Books in the Vintage Contemporaries series

Ann Packer is one of our most talented observers of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils. In these unforgettable, emotionally searing stories, she explores the moral predicaments that define our lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss.

A breaved father stalks his son's killer. A woman cries alone by her television screen. A devout teenager wrestles with his faith and sexuality. Here, in these twenty-three stories, Andre Dubus turns fiction into an act of compassion. For readers new to Dubus, this is the perfect starting point. For fans of his, this is an essential, must-have collection.

A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of 2013Set against a vast American landscape that ranges from Manhattan to the lush rain forests and marijuana farms of Northern California, these eleven stories from the acclaimed author of The Bostons and Daughters of the Revolution dive into our darkest spaces, confronting the absurdity and poetry of human existence.

From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant, here is a novel that examines wildly divisive American issues like gun control and animal rights with Chris Bohjalian's trademark emotional heft and spellbinding storytelling skill. For ten summers, the Seton family-all three generations-met at their country home in New England to spend a week together playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and savoring gin and tonics on the wraparound porch to celebrate the end of the season. In the eleventh summer, everything changed. A hunting rifle with a single cartridge left in the chamber wound up in exactly the wrong hands at exactly the wrong time, and led to a nightmarish accident that put to the test the values that unite the family-and the convictions that just may pull it apart.

The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions. Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.