Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years - or soon to be - Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as they offer answers.

In Lori Ostlund's debut collection people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind.

In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, Ostlund offers characters that represent a different sort of everyman--men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In "Upon Completion of Baldness" a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. The precocious narrator of "All Boy" finds comfort when he is locked in a closet by a babysitter. In "Dr. Deneau's Punishment" a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. A lesbian couple whose relationship is disintegrating flees to the Moroccan desert in "The Children beneath the Seat." And in "Idyllic Little Bali" a group of Americans gathers around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and ends up witnessing a man's fatal flight from his wife.

In the eleven stories in "The Bigness of the World" we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.

In Lori Ostlund's debut collection, people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind. In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, Ostlund offers characters that represent a different sort of everyman - men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In ""Upon Completion of Baldness"" a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. The precocious narrator of ""All Boy"" finds comfort when he is locked in a closet by a babysitter. In ""Dr. Deneau's Punishment"" a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. A lesbian couple whose relationship is disintegrating flees to the Moroccan desert in ""The Children Beneath the Seat."" And in ""Idyllic Little Bali"" a group of Americans gather around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and end up witnessing a man's fatal flight from his wife. In the eleven stories in ""The Bigness of the World"" we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.

In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In "Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth," this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling. The Dance Boots narrates a century's evolution of Native Americans making choices and compromises, often dictated by a white majority, as they try to balance survival, tribal traditions, and obligations to future generations.