Werewolves in Their Youth
by Michael Chabon | 
Women in their beds
by Gina Berriault | 
Not the End of the World
by Kate Atkinson | 
Going Away Shoes
by Jill McCorkle | 
The Assignation
by Joyce Carol Oates |
The Art of Living
by John Gardner | 
The Safety of Objects
by A. M. Homes | 
Cowboys Are My Weakness
by Pam Houston | 
Break It Down
by Lydia Davis | 
Collected Stories
by Vladimir Nabokov | 
High Lonesome
by Joyce Carol Oates | 
Sugar and Other Stories
by A. S. Byatt |
All the days and nights
by William Maxwell | 
Lust and Other Stories
by Susan Minot | 
Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories
by Ellen Gilchrist | 
The Toughest Indian in the World
by Sherman Alexie | 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
by Stephen King | 
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore | 
Strange Pilgrims
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Exercises in Style
by Raymond Queneau |
These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love.