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Any Deadly Thing
By Roy Kesey. 2013
Following the critical success of his debut collection, All Over, and of his debut novel, Pacazo, Roy Kesey now brings…
us a new gathering of short stories, Any Deadly Thing. These stories first appeared in magazines including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and American Short Fiction, and have been widely anthologized; among them are winners of a Pushcart Prize special mention, an Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize in Fiction. With story locales ranging across the Americas to Europe and Asia, Kesey once again makes the full strange world his stage. "Perfect, masterful portraits of an international cross-section of wise, broken souls--hopeful, brutal, funny as hell, and heart-crushing, every last one." -Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much "Roy Kesey is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and Any Deadly Thing is another triumph. These stories, reminiscent of William Gass in the remarkable way they combine a virtuoso playfulness and wit with an atmosphere of grimness and grief and heartbreak, range the world over for their brilliantly realized locales, but they share a deeper setting in what Gass calls 'the only holiness we have,' human consciousness. Kesey demonstrates once again that he is a spectacularly deft and empathetic priest of that creed, which is the only one for me." -Michael Griffith, author of TrophySince its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about…
the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences.Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries.Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.Cuentos invisibles
By Pedro Sorela. 2002
Pedro Sorela emprende en estas páginas su viaje más largo: la distancia que separa un cuento de su historia. Estos…
cuentos son invisibles porque invisible es el lenguaje de la literatura, que no se puede filmar. También porque tratan de viajes, y el viaje es lo que se encuentra detrás de los ojos, no delante, y -al igual que la literatura- hace posible que de nuestra visión del mundo hagamos una creación. De una represa de aguas milenarias en la cima de los Andes a un motín de blancos en un río chino, de una persecución en Londres al renacimiento de un pobre tipo en Estambul, de una reunión de extravagantes en Helsinki a un Berlín improbable y sin embargo histórico, de un Madrid inédito a un Buenos Aires francés, los cuentos de Pedro Sorela ponen en evidencia el lado mentiroso de los pasaportes. Con humor y un idioma afilado, estos cuentos amplían el arco de una obra definida por la originalidad de la mirada y la sugerencia inherente a su doble condición de literatura y viaje. Reseñas:«Una experiencia humana intensa [...] un periplo abarcador de la existencia humana en el que entran componentes culturales, morales y hasta políticos, éstos no explícitos pero sí intencionados».Santos Sans Villaneva, El Cultural «Los relatos de Sorela prueban que ha viajado lo bastante para, como hubiera dicho Valle-Inclán, no ser arrogante cuando bien podría serlo».Víctor Andresco, El PaísThe Henry Miller Reader (Essay Index Reprint Ser.)
By Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell. 1969
A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence…
Durrell. In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller’s contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller’s life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that Miller’s final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern." Earlier, H. L. Mencken had said, "his is one of the most beautiful prose styles today," and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that "what makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions." Included are stories, "portraits" of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is supplemented by a chronology from Miller’s birth in 1891 up to the spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a part of which appears in this volume.The Greatest Show: Stories (YSF Contacts)
By Michael Downs. 2012
Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum…
and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of a disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies. In the opening story, Ania Liszak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy, to the matinee. The fire nearly kills both and leaves them scarred in different ways: Teddy's mother enjoys the beautiful strangeness of the scar on her face, but the patches across Teddy's body inspire cruel schoolmates to call him "Lizard Liszak." Over time, his mother transforms her pain into drama, while Teddy, having no memory of that day, seeks ways to return to it.These and other captivating characters appear throughout the book, creating a portrait of an American city and its people over five decades, raising questions about wounds and healing, memory and forgetting, and about the human capacity for kindness -- with all its futility and power -- in the midst of great loss.Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about…
the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences.Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries.Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.Yellow Roses
By Elizabeth Cullinan. 2024
A captivating collection unveiling the intricacies of love, life, and legacyThese twelve stories, told from the viewpoint of young women…
in life’s mid-passage, explore the splendors and miseries of love, both carnal and spiritual, and cast back through sickness and health to the engraving experiences of childhood and forward to the rituals and release of death and its occasion for recall.They tell us of a dutiful but not guiltless daughter faced with the wreckage a father has made of his life, of the pain of trying to steer steadily through a doomed affair with a dearly loved married man, and of the ironies attending the funeral of a priest uncle and the birthday of an aged mother.From the outwardly unremarkable frame of a single day—on Fire Island or in New York—an entire life and an encompassment of humanity are movingly conveyed. Then, with inverted telescope, the most subjective of inner realms is explored—through a hospital stay, a sudden name change, or the surprising end of all those dreaded piano lessons.Taken together, these stories are a far greater whole than the sum of their remarkable parts, an unforgettable exploration of the paradoxical toughness and vulnerability that define the mortal condition.