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 readers into the lives of characters who struggle with--and more often against--change.

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2009
Inside Tim Johnston's "Irish Girl" (winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction) readers will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark and often darkly funny these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the reader who just loves a great story."

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2010.
The title, "A Bright Soothing Noise, "refers to the sound that fire makes, promising not only warmth and light but also violence and destruction. Brown s greatest hero is Frank O Connor, and like O Connor s his stories uncover the final bleakness of a national life but in the same moment glow with its promise of love and life and belonging. Brown s Americans will try almost anything to connect. They tend to drink too much, to drive too fast, are a little too violent in their passions and even a little too religious. Too...

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2011.
A sweet slipstream stew, a call and response to Hemingway s "In Our Time," 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...

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2012.The short stories in this rich debut collection embody in their complexity Alice Munro s description of the short story as a world seen in a quick, glancing light. In chiseled and elegant prose, Lieberman conjures wildly disparate worlds.A middle aged window washer, mourning his wife and an estranged daughter, begins to grow attached to a young woman he sees through the glass; a writer, against his better judgment, pursues a new relationship with a femme fatale who years ago broke his heart; and the daughter of a Holocaust...