Reply All

A "touching and funny" story collection full of "sympathetic characters who are deeply flawed but just as deeply human" ( Booklist).   Reply All, the third volume of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception.   A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave every day; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chief's words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks he's fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own righteous nobility when it hires a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcasts a not-so-secret affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets.   Humans fool themselves in infinite ways, and these stories illustrate this sad fact in excruciating detail, knowing commiseration, and blushing recognition.   "Laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad and deeply in touch with the profound humanity underneath the increasingly bizarre surface of our culture." —Robert Olen Butler, author of Good Scent from a Strange Mountai