National Network for Equitable Library Service

A collection of six stories and novellas includes the title story, in which the disappearance of a sweet blonde-haired child is linked to her mother's indiscretions and an older student with a fascination for a Native American legend.

A stained-glass artist struggles over his masterpiece for a castle in Southern Missouri and learns through great loss what his true subject will be. A schoolteacher searches for her missing son, her only clue a mysterious, paint-smeared stencil he left behind. And an orphaned young man and his former high school football coach set out to kidnap the coach's daughter from Los Angeles and bring her back to East Texas.

A family watches in horror as their patriarch transforms into the singing, wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. A renowned art collector relishes publicly destroying his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by helplessly as their father stages an all-consuming war on the raccoons living in the woods around their house. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him.

This collection gathers eight popular Louis L'Amour stories, performed by a star-studded cast. Willie Nelson reads several, one is read by Charles Dean, and another is fully dramatized by Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and the late Waylon Jennings, who together were known as The Highwaymen.

Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her long-awaited debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong.

In Life Without Death, the latest short story collection from Peter Unwin, ordinary men and women search for meaning in lives subject to change, chance, coincidence, and catastrophe. A man recalls a lifetime of love and loss while copying contacts out of his old little black book. A woman is left her dying father's secret stash of pornography, and is entrusted with the unenviable task of disposing of it. A new father unexpectedly discovers a way of connecting to his autistic son.

A collection of short stories about the artists, academics, diplomats and other members of the Canadian cultural and social elite.

The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed. A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees' crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the auto show.

The Vanishing Man is a collection of linked short stories about a man trying to come to terms with his past, a religious upbringing, in an ever-changing personal world that constantly throws him into self-doubt. He marries, finds happiness, only to go through a terrible divorce. He recovers, finds true love, marries, and goes through another terrible divorce and family death. He goes into therapy and tries to make sense of his failures and unhappiness by attempting to reclaim his past life. But this only partly succeeds.

A collection of stories that seeks to examine the dark side of ordinary people.