Books in the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series

You'll see how beautiful it is in the morning - jungle all around us"" says one of the characters in Anne Raeff's story collection. The jungle in these stories is both metaphorical and real, taking the reader from war-torn Europe to Bolivia and from suburban New Jersey to Vietnam.

The people in these eight interlaced stories are "bound together by the worst sort of grief", the kind that can devour you after someone close takes his or her own life. But if suicide has stolen these characters capacity to laugh, it has honed their sense of absurdity.

The stories in Better Than War encompass narratives from a diverse set of Iranian immigrants, many searching for a balance between memories of their homeland and their new American culture. The everyday life of each character subtly reflects viewpoints that are simultaneously Iranian and American, of all ages and circumstances.

Through quirky plots, one-of-kind characters, and more than a few twists, the stories in Big Bend examine gentle-hearted men and their relationships. From made-in-heaven meetings to troublesome liaisons, Roorbach's characters experience romance in unexpected, sometimes disastrous ways.

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.

In Amina Gautier's Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don't, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier's stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as "at-risk," yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences.

This collection of seventeen funny stories explores the territory separating what we feel and what we express through a series of middle class characters who are drifting aimlessly through the their lives or plotting an exit from one life to another.

This collection of stories penetrates the essential nature of human relationships. Most of the narrators are young black women whose relationships with the men in their lives are ending. While dealing indirectly with race, the stories are more about the complexities of identity and alienation.

The people in Rawlins's debut collection brave the Big Questions about relationships, love, and death, finding that just getting by is not enough. Asking for truth or understanding, they struggle with feelings often too deep, too new, too disquieting to articulate.

A collection of five short stories demonstrating the powerful interconnection between parents and children, nostalgia and memory, and the collective emotional intimacies and transactions that configure human behaviour.

Features stories that include mechanical men - Industrial Age holdovers, outsiders wanting for relevance and respect, or overwhelmed people who confuse the certainties of one reality with the doubts of another - who are cut off in some way from contemporary culture.

The ten stories in Winter Money are set in rural Kentucky and West Virginia, in dim horse racing and river towns. The men in Andy Plattner's stories are tough and uncertain, the women independent and disappointed, but they are strong-willed and high-spirited, always believing there's a better life, just over the horizon, after the next race.

Filled with sharp dialogue, engaging characters, and offbeat detail, the twelve stories collected in The Melancholy of Departure describe an outsider's world of longing, disillusion, and survival, where hope is found in unexpected places and understanding comes from unlikely sources.

In all thirteen tales, Selgin exhibits a keen eye for the forces that push people toward-and sometimes beyond-their very human limits, forces as intrinsic, elemental, and elusive as the liquid that makes up two-thirds of their bodies. These stories remind us that of all bodies of water, none is deeper or more dangerous than our own.