From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of 15 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 highly regarded among writers, reviewers and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her COLLECTED STORIES published more than a decade ago, is a literary event.

These 15 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.

Audiobook available, read by Amy Hempel