200 pages.

Featuring works selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2013 and Best American Essays 2013

Here we present “Expats,” a selection of new work by authors with deep roots in California, who have now made their homes elsewhere. We offer poetry from John Freeman, and essays from Luis Alberto Urrea (on the cruddy job that made him a writer—warning: you might never eat another donut again), Edie Meidav (navigating modern Cuba, with family in tow and a slippery landlord lurking about) and Dagoberto Gilb, whose meditation on his “first fiction-writer role model”—a larger-than-life, debauched man named Ripley—was selected for Best American Essays.

Plus these stories:

• Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “Horned Men”—selected for Best American Short Stories. Here, a father engages in unsettling surveillance of his adolescent daughter in the midst of the mortgage meltdown.
• Gilad Elbom’s “Animals and Allegories”—an Israeli brother and sister getting by on vinyl records and training for a swim competition
• Tatjana Soli’s “Pinkville”—a retelling of the My Lai massacre
• Colombian author Tomas Gonzalez’s “Victor Comes Back”—a haunted man is killing time at a gloomy boardwalk before his flight home (translated by PEN award-winner Joel Streicker)
• Jane Gillette’s “Atlas Shrugging”—a tale of the mysterious appeal of Ayn Rand, and the puzzling relationship between a newly rich Russian man and an elegant older woman from the States
• And the fiction debut of Brian Boies, with his affecting story of lost souls on a day trip away from the Mission District.

Poetry from Jesse Nathan, Judy Halebsky, Darin Ciccotelli, Wendy Willis, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Brendan Constantine, Kathlene Postma, Dan O’Brien, Ryan Ragan, and John Olivares Espinoza. And featuring a stunning portfolio from acclaimed photographer Lucas Foglia: “Frontcountry,” his pictorial series on the struggling mining, farming and ranching communities of the western United States.