Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow's stories have garnered him awards such as the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes and have given him a devoted following. Now gathered here for the first time is a collection of his most darkly comic, masterfully written tales. A young man whose childhood hobby of collecting sea shells and birds' nests takes a sinister turn when he becomes obsessed with acquiring his brother's girlfriend, in "The Hoarder" (selected as one of the Best American...

Children deceive, as do grownups, and many are the moments when all of us even deceive ourselves. People of every age and stripe, whether rarely or often, dissimulate, bluff, and beguile. The writer who fabricates and populates worlds is a deceiver, as is the artist whose triumph is to trick the eye, to alter perception. The honest magician's livelihood is based on deception; so is the dishonest thief's. And consider the great Russian poet Marina...

A densely layered journey into the dark heart of the American Dream that spans continents and centuries In Bradford Morrow's debut novel, lightning-tongued mercenary Peter Krieger travels to Nicaragua to kidnap a man who may be a 480-year-old former conquistador-and therefore could hold the secret to immortality. When Krieger attempts to sell his captive to a reclusive scientist in upstate New York, he sets off on a globe-spanning expedition, in which...

When his father passes away in the prime of his life, Liam Everett knows something foul is afoot. The reverend's slip down the basement staircase of the church was deemed an accident, but the man knew those steps better than the back of his hand, and his son is sure he would never have been so careless and clumsy. But with everyone happy to accept Reverend Everett's death as a mishap, Liam is left to find solace through the legacy his father left...

Ariel Rankin seeks to locate and save her unknown father-a man deeply scarred by his secret and brutal role in the history of his country In the sequel to Bradford Morrow's heralded Trinity Fields,young New Yorker Ariel Rankin learns that her birth father is not the man who raised her but rather a soldier named Kip Calder who disappeared into the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. Hoping to preserve her otherwise happy life, she pushes the revelation...

From the moment homes and homelands came into being, exile ensued. While narratives of exile share themes of banishment, loss and longing, they are as diverse as the human experience itself. Writers as different as Homer and Heinlein, Aeschylus and Camus addressed this subject. In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie conceives of exile as "a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always...

Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Diane Ackerman, and more explore the double-edged sword of curiosity . . . Curiosity is as central to life as breathing. And like breath itself, when it ceases, the vibrancy of life fades and disappears. Curiosity leads to discoveries both beneficent and, at times, destructive. It often occasions wonderment, but also terror. It prompts the precise scientist, but also the nosy gadfly. A double-edged sword, curiosity...

Two Los Alamos boys forge a friendship in the shadow of their parents' history-changing work developing nuclear weapons In many ways, Los Alamos is an ideal place for best friends Brice McCarthy and Kip Calder to grow up. There's wilderness to explore; brilliant and fascinating people, including their own parents and neighbors; and a booming wartime economy. Still, the town was built for one purpose: to manufacture a weapon capable of total annihilation....

New writings on our fear of-and fascination with-the "other" from Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, and more.Alien is a powerful and flexible word. Aliens are "other." Aliens are the stuff of science fiction and fantasy. Aliens are traditional literary figures that cause us to see ourselves anew. Indeed, when we witness our "normal" lives through these strangers' eyes, we become the unfamiliar ones.Conjunctions: 67, Other...

Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie gathers essays, fiction, and poetry that imagine the world of our fellow beings, animals. Cultural mythologies and pantheons are populated with snakes, monkeys, cats, jackals, whales: a cast of characters whose stories reveal how complex and wildly contradictory our species' relationship with other animals is. They're friends, enemies, tools, food. Descartes deliberated about whether animals have souls, deciding they...