"Investors who feel like they have what it takes to trade . . . should read Pit Bull." —The Wall Street JournalWelcome to the world of Martin "Buzzy" Schwartz, Champion Trader—the man whose nerves of steel and killer instinct in the canyons of Wall Street earned him the well-deserved name "Pit Bull." This is the true story of how Schwartz became the best of the best, of the people and places he discovered along the way, and of the trader''s tricks and techniques he used to make his millions."The most entertaining and insightful look at Wall Street since Liar''s Poker." —Paul Tudor Jones II, founder, Tudor Investment Corporation and the Robin Hood Foundation"An archetypal text, true to life on the Street, destined to be discussed over drinks at trader hangouts after the market closes." —Kirkus Reviews"Hilarious and eye-opening . . . Pit Bull tells the real deal about life on Wall Street—and how you make money there." —Martin Zweig, author of Martin Zweig''s Winning on Wall Street

Now in paperback, an irresistible gift for dog lovers: poems from the dogs'' point of view, written by the well known writers and poets who love them.List of contributors:Edward Albee,  Jennifer Allen,  Danny Anderson,  Lynda Barry,  Rick Bass,  Charles Baxter,  Robert Benson,  Roy Blount, Jr., Ron Carlson,  Jill Ciment,  Bernard Cooper,  Stephen Dobyns,   Mark Doty,   Stephen Dunn,   Anderson Ferrell,  Amy Gerstler, Matthew Graham,   Ron Hansen,   Brooks Haxton,   Cynthia Heimel,   Amy Hempel,   Noy Hollan,   Andrew Hudgins,   John Irving, Denis Johnson,  R.S. Jones,   Walter Kirn,  Sheila Kohler,   Maxine Kumin,  Natalie Kusz,  Anne Lamott,   Gordon Lish,  Ralph Lombreglia, Merrill Markoe,  Pearson Marx,  Erin McGraw,  Heather McHugh,   Arthur Miller,  George Minot,  Susan Minot,   Honor Moore, Mary Morris,  Alicia Muñoz,  Elise Paschen,  Padgett Powell,  Wyatt Prunty,  Lawrence Raab,  Mark Richard,   John Rybicki, Jeanne Schinto,  Bob Shacochis,  Jim Shepard,   Karen Shepard,  Lee Smith,  Ben Sonnenberg,  Kate Clark Spencer,  Gerald Stern,Terese Svoboda,  William Tester,  Abigail Thomas,  Lily Tuck,  Sidney Wade,  Kathryn Walker,  William WegmanFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

One of The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year “Amy Hempel’s dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim” (San Francisco Chronicle) and this celebrated volume gathers together her complete work—four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. For readers who have known Hempel's work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it.

A must-have for the fans of the #1 bestselling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris, a collection of his favorite short fiction from Flannery O''Connor to Tobias Wolff.David Sedaris is an exceptional reader. Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves. David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic. Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.

One of The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year “Amy Hempel’s dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim” (San Francisco Chronicle) and this celebrated volume gathers together her complete work—four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. For readers who have known Hempel''s work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it.

Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.

Amy Hempel''s compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel''s fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life.In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce.These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal). Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences. Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is an “exquisite collection” (The Wall Street Journal) and a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

L.A. Theatre Works presents Five Short Stories by Women: A quintet of tales from some of America's most distinguished female authors.Life after High School, by Joyce Carol Oates, Read by Sarah DrewOates takes us to a time in the late 1950s, to South Lebanon High School, and shows us the lives of three people at a time of self-discovery.The Banks of the Vistula, by Rebecca Lee, Read by Emily BerglAn ambitious student wants desperately to make her mark in a linguistics class. Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill A(c)2013.Never Marry a Mexican, by Sandra Cisneros, Read by Rita MorenoThe story of a woman named Clemencia who remembers her family, her parent's culture, and her affair with a married man.* In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, by Amy Hempel, Read by Lynn CollinsWhat do you say to someone on their deathbed? Amy Hempel addresses this question head-on, as a young woman describes her visit to a dying friend.Once Upon a Time, by Nadine Gordimer, Read by Alex KingstonThis is anything but a fairy tale. It's more of a dystopian fantasy - with overtones of the racial inequality in Gordimer's native South Africa.*From WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK. Copyright A(c) 1991 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Vintage Books and by Vintage Espanol as EL ARROYO DE LA LLORONA, translation, A(c) 1996 by Liliana Valenzuela. Available on Random House Audiobook read by the author. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City and Lamy, N.M. All rights reserved.Mixing Engineer: Mark Holden for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

A quietly powerful presence in American fiction in during the past two decades, these collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart neurotic somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal). Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences. Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is an “exquisite collection” (The Wall Street Journal) and a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

Amy Hempel ist die Meisterin der Kurzform. In ihren Short Stories geht sie unsere geheimen Ängste und Wünsche an, beschwört unsere Menschlichkeit und verpflichtet uns zu Leidenschaft. Hempels Charaktere sind greifbar und lebendig, immer unvergesslich, mit gebrochenen Herzen und von Trauer verfolgt. Genau wie sie schrecken auch wir vor der Wahrheit zurück, flüchten uns in bequeme und fiktive Ausschmückungen, um ihre Gefahren zu vermeiden. Doch Amy Hempels Geschichten ermöglichen es, die Wahrheit zu überleben, für sie und von ihr zu singen. Das Geheimnis liegt in der Qualität des Liedes.

"Investors who feel like they have what it takes to trade . . . should read Pit Bull." —The Wall Street JournalWelcome to the world of Martin "Buzzy" Schwartz, Champion Trader—the man whose nerves of steel and killer instinct in the canyons of Wall Street earned him the well-deserved name "Pit Bull." This is the true story of how Schwartz became the best of the best, of the people and places he discovered along the way, and of the trader''s tricks and techniques he used to make his millions."The most entertaining and insightful look at Wall Street since Liar''s Poker." —Paul Tudor Jones II, founder, Tudor Investment Corporation and the Robin Hood Foundation"An archetypal text, true to life on the Street, destined to be discussed over drinks at trader hangouts after the market closes." —Kirkus Reviews"Hilarious and eye-opening . . . Pit Bull tells the real deal about life on Wall Street—and how you make money there." —Martin Zweig, author of Martin Zweig''s Winning on Wall Street

Now in paperback, an irresistible gift for dog lovers: poems from the dogs'' point of view, written by the well known writers and poets who love them.List of contributors:Edward Albee,  Jennifer Allen,  Danny Anderson,  Lynda Barry,  Rick Bass,  Charles Baxter,  Robert Benson,  Roy Blount, Jr., Ron Carlson,  Jill Ciment,  Bernard Cooper,  Stephen Dobyns,   Mark Doty,   Stephen Dunn,   Anderson Ferrell,  Amy Gerstler, Matthew Graham,   Ron Hansen,   Brooks Haxton,   Cynthia Heimel,   Amy Hempel,   Noy Hollan,   Andrew Hudgins,   John Irving, Denis Johnson,  R.S. Jones,   Walter Kirn,  Sheila Kohler,   Maxine Kumin,  Natalie Kusz,  Anne Lamott,   Gordon Lish,  Ralph Lombreglia, Merrill Markoe,  Pearson Marx,  Erin McGraw,  Heather McHugh,   Arthur Miller,  George Minot,  Susan Minot,   Honor Moore, Mary Morris,  Alicia Muñoz,  Elise Paschen,  Padgett Powell,  Wyatt Prunty,  Lawrence Raab,  Mark Richard,   John Rybicki, Jeanne Schinto,  Bob Shacochis,  Jim Shepard,   Karen Shepard,  Lee Smith,  Ben Sonnenberg,  Kate Clark Spencer,  Gerald Stern,Terese Svoboda,  William Tester,  Abigail Thomas,  Lily Tuck,  Sidney Wade,  Kathryn Walker,  William WegmanFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

One of The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year “Amy Hempel’s dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim” (San Francisco Chronicle) and this celebrated volume gathers together her complete work—four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. For readers who have known Hempel's work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it.

A must-have for the fans of the #1 bestselling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris, a collection of his favorite short fiction from Flannery O''Connor to Tobias Wolff.David Sedaris is an exceptional reader. Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves. David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic. Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.

One of The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year “Amy Hempel’s dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim” (San Francisco Chronicle) and this celebrated volume gathers together her complete work—four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. For readers who have known Hempel''s work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it.

Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.

Amy Hempel''s compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel''s fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life.In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce.These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal). Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences. Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is an “exquisite collection” (The Wall Street Journal) and a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

L.A. Theatre Works presents Five Short Stories by Women: A quintet of tales from some of America's most distinguished female authors.Life after High School, by Joyce Carol Oates, Read by Sarah DrewOates takes us to a time in the late 1950s, to South Lebanon High School, and shows us the lives of three people at a time of self-discovery.The Banks of the Vistula, by Rebecca Lee, Read by Emily BerglAn ambitious student wants desperately to make her mark in a linguistics class. Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill A(c)2013.Never Marry a Mexican, by Sandra Cisneros, Read by Rita MorenoThe story of a woman named Clemencia who remembers her family, her parent's culture, and her affair with a married man.* In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, by Amy Hempel, Read by Lynn CollinsWhat do you say to someone on their deathbed? Amy Hempel addresses this question head-on, as a young woman describes her visit to a dying friend.Once Upon a Time, by Nadine Gordimer, Read by Alex KingstonThis is anything but a fairy tale. It's more of a dystopian fantasy - with overtones of the racial inequality in Gordimer's native South Africa.*From WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK. Copyright A(c) 1991 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Vintage Books and by Vintage Espanol as EL ARROYO DE LA LLORONA, translation, A(c) 1996 by Liliana Valenzuela. Available on Random House Audiobook read by the author. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City and Lamy, N.M. All rights reserved.Mixing Engineer: Mark Holden for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

A quietly powerful presence in American fiction in during the past two decades, these collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart neurotic somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal). Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences. Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is an “exquisite collection” (The Wall Street Journal) and a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

Amy Hempel ist die Meisterin der Kurzform. In ihren Short Stories geht sie unsere geheimen Ängste und Wünsche an, beschwört unsere Menschlichkeit und verpflichtet uns zu Leidenschaft. Hempels Charaktere sind greifbar und lebendig, immer unvergesslich, mit gebrochenen Herzen und von Trauer verfolgt. Genau wie sie schrecken auch wir vor der Wahrheit zurück, flüchten uns in bequeme und fiktive Ausschmückungen, um ihre Gefahren zu vermeiden. Doch Amy Hempels Geschichten ermöglichen es, die Wahrheit zu überleben, für sie und von ihr zu singen. Das Geheimnis liegt in der Qualität des Liedes.