"In the title story of 'Walk Between the Raindrops,' a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In 'Thirteen Days,' passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And 'Hyena' begins simply: 'That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit -- it was there and it came for him.' A virtuoso of the short...

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, the protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man.

Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures (some famous, some infamous, some unknown) associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR from 1900-1968.

"Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a 'room salon', an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roomate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds...

When Jennifer Scott arrived at the doorstep of a grand Sixteenth Arrondissement apartment as a foreign exchange student, she was greeted by the woman who would become her mentor and the inspiration for the way she lived long after her time abroad was over. Madame Chic took the casual California teenager under her wing, revealing the secrets of how to French elevate the little things in life to the art of living. Lessons from Madame Chic is the essential...

Step into George Singleton's world and see why he is earning a reputation as one of the funniest, wisest, and most surprising Southern writers of his generation.

Text and photographs present the traditions and the annual celebration of the charro, the Mexican cowboy.