In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of nearly sixty tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers.

"In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway- Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was...

"With wry humor and penetrating satire, Flatland takes us on a mind-expanding journey into a different world to give us a new vision of our own. A. Square, the slightly befuddled narrator, is born into a place limited to two dimensions -- irrevocably flat -- and peopled by a hierarchy of geometrical forms. In a Gulliver-like tour of his bizarre homeland, A. Square spins a fascinating tale of domestic drama and political turmoil, from sex among consenting...

"In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people's private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation...

"Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a lapidary memoir. Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in...

A collection of poems arranged in such categories as "Mystery," "Animals," "Childhood," "War," and "Love."

Discusses the lives of African Americans from the early years of the nineteenth century to the start of the Civil War.

"Wes Moore's remarkable bestseller The Other Wes Moore ends when Wes completes his journey from a fatherless delinquent to college graduate and heads off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. But what happens next? Next, he had to figure out the answer to the question: What is your work? More than finding a job, he had to find the work he was meant to do. For the next decade, Wes traced a path through some of the most fascinating and high-pressure workspaces...

A chronicle of Washington's last fifteen years reviews his accomplishments and explains how he gained strong political influence.