Bøger i Iowa Short Fiction Award serien

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. The ten shimmering stories in this collection offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography.

The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams's precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation.

At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Big things happen in this collection. But it's also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.

The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.

The characters in No Use Pretending have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable, and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering. This collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist "weird fiction" to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals, inviting readers to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare.