Nikolai asks his animal friends to help him answer three important questions: "When is the best time to do things?" "Who is the most important?" and "What is the right thing to do?"

Culling the vastness of experience-from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average-like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead...

In early twentieth-century Vermont, orphaned, eleven-year-old Pollyanna comes to live with her austere and wealthy Aunt Polly, and uses her philosophy of gladness to bring happiness to her aunt and other unhappy members of the community.

Selfish and lazy, Nils learns kindness and wisdom after he is bewitched into an elf-sized boy and carried off by a barnyard goose to join the migration of wild geese across Sweden to Lapland.

Meet Holly, the sunny twenty-nine-year-old owner of Girl Meets Boy, a dating service for those who are "beautiful inside and out." Though she's a successfulmatchmaker, she hasn't quite fulfilled her own relationship dreams (her ex-fiancé, Nick, seems unlikely to progress from his job as Mr. Elephant, children's party entertainer). So when her friends dare her to pick a man off the top of the pile, she's game. But in one awful evening, the seemingly...

While visiting the small town of Yonwood, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Nickie makes some decisions about how to identify both good and evil when she witnesses the townspeople's reactions to the apocalyptic visions of one of their neighbors.

After his mother buys him all the stuffed animals he wants, a boy discovers what he truly wants.

In Shane, Schaefer executes a perfect Western narrative while exploring the overarching themes of virtue, the human condition, and a man's search for self.

When five-year-old Madison drops her mother's expensive camera on the floor she is afraid to tell the truth about what happened, but she soon discovers that lying only makes her feel worse.

"Laura, a brilliant student and promising scholar, escapes from her small town, working class background to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield scholarship to Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her schoolwork, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among the anointed "best and brightest" of her generation. Years later, back in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in Henry James studies, she...