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Showing 1 - 20 of 32 items
By Alan Brown, Gabrielle Roy. 1982
By Lydia Davis. 2011
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany…
and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.By Anne Fadiman, Marina Keegan. 2014
An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured…
the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.By Judith Schalansky. 2020
A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands A Publishers Weekly Best Book…
of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.By Wendell Berry. 2004
Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty–three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional…
chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations.This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.By Nelson Algren, Dan Simon, Brooke Horvath. 2009
Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards…
and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren's eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places. In Entrapment and Other Writings--containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays--Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and '50s do, in part because he hasn't yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. "You should not read [Algren] if you can't take a punch," Ernest Hemingway declared. "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. 1999
From Slapstick's "Turkey Farm" to Slaughterhouse-Five's eternity in a Tralfamadorean zoo cage with Montana Wildhack, the question of the afterlife…
never left Kurt Vonnegut's mind. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and the Afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight. In thirty odd "interviews," Vonnegut trips down "the blue tunnel to the pearly gates" in the guise of a roving reporter for public radio, conducting interviews: with Salvatore Biagini, a retired construction worker who died of a heart attack while rescuing his schnauzer from a pit bull, with John Brown, still smoldering 140 years after his death by hanging, with William Shakespeare, who rubs Vonnegut the wrong way, and with socialist and labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, one of Vonnegut's personal heroes.What began as a series of ninety-second radio interludes for WNYC, New York City's public radio station, evolved into this provocative collection of musings about who and what we live for, and how much it all matters in the end. From the original portrait by his friend Jules Feiffer that graces the cover, to a final entry from Kilgore Trout, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian remains a joy.By Michael Bracewell. 2021
'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a…
sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan CoeA vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...By Michael Bracewell. 2021
'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a…
sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan CoeA vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...By Ed Pavlić, Ivelisse Rodriguez. 2022
How we can recover from terrible ruptures, the pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, class warfare, gendered violence, and ecological brinksmanship.Individually…
and collectively, we bear deep wounds. Some of these are generations old; all have been worsened by a destructive period of pyrrhic politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, Boston Review believes that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal. In this new anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays from renowned writers and newcomers, writers explore whether and how we can repair terrible ruptures, life-threatening illnesses and the pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, class warfare, gendered violence, and ecological brinksmanship. ContributorsAriella Aisha Azoulay, Kemi Alabi, Donia Elizabeth Allen, Don Mee Choi, Adebe DeRango-Adem, Emma Dries, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Randall Horton, Savonna Johnson, Kim Hyesoon, Maya Marshall, Colleen Murphy, Simone Person, aureleo sans, Bishakh Som, Olúfmi O. Táíwò, Meredith Talusan, Brian Teare, Yiru ZhangBy Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2018
Get an inside look at Algonquin’s outstanding forthcoming fiction with the Spring 2018 Algonquin Reader. Discover the inspiration behind each…
book through an original essay by the author. Then enjoy a short preview of each novel. The books featured in this issue are:The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel On Sale May 2018Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories by Kelly Barnhill On Sale February 2018Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison On Sale April 2018Remind Me Again What Happened by Joanna Luloff On Sale June 2018The Price of the Haircut: Stories by Brock Clarke On Sale March 2018Southernmost by Silas House On Sale June 2018 Cover illustration by Mark Hoffmann.By Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 1999
This book is made up of twenty-three stories, each from a different author from across the globe. All belong to…
one world, united in their diversity and ethnicity. And together they have one aim: to involve and move the reader.The range of authors takes in such literary greats as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri, and emerging authors such as Elaine Chiew, Petina Gappah, and Henrietta Rose-Innes.The members of the collective are:Elaine Chiew (Malaysia)Molara Wood (Nigeria)Jhumpa Lahiri (United States)Martin A Ramos (Puerto Rico)Lauri Kubutsile (Botswana)Chika Unigwe (Nigeria)Ravi Mangla (United States)Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)Skye Brannon (United States)Jude Dibia (Nigeria)Shabnam Nadiya (Bangladesh)Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)Ivan Gabirel Reborek (Australia)Vanessa Gebbie (Britain)Emmanual Dipita Kwa (Cameroon)Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa)Lucinda Nelson Dhavan (India)Adetokunbo Abiola (Nigeria)Wadzanai Mhute (Zimbabwe)Konstantinos Tzikas (Greece)Ken Kamoche (Kenya)Sequoia Nagamatsu (United States)Ovo Adagha (Nigeria)From the Introduction:The concept of One World is often a multi-colored tapestry into whichsundry, if not contending patterns can be woven. for those of us who workedon this project, 'One World' goes beyond the everyday notion of the globeas a physical geographic entity. Rather, we understand it as a universal idea,one that transcends national boundaries to comment on the most prevailingaspects of the human condition.This attempt to redefine the borders of the world we live in through theshort story recognizes the many conflicting issues of race, language, economy,gender and ethnicity, which separate and limit us. We readily acknowledge,however, that regardless of our differences or the disparities in our stories, weare united by our humanity.We invite the reader on a personal journey across continents, countries,cultures and landscapes, to reflect on these beautiful, at times chaotic, renditionson the human experience. We hope the reach of this path will transcend theborders of each story, and perhaps function as an agent of change.Welcome to our world.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
"All great novels are great fairy tales," wrote Vladimir Nabokov many years ago, and Fairy Tale Review continues to believe…
that all great literary works owe everything to fairy tales. In this issue you will find work represented that draws from the spectacular, old tradition of fairy tales in brilliant new ways. An increased understanding of the precise and incredible fairy-tale techniques, so wonderfully elucidated by the scholar Max Luthi, but expanded, in the aesthetic of Fairy Tale Review, to contemporary literature across the styles and genres, may help resolve the unfortunate schisms that sometimes arise between so-called mainstream and avant-garde writers and critics. In this issue you will find work across so many such borders; some of the writing refers to specific fairy tales, but much of it simply feels like a fairy tale; and how it feels like a fairy tale is through language, through form. Please spread the word that fairy tales are the newest and oldest aesthetic; and they give our lives fearful, beautiful shape. Form is fairy tale, fairy tale is form.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
Mauve is a new word with old roots. The color's earlier incarnations--Tyrian purple (given for the shade of Roman emperors'…
cloaks) and aniline purple--were abandoned when, to increase the popularity of Perkin's dye, its sellers named the color after a French flower called the mallow. When we consult the dictionary, it tells us that the mallow is a herbaceous plant with hairy stems and pink or purple flowers. Its fruit comes shaped in wedges and so it is nicknamed the cheese plant. Mallows are grown as ornamentals, and mallows are grown as edibles. Some are for looking at, others are for eating. We want this issue to be both--a mallow, a marsh, a cake that defies old proverbs. Gaze at it. Eat it too. Consume, ravage, devour it. Why, go ahead and try it on, walk around in it as long as you like. Either way, we promise you'll look ravishing.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most…
aesthetically diverse, issue to date. Despite this diversity the fairy tale pulse or "feel" is present in each piece in The Aquamarine Issue. What also contains this issue and holds it within the salt palace of tiny sea horses is how the narratives and poems, taken together in here, can be seen to contribute not only to the very important living body of contemporary fairy tales--so nascent and now--but also to the conversation about what constitutes "a fairy tale," that monumental type of art.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
Fairy Tale Review is an annual literary publication dedicated to publishing new fairy-tale fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. It seeks to…
expand the conversation about fairy tales among practitioners, scholars, and general readers. Contents reflect a diverse spectrum of literary artists working with fairy tales in many languages and styles. In the Emerald Issue, new stories, poems, essays, and artwork is inspired by the themes of "emeralds" and "Oz". In Frank L. Baum's introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the author indicates that his story "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale" in opposition to the "historical" stories with all their "horrible and blood-curling incident".By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
"At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity…
of mind to enjoy fairy tales," Andre Breton wrote in 1924. "There are fairy tales to be written for adults," he continued. "Fairy tales almost blue." Violet flowers are often described as "almost-blue," which is how this color was chosen. This issue of Fairy Tale Review focuses on fairy tales for adults.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
Brown is the color of the wolf, of the harvest-ravaged farm, of thatched roofs, of cinnamon cake, of autumn, of…
snuff, of wooden boxes (bridal chests, watch cases, humidors, coffins). If ever there was a color more suited to earthly existence, it's the color of earth itself. And earthly existence is at the very heart of fairy tales, despite all the unearthly circumstances depicted.By Kate Bernheimer. 2015
The sheer volume of responses to the first issue of Fairy Tale Review shows that fairy tales continue to be…
one of the most viable art forms. In fairy tales, all things are interdependent, mysteriously and insanely entwined. They contain a deeply ecological world. The Green Issue is devoted to new fairy tales, with a special consideration for nature. The unbridled individualism at work in the literary forms most dominant today devalues the natural world in relation to the human. In fairy tales, the human world and the animal world are collapsed. The collapse remains open to wonder and change. In this way, fairy tales provide the possibility for narratives to shine a different sort of terrible light on the natural world. This world is transparent, imperiled, abstract, and new. In this world, clarity and wonder go hand and hand.By Kate Bernheimer. 2016
Ochre is the color of our earliest stories. It is the color we chose when we wanted to make paintings…
on the walls of caves, in places that never did learn the name of sunlight. By the grace of small fires we etched in ochre; we coughed at the smoke in a confined area but also the absurdity of things we would later call warmth and light and home. Ochre was the color that permeated our lives, slipped into our fingernails, found its way onto all our clothes, our bedspreads, and the skins of lovers. There is evidence of ochre in caves dating back twenty centuries BC: horses and bison and traces of human hands. The places we have touched, tried to remember. Our tongues made middens of ochre even when we couldn’t see. If fairy tales are a language, as Kate Bernheimer argues, then...ochre is the color in which that language must be written.