Denis Johnson

Presents the story of early twentieth-century day laborer Robert Grainer, who endures the harrowing loss of his family while struggling for survival in the American West against a backdrop of radical historical changes.

"American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers Denis Johnson's now classic story collection chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost...

Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years? absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country?s civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune...

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.