Orem Library

Although Barnaby Gaitlin has been "working steadily for Rent-a-Back, renting his back to old folks and shut-ins," his past "habit of breaking into other people's houses" seems destined to ruin his life again.--Jacket.

A lush and rowdy collection of stories set in a rural Michigan landscape, where wildlife, jobs, and ways of life are vanishing. "American Salvage" is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century.

In the title story of "Walk Between the Raindrops," a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In "Thirteen Days," passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And "Hyena" begins simply: "That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit--it was there and it came for him.

A collection of twelve short works that portrays contemporary American family life visits morally complex themes in a fractured nation of inhabitants searching for connection and understanding.

The Throwback Special is the story of twenty-two ordinary guys who gather each fall to reenact what ESPN has called the most shocking play in NFL history: the November 1985 play in which Joe Theismann of the Washington Redskins had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants on Monday Night Football. (The play was known by the Redskins as the Throwback Special.) Over the course of a weekend we follow the men as they choose roles;...

A new selection of tales from one of America's favorite storytellers, designed to appeal to young readers. He's a minster of the surprise ending and champion of the underdog. Includes such favorites as "The Ransom of Red Chief", "Gifts of the Magi", "The Furnished Room", "The Guilty Party", and more.

In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bechs Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry...

The more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume.The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader's delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America's favorite storyteller.They are tales in his most mellow, humorous, and ironic moods.They give the full range...