Jess Walter

A collection of the year's best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. New York Times bestselling author, Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

National Book Award Finalist  The breakout novel from a writer of extraordinary talent: In the wake of a devastating terrorist attack, one man struggles to make sense of his world, even as the world tries to make use of him Brian Remy has no idea how he got here. It's been only five days since terrorists attacked his city, and Remy is experiencing gaps in his life-as if he were a stone being skipped across water. He has a self-inflicted gunshot...

The story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 ... and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later, featuring an Italian housekeeper and his long-lost American starlet, the producer who once brought them together, and his assistant. "Beautiful Ruins is a glorious read for book lovers ... Jess Walter has quietly and expertly built a career over six novels that puts him at the forefront of great American writers. Beautiful...

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes--for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous--as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places." -- We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities,...

"We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers. In 'Thief,' a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In 'We...

The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.

From its opening scene—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that

...

In his darkly comic short story collection, the author brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-four interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, yet filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents...

To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the journal called 'a key barometer of the literary climate' by the New York Times and twice honored with a National Magazine Award for fiction, here is The Best of McSweeney's--a comprehensive collection of some of the magazine's most remarkable work. Drawing on the full range of the journal thus far--from the very earliest volumes to the Chris Ware-edited graphic novel issue to the full-on Sunday-newspaper...