Cynthia Ozick is one of America's literary treasures. For her sixth novel, she set herself a brilliant challenge: to retell the story of Henry James's The Ambassadors—the work he considered his best—but as a photographic negative, that is the plot is the same, the meaning is reversed. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother's family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help.

In her first collection of short stories, Mariko Nagai weaves together ten tales of rural survival in a world ravaged by famine, war, and religious conflict. Largely inspired by Japanese folk tales and history, and yet timeless, these stories depict humanity's limits faced with imprisonment, tests of faith, sexual coercion, and abandonment of family. The title story, named for a pastoral form of poetry, centers around a village of women—all but one of the men having already departed and died in war—plunged into starvation, and the dark choices the survivors must make. Yet Nagai's tales are timeless and universal in their depiction of the human spirit's endurance in the face of extremes in human conflict and rural life. Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Jonis Agee.

From the author of Seven Loves comes this austere, passionately shaped collection of stories that courageously explores the dynamic nature of modern marriage, the life-shattering heartbreak that often accompanies its collapse, and the fickle way in which the boundaries between us can be broken, erased, and newly defined. Trueblood unites past and present through her characters' complex personalities as she skillfully unravels their tumultuous relationships, giving readers a glimpse into marital circumstances that, though often tragic, will surely ring familiar.

Hazel Latour and 12-year-old Stella live on a small farm, on a reservation run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Their daily lives are disrupted when, one Easter Sunday, a glorious white turkey makes her home in their chicken coop. Stella sees this as a good omen, believing the turkey to be holy, but Hazel insists it's just a dumb bird and is unafraid of arousing the ire of the head of the tribal leasing office, George Wanbli, a medicine man who she sees as a rival. Clients flock to Hazel, the bird bringing prosperity, but word gets out about the turkey, provoking Wanbli's jealousy. He attempts to crucify the bird and slaughter her chicks, but they miraculously return to life. The author weaves a charming, plainspoken tale of two people who have only each other until a bird gives them the courage to battle the forces of corruption and evil.

Frances Washburn is also the author of Elsie's Business, a modern retelling of the Lakota Deer Woman story. She grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and received her degrees at the University of Mexico. She is currently a professor of Indian studies at the University of Arizona.

Please Come Back To Me, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, is another remarkable collection by an author the New York Times has called "a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth."

On the surface, Jessica Treadway's stories offer realistic portrayals of people in situations that make them question their roles as family members, their ability to do the right thing, and even their sanity. But Treadway's psychic landscapes are tinged with a sense of the surreal, inviting readers to recognize—as her characters do—that very little is actually as it seems.

When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters' drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Subtle, wry, and unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.

Katherine is 17, living alone in the beautiful, desolate landscape of southern Arizona. Her mother is feckless, her father busy with his new family. Meeting Son, the scion of a local rancher, seems like deliverance. They marry and live as a family in his parents' venerable adobe house, but it soon becomes clear that Son is a man who, as his father says, has a "young heart near withered beneath the breastbone." Katherine must find her own way during a dangerous months-long drought, when everything seems to be disintegrating around her. Susan Froderberg's incantatory language—and her deep knowledge of both the complexities of a small, deeply-rooted place and the human heart—make Old Border Road soar.

This meticulously researched novel, a fictionalized account of the 1998 kidnapping of driller Edward Leonard by Colombian guerrillas, guides readers deep into the physical and political terrain of a beautiful but dangerous country that remains off-limits to the casual traveller. At once a suspense thriller and an engrossing work of journalism, Butterflies in Bucaramanga is a story of a man who gets caught in the collision between Western corporate imperatives and revolutionary politics—and whose unlikely obsession with the beautiful blue Morpho butterfly proves key to his survival.