If you like your short stories really short, this collection will appeal to you. The Tent comprises 35 fictional essays, poems, and reworkings of myths, some little more than a page long, with Atwood's inimitably dry, witty writing accompanied by her fantastical line drawings.

-LCD

Sitting down to read this entire collection is like deciding to make it through a bottle of top-shelf vodka, shot by shot. Repeated doses of Lydia Davis' distilled and bracing prose will make your head spin, as she extracts pathos out of extreme concision. While this collection may be devastating when consumed whole, each taut tale is likely to clear your head rather than cloud it.

-TW

Colombia, Haiti, Burma, Sierra Leone: places like this are usually the setting for war reportage rather than fiction. Yet Fountain's stories of Americans — idealistic or ignorant, engaged or aloof — in countries the State Department would rather you not be in, are straightforward in the telling but quietly explosive in their effect.

-CPL

In eight short stories and a novella, Henríquez guides the reader through the heat, poverty, and lust of youth in gritty, contemporary Panama. Working in fast-food restaurants or empty strip malls, the young women in these stories come of age as fathers walk out, siblings disband, and lovers edge into and out of the haze.

-EMM

Trailing prostitutes in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a father and son fishing on a green Russian sea, and a 5th Avenue runaway, Van Booy spins a collection of taut short stories in which the characters struggle with love and abandonment.

-EMM