These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home-thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

In the Hindu Kush Mountains that divide Afghanistan from Pakistan, a new Islamic prophet plans the destruction of the Great Satan. The prophet Khalid Ibn'abd Al-aziz Assaud reveals that Allah has shown him the path to a new Islamic order. He intends to create a new Islamic world by bringing the wrath of Allah down on the infidels in ways they don't expect. Educated in the United States and tempered in the wars of Afghanistan, Assaud knows America's military strengths and its economic weaknesses. Americans' dreams are kept alive with debt-if you destroy the banks of the Unites States, you bring down the enemy. Dr. Ross Palmer, a decorated Marine and noted economist, leads an elite unit of the Federal Reserve. Formed to respond quickly to attacks on United States financial institutions, the unit has worked only on simulations-until now. The first attack by Assaud is aimed at the world's oil supply. Assaud's second assault, a nationwide cyber-attack on the credit system, proves much more difficult for Dr. Palmer's team. In response to this final attack the Federal Reserve is forced to close all of the nation's banks. Can that halt the slide, or will America descend into another great depression? Either way, life in the United States is about to change.

Work, and the coffee-fueled day-to-day grind, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on work-and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Sometimes work is rewarding, and sometimes it's just demanding. From the cubicle to the courtroom, from the stage to the station. These fifteen stories reflect upon the time we dedicate to the jobs we do, from the moment we begin our commute to the second we return home, and every hardworking hour in between.