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The biggest and best collection of American flash fiction ever assembled reveals the very big imaginative possibilities of very short stories Featuring 100 genre-spanning and form-bending stories, spanning 160+years; includes literary fiction, speculative fiction, noir, satire, surrealism, humor, horror, parables, fables, and more. This landmark Library of America anthology presents the best of a century and a half of American storytelling and literary innovation--in 100 bite-sized pieces, from 100 wildly diverse and distinguished authors. Celebrating the artful brevities of flash fiction from Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Zora Neale Hurston to Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and Diane Williams, it recovers some of the little-understood history of the very short story before "flash fiction" was invented, and it gathers the brilliant work of a score of emerging contemporary writers, too. Here are: Winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award (Ernest Heming

At last, a major American poet collected for the first time in the sixth volume of the definitive Library of Edition of her works In his last book, Harold Bloom presents the earthy, surprising, and lyrical poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin's career began and ended with poetry. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of her works gathers, for the first time, her collected poems--from her earliest collection Wild Angels (1974) through her final publication, the collection So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor just a week before her death in 2018. The themes explored in the poems gathered here resonate through all Le Guin's oeuvre, but find their strongest voice in her poetry: exploration as a metaphor for both human bravery and creativity, the mystery and fragility of nature and the impact of humankind on their environment, the Tao Te Ching, marriage, womanhood, and even cats. Le Guin's poetry is often traditional in form but never in style:

InJoan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics.Arranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. (Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971'sThe Panic in Needle Parkand 1976'sA Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five. The book includes more than 50 artists ranging from Bri