Selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short storywriters, and novelists, this revised and updated second edition features fifty remarkable stories written by a wide spectrum of stylistically and culturally diverse authors.

Russell Banks - Donald Barthelme - Rick Bass - Richard Bausch - Charles Baxter - Amy Bloom - T. C. Boyle - Kevin Brockmeier - Robert Olen Butler - Sandra Cisneros - Peter Ho Davies - Janet Desaulniers - Junot Diaz - Anthony Doerr - Stuart Dybek - Deborah Eisenberg - Richard Ford - Mary Gaitskill - Dagoberto Gilb - Ron Hansen - A. M. Homes - Mary Hood - Denis Johnson - Edward P. Jones - Thom Jones - Jamaica Kincaid - Jhumpa Lahiri - David Leavitt - Kelly Link - Reginald McKnight - David Means - Susan Minot - Rick Moody - Bharati Mukherjee - Antonya Nelson - Joyce Carol Oates - Tim O'Brien - Daniel Orozco - Julie Orringer - ZZ Packer - E. Annie Proulx - Stacey Richter - George Saunders - Joan Silber - Leslie Marmon Silko - Susan Sontag - Amy Tan - Melanie Rae Thon - Alice Walker - Steve Yarbrough

From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism, this indispensable anthology brings together works from all genres of creative nonfiction, with pieces by fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more.
Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970.
Contributers include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earley, Anthony Farrington, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Diane Glancy, Lucy Grealy, William Harrison, Robin Hemley, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Ted Kooser, Sara Levine, E.J. Levy, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Lee Martin, Rebecca McCLanahan, Erin McGraw, John McPhee, Brenda Miller, Dinty W. Moore, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lia Purpura, Richard Rhodes, Bill Roorbach, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Sue William Silverman, Floyd Skloot, Lauren Slater, Cheryl Strayed, Amy Tan, Ryan Van Meter, David Foster Wallace, and Joy Williams.

In the mythical town of Winesburg, Indiana, there lives a cleaning lady who can conjure up the ghost of Billy Sunday, a lascivious holy man with an unusual fetish and a burgeoning flock, a park custodian who collects the scat left by aliens, and a night janitor learning to live with life's mysteries, including the zombies in the cafeteria. Winesburg, Indiana, is a town full of stories of plans made and destroyed, of births and unexpected deaths, of remembered pasts and unexplored presents told to the reader by as interesting a cast of characters as one is likely to find in small town America. Brought to life by a lively group of Indiana writers, Winesburg, Indiana, is a place to discover something of what it means to be alive in our hyperactive century from stories that are deeply human, sometimes melancholy, and often damned funny.

A new story collection focused on the Heartland from Michael Martone, one of America's most prolific and important contemporary authors. In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the Flyover as he conjures Winesburg, Indiana, a fictional town and all of its inhabitants' lyric philosophies, tales of the mundane, and the sensation of being "lost" in the heart of the heart of the country. But here, in over one-hundred and thirty short fictions, even as there is much sadness, the citizens continue to tinker and create, marvel and wonder in the midst of ruin and rust. These stories may capture lives of quiet desperation, but in so doing, they create a kind of hobbled poetry in the spontaneous sketches of the ordinary made extraordinary, the regular irregularities, the familiar knocked off-balance with a glancing blow. From the overly overworked City Manager, to Margaret Wigg's obsessively collected collection of library stamps, to Blanche's air-filled aluminum ice cube tray, the town is a community of everyday odd-balls rife with isolation and idiosyncrasy. They are people trying to get by; that question loss as well as passion, devotedness, childhood wonder, and kinship in their observations and daily routines. With undeniable humor, intelligent quirk, and earnest longing for a pastoral passing into the annals of deep Midwestern time, Michael Martone crafts an unforgettable panoply of characters whose perspectives invite us to alternatively interpret our own commonplaces.

Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize Finalist for the the Big Other Award for Fiction The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone is a Midwestern mythology that celebrates facts, fiction, and the impermanence of art. Inspired by the real-life pioneer of early aviation who invented the art of skywriting, the brief stories in this collection by "editor" Michael Martone follow the adventures of Art Smith and his authorship in the sky. In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut and Hayao Miyazaki, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone recreates the wonder of the early flying machines as it reimagines the unwritten stories we tell about the daredevils who flew them.

"Michael Martone writes with deep affection for the ordinary. In hishands, the quotidian dreams of the American heartland are transformed... " --Louise Erdrich

"This is a marvelous book.... What agift!" -- Richard Rhodes

Abalone, Arizona, is a sleepy southwestern town whose chief concerns are boredom and surviving the Great Depression—that is, until the circus of Dr. Lao arrives and immensely and irrevocably changes the lives of everyone drawn to its tents. Expecting a sideshow spectacle, the citizens of Abalone instead confront and learn profound lessons from the mythical made real—a chimera, a Medusa, a talking sphinx, a sea serpent, witches, the Hound of the Hedges, a werewolf, a mermaid, an ancient god, and the elusive, ever-changing Dr. Lao himself. The circus unfolds, spinning magical, dark strands that ensnare the town’s populace: the sea serpent’s tale shatters love’s illusions; the fortune-teller’s shocking pronouncements toll the tedium and secret dread of every person’s life; sensual undercurrents pour forth for men and women alike; and the dead walk again. Dazzling and macabre, literary and philosophical, The Circus of Dr. Lao has been acclaimed as a masterpiece of speculative fiction and influenced such writers as Ray Bradbury.

Do Midwesterners have a peculiar way of looking at the world? Is there something not quite right about the way they see things? For such a normal place, the heartland has produced some writers who take a most individual approach to storytelling. And the result to the delight of readers everywhere has been stories that reveal the mystery, joy, and enchantment in the most ordinary and incidental moments of life. These 33 exceptional tales showcase the peculiarly wonderful vision of some of the region s best-known or soon-to-be-celebrated writers. Each invites its readers to see the world through different eyes and see it anew."

In this one volume, readers have access to the two decades of Hoosier mythology created by Michael Martone, one of Indiana s most recognized voices. This book collects work from Martone s first five books: Alive and Dead in Indiana, Safety Patrol, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler s List (IUP, 1990, 1992), Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Seeing Eye. Virtually all of the stories in this "double-wide" collection speak to the Hoosier experience and imagination. Places like Martone s hometown of Fort Wayne, as well as Peru, Elkhart, and Indianapolis, and narrators such as Colonel Sanders, Alfred Kinsey, and James Dean s high school English teacher all come to life with the author s trademark blend of irreverent humor and incisive reality."