, the shorter eighth edition provides a wealth of criticism of key works and authors, as well as the opportunity to look deeper into the craft of fiction.

To drink deep of the direction and sensibility of contemporary southern fiction, savor each dram in this delectable volume. Nineteen of the South's most venerable writers -- Madison Smartt Bell, Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Allan Gurganus, Barry Hannah, William Hoffman, Madison Jones, Michael Knight, William Henry Lewis, Jill McCorkle, Lewis Nordan, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Walter Sullivan, and Allen Wier -- have selected a short work for inclusion here. All of the contributors are affiliated with the the Fellowship of Southern Writers, organized in 1989 under the inspiration of the late Cleanth Brooks for the purpose of encouraging and honoring excellence in southern letters.

Each piece in The Cry of an Occasion celebrates the distinctness of southern experience, giving expression in story form to a singular episode of mind, heart, or will. Varying from whimsical to ominous to sidesplitting to melancholy, the stories share a regard for the people who brush against us and in so doing shape us -- generations of family especially, neighbors, as well as those occasional individuals who can mysteriously yet profoundly affect our lives.

On a freezing December night, a woman returning home from a first date with a man finds herself locked out of her apartment; the pains he takes to help her surprises them both. A teenage girl suffers the day of her grandmother's funeral attempting to be adult, furious with the pessimism of her mother and wounded by the absence of her father since she was three. A slave fleeing Mississippi in 1862 draws on the wisdom of breaking horses passed down from his grandfather to win assistancein his flight for freedom. Fourteen years after his teenage son's death, a man realizes his mourning is incomplete despite therapy, relocation, and the outward signs of contentment. A pregnant woman has vivid dreams -- of giving birth to a kitten, of forgetting her baby on the hood of her car, and of concealing a joint in her bra -- as she watches Boston's changing seasons and struggles with her torturous enjoyment of smoking.

"Now where will it all end?" asks one character. "All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on". The occasion and expression of southern fiction are in hale and hardy form, and reading this exemplary collection is pure pleasure.

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain falls, unabated, for days. Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of a perilous Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of the Second World War. Haunted by their sergeant's cold-blooded murder of a young girl, and with only an old man of uncertain loyalties as their guide, they truge on in a state of barely suppressed terror and confusion. With snipers lying in wait for them, the men are confronted by agonizing moral choices... Taut and propulsive - Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a tough and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

In his first collection of poetry and prose, award-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch proves that he is also an accomplished poet. Penned over a span of many years, the poems in These Extremes deal with a wide variety of subjects. Many focus on Bausch's own family and relationships. In one long, touching poem, "Barbara (1943--1974)," the poet memorializes his oldest sister, who died young. He also offers two prose memory pieces, recollections from his childhood and adolescence. In these brief "essays," Bausch draws loving but unsentimental portraits of his father, mother, and other relatives as he reflects on the sense of belonging that he gained from his family -- something he hopes to pass on to his own children in this violent, chaotic world.

In "Back Stories," the center of the book, Bausch effortlessly weaves poems around familiar characters from history, literature, movies, and popular culture -- including Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sam, the piano player from Casablanca. Decidedly accessible in form, theme, and expression, These Extremes will surprise and delight lovers of poetry and fans of Bausch's stories and novels.

Stephen Goodwin's second novel is an emblematic tale of the sixties, of a sophisticated couple going back to the land. The restlessness that compels Anna and Steadman to move from the city to a small mountain farm in Virginia is brought into high relief by the cycles of the natural world, and by the arrival of Anna's demonic twin sister. Goodwin's prose, by turns stark and pastoral, outlines these struggles while leavening them with self-effacing humor and beauty. Peopled with hippies and mountain folk, artists and farmers both organic and traditional, not to mention an unforgettable child, The Blood of Paradise evokes an era through a sensitive and unstinting portrait of marriage.

"To read the fiction of Richard Bausch is to be hugely moved, to be in touch with the depths of experience, to be present at the creation in a monument to human worth."—Newsday

Richard Bausch gets deep inside of people's lives. He speaks eloquently for all and to all of us about the intricacies of relationships—their fragility and their inherent possibility for explosion.

"Few explore with greater wisdom and compassion than Richard Bausch the dangers lying along the path to family love; few so richly deserve a wider audience than he has thus far reached."—Chicago Tribune

"Like Raymond Carver, Mr. Bausch can write the fine line with a directness that allows for no errors. His dialogue, like that of Bobbie Ann Mason, has just the right sound. Perhaps, on consideration, it is misleading to say that his characters are ordinary people, for against the unthinking rush of our current culture, they seek a pattern in life. They are inarticulate neither in voice nor in thought."—Bette Pesetsky, New York Times Book Review

"Richard Bausch displays a sensational mastery of form and content, a way of reaching into your body and gently holding your soul. He is, quite simply, one of our finest storytellers, a man whose gigantic talent is to be treasured, a writer to whom you must say, 'Thank you.'"—Detroit News

Richard Bausch is a master of the short story--and this selection brings together ten pieces which perfectly showcase his incisive wit, perception, and artistry. "He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature."--Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World.


From the Hardcover edition.

Natasha, a lonely congressional aide, meets Michael Faulk, a priest struggling with his faith. Love blossoms over the spring and summer of 2001. A month before their wedding, Natasha is on a trip in Jamaica and Michael is in New York when the World Trade Center is attacked. That same day, Natasha endures a private trauma of her own: she is raped by a young man on the shores of the Caribbean. She and Michael are soon reunited, but the horror of that day, and Natasha's inability to speak of it, means that there will forever be a sharp line that divides their relationship into before and after.

Critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch continues the tradition of identifying the best young writers on the cusp of their careers in this year's volume of "Best New American Voices". Here are stories culled from hundreds of writing programs such as the lowa Writers' Workshop and Johns Hopkins and from summer conferences such as Sewanee and Bread Loaf - as well as a complete list of contact information for these programs. This collection showcases tomorrow's literary stars: Julie Orringer, Adam Johnson, William Gay, David Benioff, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Maile Meloy, Amanda Davis, Jennifer Vanderbes, and John Murray are just some of the acclaimed authors whose early work has appeared in this series since its launch in 2000. The best new American voices are heard here first.

A 2004 PEN/Malamud Award winner, this collection celebrates the work of American artist Richard Bausch -- a writer the New York Times calls "a master of the short story." By turns tender, raw, heartbreaking, and riotously funny, the many voices of this definitive forty-two-story collection (seven of which appear here for the first time) defy expectation, attest to Bausch's remarkable range and versatility, and affirm his place alongside such acclaimed story writers as John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley.

Explorer Mary Kingsley ignored the narrowly circumscribed roles and rules for a Victorian young woman. She traveled to West Africa and visited places no European had ever been. She died young, and alone.

Almost one hundred years later, a young woman named Lily Austin receives a book about explorers for her fourteenth birthday, and the only female face inside belongs to Mary Kingsley. That night, something awful and unexpected befalls Lily, setting her upon a journey of personal discovery for which Kingsley becomes a kind of spiritual companion. Lily, a young playwright, creates her own version of Mary Kingsley, using a cache of letters Kingsley wrote to an unnamed reader in the future. This is a book about the different kinds of bravery with which women, then and now, have faced the world.

Nora Michaelson and her eleven-year-old son, Jason. are going through a difficult adjustment to life after the accidental death of Jason's father. at a time when the family's small business was failing. The loss of Jack Michaelson has left his wife and son nearly destitute. It has also placed their lives in jeopardy. This is a story of terror, and resourcefulness in the face of terror, from a master storyteller.

The critics have been effusive in their praise for Richard Bausch's Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea. His hardover sales have also never been higher. Taking its title from Walter Winchell's famous radio salutation, Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America opens in Washington, DC, in 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination, telling the story of Walter Marshall, an idealistic 19-year-old who lives with his widowed mother and studies to be a journalist like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. In this coming-of-age novel in the truest sense of the phrase, young Marshall fumbles toward manhood in a nation that is itself in the midst of cataclysmic change.

With the same elegance and precision that has distinguished his other novels, Richard Bausch has evoked a sense of time and place in a different America and brings the last 30 years of history profoundly and vividly to life.