Nine richly varied, often funny, always moving stories that reveal the complex workings of the human heart. Bill Roorbach conjures vivid characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary. He first made his mark as the winner of an O. Henry Prize for the title story of Big Bend, his first collection, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His new collection, The Girl of the Lake, captures a virtuoso in his prime. Roorbach's characters are unforgettable: among them an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past. These moving and funny stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and memorable as Bill Roorbach's novels. He has been called "a kinder, gentler John Irving... a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style" (the Washington Post), and his work has been described as "hilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wise" (Parade magazine), all of which is evident in spades (and also hearts, clubs, and diamonds) in every story in this arresting new collection. Bill Roorbach is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling Life Among Giants and The Remedy for Love. His work has been published in Harper's, the Atlantic, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and many other publications, and has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. For more, see www.billroorbach.com. From "The Fall" How's your pack?" Jean called forward. "Heavy," Timothy said. He could say just the one word heavy in such an ironic way that it meant everything about the little argument they'd had last night and the bigger one this morning, and about all her complaining, and yet how good she suddenly felt, even climbing up the big rocks here. Looming in the woods above them was a gargantuan boulder, yellow where all the rock around them was gray, a glacial erratic, Jean knew from a half-forgotten geology class, a mammoth presence, dragged by the ancient glacier all the way from Vermont, likely, cracked magnificently along the way, fallen into two pieces you wanted to push back together. "That is a glacial erratic," Jean called forward. Timothy said nothing, hiked on, though she knew he had heard her by the brief and infinitesimal tightening of his neck. Well, altogether she had preferred art history in any case: Bonnard, Kandinsky, Cézanne, Max Planck, Otto someone, Courbet, Delacroix, Manet: why were they all men? Someone had complained and Professor Della Sesso had agreed, stopped his own class, rewritten his own syllabus in front of them, come back the next week with slides from Käthe Kolwitz, Vanessa Bell, Suzanne Valadon, Mary Cassatt, Romaine Brooks, Natalia Goncharova. He'd stopped the class! Of course it was all planned, to make his point, a great point about the place of women not so much in art but in art history. He was a beautiful man. Jean missed her college days. Her publishing job was basically secretarial, second assistant to the curator of the image bank at Time Warner. At least it was about art. They stopped a little higher, sat on a kind of wide shelf of cool, dry granite, pulled the top layer out of Jean's pack, ate a lunch of chicken roll-ups she'd made this morning, two carrots each (Timothy had peeled them unnecessarily, making fun of Uncle Bud's garden-its very existence when there were grocery stores), and then two big pieces of the carrot cake she'd made for Uncle Bud-carrots were the theme-a quart of water between them (which would be altogether nearly three pounds less for her to carry). "Here's to Drunkel Bud," Timothy said.