These stories are enveloped by change and the changes that shift the trajectories of our lives: change that shatters us, change that opens the world, and change from which we can never come back. These fourteen stories tell us about extensive and inevitable changes and how we realign ourselves and our lives, if we can.

"LaSalle's [stories] transcend their particulars to show people with dreams, dilemmas, and disappointments that will move any reader." --Jhumpa Lahiri, Harvard Review "Haunting and evocative...LaSalle's prose is lyrical, at times rhapsodic, and his characters memorable." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The twelve stories of Sleeping Mask, written in propulsive, fluid prose, introduce readers to remarkable characters. They include a child soldier sent to raid a girls' boarding school, a Virginia Woolf scholar surviving cancer, a desperate writer living under fascism in a futuristic Latin America, the spirits of recently deceased college students on a tour of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and a middle-aged man transported back to his childhood, where he is led out to sea by his mother's ghost. LaSalle's tantalizing "fictions" are evocative of many of the great innovators of postmodern literature, from Borges to Nabokov, while charting a path entirely their own. Through all of their stylistic pyrotechnics these stories never forsake rich characterization and plotting to probe the deepest parts of the contemporary human condition, such as the nature of erotic desire, the legacy of art and artistry, the power of grief and fear, and the horror of war and violence. Peter LaSalle is the author of several books of fiction, including the story collections Tell Borges If You See Him, recipient of he Flannery O'Connor Award, and What I Found Out About Her, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett, in his native Rhode Island.

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.

Set on the field of play, or maybe just its memory, these stories of the sporting life range beyond the expected to include such pursuits as yoga, billiards, horse racing, cards, and boxing. Here, even iconic sports like football, basketball, and baseball get a fresh take through stories that might feature a losing coach, a woman hoopster, or a groundskeeper (rather than a star player). Whether front-and-center as a story's driving force or as a backdrop for other concerns, the skill, cunning, and aggression on display here are familiar to all of us - as players, willing or not, in all manner of contests.

To be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that perhaps we are sleepwalking--that's what life can be like for the people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and narrative daring.

The characters range from a fragile, and very rich, Mount Holyoke College girl in Paris to an out-of-work American businessman caught up in an international financial scam in Buenos Aires; from a happy-go-lucky old piano-lounge performer, once famous in all the New England seaside resorts, to a quartet of passengers on a bus barreling across the Mexican desert on Christmas Eve--and heading right toward a nightmarish encounter indeed on the road. In one story, a troubled guy who is somehow both himself on a hockey scholarship at Harvard in the sixties and himself a few decades later, meets his beautiful lost girlfriend at a long-gone Cambridge cafeteria. The busboys become hovering angels. Time slips backward and forward. Things that happened may not have happened.

While rich with specific detail of character and place, these stories also tap into the stranger kind of clarity that does come, paradoxically, from subtle disorientation, as found in innovators like Nabokov and Borges. LaSalle's lovely, rhythmic sentences, in which an aside can sometimes be the central concern, create a captivating permeability in the boundary between real and unreal while always enchanting with their power simply to tell a moving story. This is very original short fiction that aspires to nothing less than reasserting the wonderful possibilities of the genre--or, as the narrator of the story "The End of Narrative" ultimately suggests: "Maybe narrative hadn't ended, which is to say, hasn't ended."

"What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming Americans," winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today. In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many--an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others--can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.
"I've always believed that as a short story writer Peter LaSalle has been in the same class as Donald Barthelme and Joyce Carol Oates in the avant-garde of American fiction writers, and now, reading his new collection, "What I Found Out About Her," I am more than confirmed in that belief: indeed, his sophisticated and highly controlled formal experimentation, which is the sparkling core of his style, now flows with such masterly ease that he can be said to be in a class of his own, at the forefront of American creators of original prose." --Zulfikar Ghose, author of "The Triple Mirror of the Self"
"Peter LaSalle's stories, set in wonderfully various settings--Buenos Aires, New York, Paris, Chicago--are rich in their delineation of our private lives and loves, and in those moments in which, by ourselves or with others, we live most deeply. These haunting tales are shrewdly original, disarmingly complex, and--always, always, since LaSalle is one of our finest storytellers--as beautifully crafted as they are memorable." --Jay Neugeboren, author of "You Are My Heart and Other Stories"

Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, 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 childhood-and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.

The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel. A summer spent roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris finds LaSalle haunted by the work of the French surrealists. In Hanoi, he meets for beers with the editors - two military men - of the Army Literature and Arts Magazine while investigating Vietnam's acknowledged great modern novel, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. A strange nighttime drive with a dear friend through the streets of sprawling Sao Paulo, searching for landmarks associated with modernist Brazilian poetry, takes on grave weight when he learns of his friend's death shortly afterward. The outright adventure of bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young - looked back on now - moves toward a theory of the perhaps dreamlike tenor of any travel, especially when done alone. An account of Jorge Luis Borges's stay in Texas explores how the place made such a lasting impression on the Argentinian writer. Additional pieces bring LaSalle to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works, all the while contemplating larger ideas engendered by travel, from issues of international politics to metaphysical understandings of time. Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life, this is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a gift for the essay form.