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.

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.

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.