From the bestselling author of Fight Club and Diary, a collection of essays and journalistic pieces that prove that real life has imagination beaten cold in the strangeness and wonder departments

Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining...

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding--sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them.

Anders provides six quirky, wry, engaging stories about aliens, humanity, time travel, and family reunions.

"Just when things have finally cooled down for 88-year-old Maud after the disturbing discovery of a dead body in her apartment in Gothenburg, a couple of detectives return to her doorstep, ruining a perfectly good afternoon. Though Maud deftly dodges their questions with the skill of an Olympic gymnast a fifth of her age, she wonders if suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is. The truth is, ever since Maud was a girl, death has seemed...

Nineteen stories on the joys and sorrows of the inhabitants of a small town in New Hampshire. In Yankee Curse, elderly Miranda knits placidly at a town meeting, pondering unspoken invective against an enemy, but stopping short of "a curse she would never levy, not even on Mort Wallace: to live too long."

Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur's formidable debut give voice to the hopes, dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters--adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home--golden fields...

A woman with a magic way of curing children's bad habits tries her hand with a bully, a whisperer, and a slowpoke and formulates cures for a show-off and a crybaby.