The Apple
by Michel Faber | 
The Fahrenheit Twins
by Michel Faber | 
The Courage Consort
by Michel Faber | 
Sixty Stories
by Donald Barthelme | 
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
by David Foster Wallace | 
Dear Life
by Alice Munro | 
Selected Stories
by Alice Munro | 
Forty Stories
by Donald Barthelme | 
The Collected Stories
by Amy Hempel | 
An Actor's Life
by Duncan Whitehead | 
Short Cuts
by Raymond Carver | 
The Night In Question
by Tobias Wolff | 
City Solipsism: A Short Story
by Zack Love | 
The Complete Stories
by Bernard Malamud | 
One Arm and Other Stories
by Tennessee Williams | 
Girl With Curious Hair
by David Foster Wallace | 
The Shell Collector
by Anthony Doerr | 
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
by Denis Johnson | 
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
by Tobias Wolff | 
The Collected Stories
by Grace Paley |
Michel Faber's short stories are markedly diverse-the voice of each is so distinct that the book reads like an anthology of different writers. But Faber's radically inventive style fastens all fifteen stories into a compelling collection deserving of the high praise it garnered in the United Kingdom. One surreal story, "Fish," projects a futuristic world populated with fish swimming in the air. As sharks hover in abandoned corners and human zealots of the Church of the Armageddon loose their fanaticism on the innocent, it's a mother's full-time job to protect her young daughter. The title story, "Some Rain Must Fall," tells of a substitute schoolteacher called on in a crisis, and as she encourages her pupils to express their feelings, we learn the source of the class's trouble: a devastating act that resonates with contemporary America. As Garth Morris wrote in the Mail on Sunday (London), "these are well-crafted pieces of quiet forlorn intensity in a very real world."