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

In these wondrously strange and revealing stories, Tom Kealey chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the young and marginalized as they discover many ways of growing up. Thieves I've Known is a collection of powerful, moving stories about the lives of a redemptive and peculiar cast of young characters who become easy to know and difficult to forget.

The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the America's most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum's characters struggle to define their relationship to home.

In Karin Lin-Greenberg's Faulty Predictions, young characters try to find their way in the world and older characters confront regrets. These stories provide insight into the human condition over a varied cross section of geography, age, and culture.

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.

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 women in the linked short story collection Once Removed carry the burdens imposed in the name of intimacy - the secrets kept, the lies told, the disputes initiated - as well as the joy that can still manage to triumph.

Work, and the coffee-fuelled 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.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. 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.

Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years - or soon to be - Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality.

Two hospital chaplains console the living during the moments when they look upon their beloved dead for one last time in a large urban hospital in Los Angeles. This moving and unsettling collection of stories shines a piercing light on the dark corners of our modern world, illuminating necessary truths that convey a clearer and, undoubtedly, greater vision of humanity.

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.