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Inspired by the teachings of Buddha, the 42 contemporary short stories in Buddha in a Teacup will inspire and entertain modern-day readers, non-Buddhists and Buddhists alike. Each tale presents a key moment in the human comedy when people are presented with opportunities to move beyond fear and doubt into healthier and more meaningful relationships with themselves and each other.

Most of the nine stories in Last Known Position were written upon James Mathews' return from combat deployment to the Middle East with the D.C. Air National Guard. Life under fire provided the author with both dramatic events and a heightened sense of observation, allowing him to suggest the stress of combat as the driving factor behind extreme yet believable characterization and action.

In the nine stories of Let's Do, various calamities strike ordinary Midwesterners, who cope with a mixture of good intentions and ineptitude. Balancing humor with painful clarity, author Rebecca Meacham pulls listeners into the lives of characters who struggle with and more often against - change.

Little America is for anyone who has ever considered just getting in the car and driving away. Here the ribbon of Western road is a metaphor for the heart's strange longings, providing hard, sometimes hilarious, lessons on the improbability of escape, the possibility of salvation, and the elusiveness of self-knowledge.

This extraordinary first collection of short stories covers the landscape of dysfunctional childhood, urban angst, and human disconnection with a wit and insight that keep you riveted. The characters here have rich and imaginative interior lives, but grave difficulty relating to the outside world.

Matt Debenham's stories are for people who think they don't like short stories. These stories don't leave off in mid-breath; instead, they feature characters who seem to live on even after their closing pages. The humor in The Book of Right and Wrong makes the jarring moments that much more jarring, and the tender moments that much more tender. At once heartbreaking and hilarious, the 11 stories in The Book of Right and Wrong capture their characters at the defining moments of their lives.

The stories in Things Kept, Things Left Behind explore the ambiguities of kept secrets, the tangles of abandoned pasts, and uneasy accommodations. Jim Tomlinson's characters each face the desire to reclaim dreams left behind, along with something of the dreamer that was also lost.

In Ann Harleman's remarkable debut collection, men and women of extraordinary passions look for and sometimes find the hidden heart of ordinary life. Testing themselves and each other, they search for ways to connect. Harleman combines a clear eye with a generous heart, revealing her characters - misguided, selfish, loving, brave - through a compassionate, often humorous probing of their inner and outer worlds.

Largely set in the South, the 11 stories of Body Language guide us into the hidden worlds of the culture wars. The people in these stories belong to the fringes of society, struggling for an identity and a place to belong.

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call...love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories. Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can - and often do - fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees.

Powerful and haunting, the 10 stories in this debut collection conjure a world where dreams and reality merge, often with dangerous consequences. Michael Hyde explores the relationships between illusion and reality, delusion and clarity, as his characters come to realize that the revelations they wholeheartedly pursue are often not the ones that await them and will move them. A teenage girl obsessed with the death of a classmate hopes to become the killer's next victim, a wayward graveyard attendant punishes the dead for his punishments in life, and a ghostly vision in a garden shed offers a catalyst for one woman's change.

Molly McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment. We meet McNett's endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.

Geoff Schmidt's debut collection, Out of Time, is a meditation on meaning and mortality, and the ways that story and the imagined life can sustain us. In these stories, vengeful infants destroy and rebuild the world, rivalrous siblings and their mother encounter witches and ghosts and the possessed, Barack Obama and Keith Richards smoke their last cigarettes, men and women with cancer variously don gorilla suits or experience all time simultaneously.