Love Begins in Winter
by Simon Van Booy | 
You Think It, I'll Say It
by Curtis Sittenfeld | 
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
by Kevin Wilson | 
Throw Like A Girl
by Jean Thompson | 
Short Short Stories
by Dave Eggers | 
The Dark Dark
by Samantha Hunt | 
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
by Maile Meloy | 
Half in Love
by Maile Meloy | 
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
by Megan Mayhew Bergman | 
Bark
by Lorrie Moore | 
Voices in the Night
by Steven Millhauser | 
In the Loyal Mountains
by Rick Bass | 
Binocular Vision
by Edith Pearlman | 
The Isle of Youth
by Laura van den Berg | 
Our Story Begins
by Tobias Wolff | 
Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo |
That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo | 
Drown
by Junot Diaz | 
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
by Fredrik Backman | 
Olive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout |
Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from many of his novels. In "Horseman," a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer: "And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward--or not. In "Voice," a semiretired academic is conned by his increasingly estranged brother into coming along on a group tour of the Venice Biennale, fleeing a mortifying incident with a traumatized student back in Massachusetts but encountering further complications in the maze of Venice. And in "Milton and Marcus," a lapsed novelist struggles with his wife's illness and tries to rekindle his screenwriting career, only to be stymied by the pratfalls of that trade when he's called to an aging, iconic star's mountaintop retreat in Wyoming.