When Jean Thompson-America's Alice Munro (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)-is telling stories, You cannot put the book down (The Seattle Times), and her superlative new collection, Do Not Deny Me, is one to be savored, word by word.

* Award-winning storyteller gaining popularity: Jean Thompson's short fiction has been honored by the National endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; Who Do You Love: Stories was a National Book Award finalist for fiction and was promoted by David Sedaris during his own lecture tour; and Throw Like a Girl: Stories was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. The collection is also in its sixth printing, as Thompson's longstanding critical acclaim crosses over into a popular following. Do Not Deny Me is perfectly positioned to gain an even wider audience.

* Do Not Deny Me: Here is a title that demands-and commands-attention in and of itself. Yet Thompson's latest collection is no literary dare, delivering as it does twelve dazzling new stories that together offer, with wit, humor, and razor-sharp perception, a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day. In Thompson's writing, The New York Times Book Review has noted, some of the biggest satisfactions happen line by line, thanks to Thompson's effortless ability to tip her prose into the universal. Thompson succeeds as one of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience (The Boston Globe).