Fans of #longreads may already be aware of Byliner, a site that spotlights “great reads by great writers” and sells lengthy original essays by the likes of Mark Bittman and Ann Patchett as one-off, $1-4 downloads. As Jacket Copy reports, Byliner will expand into fiction beginning Monday — and they’ve snagged quite a coup for their first release. Amy Tan will publish her first new story in six years on the site. Called “Rules for Virgins,” the tale is set in 1912 Shanghai and comprises the increasingly personal guidelines an aging courtesan named Magic Gourd gives to her protégée, Violet. You can pre-order the story as an Amazon Kindle Single, but since it won’t be available for download until Monday anyway, we say wait a few days and use your $3 to support Byliner’s new fiction initiative.

If you’re like us, Rae Bryant‘s skin-crawling (make that gnawing) story “Intolerable Impositions” will make you simultaneously laugh and cringe at the squeamish awkwardness of one-night stand intimacies — and the sacrifices we’re willing to make to avoid them. Set to be included in her upcoming short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, from Brooklyn indie publishers Patasola Press, this witty piece of flash fiction is at once strangely fantastical and familiar. Click through to check it out.

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Genius satirist George Saunders is by no means new to awards. With both the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Fellowships under his belt, it comes as no surprise that Saunders’ short story, “Victory Lap,” which is about the kidnapping of a teenage girl, grabbed a nod for ASME’s 2010 National Magazine Awards in its fiction category yesterday. Originally published in The New Yorker on October 5th, 2009, the story toys with perspective, channeling the voices of three distinctive characters.

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After collecting data from 13,000 bookstores, websites and non-traditional book-selling stores, the Daily Beast has rounded up the top reads within 16 U.S. cities. While fiction picks seemed to waver between Dan Brown, Kathryn Stockett, James Patterson and John Grisham, the non-fiction reads offered some surprises. Why are Red Socks-centric Bostonites loving Joe Torre’s The Yankee Years? Who knew funny man Steve Harvey’s relationship advice book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man would be taken so seriously? And yes, we’re also extremely irritated with Houston, Cleveland, and Seattle (?!) — all spots where Going Rogue was number 1.

See how your city’s non-fiction picks fared after the jump.

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John Banville mixes mythology and mathematics in The Infinities, the first novel published under his own name since he won the Booker Prize in 2005.

The Infinities chronicles half-hearted memories, dreams, and fears at the deathbed of mathematician/physicist Adam Godley, whose struggling family and a few matter-of-fact Greek gods have come to attend his passing — and fulfill desires of their own. Set in the Irish countryside of a vaguely alternate universe, the book resembles playwright Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon in story, but takes on an added dimension of grounded surrealism and wit.

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Like Chatroulette, Union Atlantic, Adam Haslett’s new novel, boasts the inevitability of a work mainlined to the zeitgeist. It seems to have been plucked fully formed from the ether; or if not from there, then at least from the airwaves of Fox News. Doug Fanning, the book’s whorl of selfishness, need, and greed, is today’s Gordon Gekko — a VP at Union Atlantic, a bank too big to fail that’s terrifyingly plausible. Haslett, whose first book of short stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was nominated for both the Pulitzer and the Man Booker Prize, isn’t so much interested in detailing the gold of this man’s crowns as he is in the crumbling of the soul behind his smile.

While in the Navy, Fanning read green blips on a radar screen in the Gulf War, clusters of pixels the coordinates of which, if properly interpreted, meant death for the ship, threat, plane, or people they represented. In civilian life, Fanning makes a killing reading similarly abstract numbers on a screen that mean, somewhere, dollars, yen, billions, profit, or loss. Read More »

Peter Akinti’s harrowing debut novel shines an unflinching light on the disparity of race and class, focusing on East London’s projects with an activist spirit akin to Richard Wright.

Drawing on his experience growing up in the council estate of Forest Gate, Akinti crafts vivid young characters struggling to define themselves amid the chaos of families and communities entrenched in crime. The grit is tempered with an unlikely love story, affirming the power of the human spirit and signaling the arrival of a major new literary talent.

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Invisible, Paul Auster’s newest and perhaps most accomplished book, is a suspenseful, psychological query on the natures of art and life, good and evil, and truth and memory.

The story begins with Adam Walker, a bright-eyed aspiring poet at Columbia University in 1967, but quickly delves into a four-decade, multi-layered saga full of sexuality, violence, philosophical puzzles, and unpredictable resolutions. Told in three narrative voices — first, second, and third — it’s a daring literary experiment by one of contemporary literature’s most provocative writers.

Read Invisible online, check out an interview with Auster discussing the book in The Huffington Post, explore the definitive website on his life and work, and buy a copy for yourself.

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Joyce Carol Oates is one of those rare literary luminaries whose creative output has matched her critical praise. Sure, her endless catalog of novels, short-story collections, plays, and poetry can come across as a bit daunting, but Oates is really just a storyteller obsessively dedicated to her creative outlet. With the publication of her latest novel, Little Bird of Heaven, the National Book Award winner explores familiar themes of emotional turmoil, violence, and small-town social dynamics. After the jump, Oates chats with us about the importance of a sense of place, balancing different literary genres, and her love of running. Read More »

Lydia Peelle’s debut story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing assembles eight rough-cut narrative gems, of which two have already garnered Pushcart Prizes and one more an O. Henry Short Story Award. Not bad for a fresh voice on the scene. A native of Boston, Peelle now lives in Nashville, the city center of an agrarian swath of Tennessee where most of the tales are based.

Despite comparisons to Faulkner, it would be misleading to assign her characters the expected deep-rooted longing for the “Old South.” A sense of bewilderment, and even depression at the current state of affairs, is palpable, yet the root of the problem lies in the fact that no one — from Jack Welch the taxidermist to Cole, a troubled young man on the road with a traveling fair — can shape any answers to our modern-day predicament. Read More »