In World Gone Missing, Laurie Ann Doyles powerful short story debut collection, people have disappeared. Set in and around San Francisco, these twelve stories weave contemporary issues--divorce, sexual identity, homelessness--through a cast of memorable characters struggling to fill the void of a missing loved one. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who didnt come home one night to the successful businesswoman increasingly obsessed with a high school friend she hasnt seen in decades to the middle-aged clerk meeting her sons birth-mother for the first time, Doyles writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring. Stories in this book have won the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award and been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. Her stories and essays have also been published in The Los Angeles Review, Timber, Jabberwork Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere.