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.

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.

The eleven stories in Wendy Brenner's debut story collection concern people who are alone or feel themselves to be alone: survivors negotiating between logic and faith who look for mysterious messages and connections in everyday life, those sudden transformations and small miracles that occur in mundane, even absurd settings.

Brenner's stories range in setting from the rural and southern (a rotating country music bar, a dog track/jai alai compound, a grocery store, a natural cold springs sinkhole) to the urban and high-tech (absurdly bureaucratic companies and academic departments and a food irradiation plant). Often young and tough women seeking to hone their survival sensibilities, Brenner's characters are a mix of the everyday and the fantastic: frustrated secretaries and scientists, a young supermodel, precocious children, fierce plumbers and mechanics, a psychic grandmother, an unhappy lottery winner, a desperate grocery-store mascot in an animal suit. And then there are the animals--real ones of all kinds who turn up at unlikely moments and often seem to be trying to help.

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, these stories are quirky takes on contemporary life in which animals, not always large, lurk around the edges.
"I like animals and I like men" begins the hopelessly-in-love narrator of "The Round Bar," who follows her married country singer to Nashville in her own version of a down-and-out song. In "The Oysters," Pat Boone"not the Pat Boone"laments his love for his newly married professor, while delivering oysters to be irradiated. The oysters themselves are having a hard time deciding whether irradiation is a gain or a loss. Wendy Brenner triumphs in capturing all the normal oddities of life; and in the magic of a few words a bizarre but accurate images he creates our lives and how we live and breathe.

"Brenner's work is disturbed, taut, funny, and wise. Better than that it's good."--Padgett Powell

"Her prose is at times as moving and mean as broken bottles. . . . Brenner is a writer of large . . . talent."Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wendy Brenner is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other literary journals.

"Brenner's achievement in these ironic, understanding tales is making sure that even the small losses her characters suffer do not fail to move us."Polly Morrice, New York Times Book Review

"Intoxicatingly original."Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award