The award-winning stories that make up this linked collection showcase ordinary men and women in and around Rugglesville, Virginia, as they struggle to find places and identities in their families and the community. They experience natural disasters, a sun-worshipping cult, Vietnam flashbacks, kidnapping, addiction, and loss. The book's opening story, "Flood, 1978," follows Hank, who comes to understand his father's deep sense of grief over the death of his wife. Later, in "Hand-painted Angel," Hank's sons see the family spinning apart as their father ages and family secrets are disclosed. In...

"What the Zhang Boys Know has a dozen chapters, each one a vivid short story in itself. Garstang makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The lives of the inhabitants of a condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown are told separately and as part of a web of entanglements. The entrances and exits are handled with the deftness of a French comedy, but the empathy of the author brings all the characters achingly alive. What the Zhang Boys Know is a wonderful and haunting book." - John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

"Travel invigorates and enlightens, and so does reading. You don't have to go to the Congo to gain an understanding of the challenges women face there. You don't have to go to Costa Rica to learn about resentment toward fly-by evangelism. You don't have to go to Iran to sample Persian culture and anguish. When it's done right-as the stories in this anthology are-fiction can transport you and show you the essential details, the soul of a place. A fiction writer is like an archaeologist in that way, digging, brushing away what doesn't belong and revealing what a casual observer-a tourist-might...

In Volume I of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, we discovered that it's a dangerous world. We ran from a herd of wild boar in Germany and a biker gang in New Zealand; we fought cancer in Russia and a rogue militia in central Africa; we survived thieves in Costa Rica and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; and we endured a terrorist attack in Israel and overzealous security guards in Beijing. The twenty stories in that volume took us to all seven continents and introduced us to the fine work of twenty excellent short story writers.

Putting together Volume...