Kellie Wells is a writer of startling imagination whose "phantasmal stories," Booklist says, "shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy." God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, Wells's second collection of short stories and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, is populated with the world's castoffs, cranks, and inveterate oddballs, the deeply aggrieved, the ontologically challenged, the misunderstood mopes that haunt the shadowy wings of the world?s main stage. Here you will find a teacup-sized aerialist who tries to ingest the world's considerable suffering; a lonely god growing ever lonelier as the Afterlife swells with monkeys and other improbable occupants; a father fluent in the language of the Dead who has difficulty communicating with his living son; and Death himself, a moony adolescent with a tender heart and a lack of ambition. God-haunted and apocalyptic, comic and formally inventive, these stories give lyrical voice to the indomitability of the everyday underdog, and they will continue to resonate long after the last word has been read.

These prizewinning stories champion the everyday person who tries to do his or her best in demanding and even demeaning situations. The stories in A Common Person and Other Stories, R. M. Kinder’s third short-story collection and the winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, expose the disruption in our modern life and the ever-present threat of violence, and, most importantly, they capture the real heroism of everyday people. The characters in these stories, most set deep in the middle of America, seem to invite trouble through their concern for others: a neighbor’s mistreated dog, a boy standing up to a bully, a woman who faces cancer and the loss of love. Kinder’s characters struggle with conflicts common to us all—to treat humans and animals with compassion, to open minds and hearts to diversity, all while balancing the welfare of the individual and the larger community. The characters aren’t always loveable, but they have their moments of grace—they accept responsibility and take stands. These stories, by turns humorous, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life as their characters perform acts of defiance, determination, and connection. The memorable characters in A Common Person and Other Stories are, like us, doing the best they can, and that is often remarkable and admirable. Considered closely, Kinder shows us, no person is common.

Down Along the Piney is John Mort’s fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.

Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as they offer answers.

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