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Men Under Water
By Ralph Lombreglia. 1990
"In his first collection of stories, Ralph Lombreglia writes about being young and unsettled, about trying to connect and not…
always making it--or succeeding in startling ways. A powerful first collection."--The New York Times Book ReviewLate in the Standoff
By Tracy Daugherty. 2005
In this, his third collection, Tracy Daugherty focuses on social and cultural forces shaping people's intimate behavior. Set in Texas…
and Oklahoma, the stories and novella suggest that even politics is a kind of family squabble whose elusive solutions often come from unexpected quarters. In "Power Lines," a young man's sexual awakening in Midland, Texas, coincides with lessons about heroism and loyalty one hot summer that is suddenly seared with violence. In "The Standoff," a retired politician and his asthmatic grandson rediscover their bond on a trip to a small Oklahoma town where the old man has been asked to settle an "Indian dispute." In "Cotton Flat Road," a brother and sister lift the lid on their differences as he discovers her secret life across the tracks in the Texas oil town they grew up in.The Immanence of God in the Tropics
By George Rosen. 2012
"Precise, moving writing--a powerful and compelling collection."--Joseph Hurka, author of Fields of Light "One of the most compelling stories published…
[by the Yale Review]. . . . A thoughtful, reflective, sensitive, and graceful work."--Kai Erikson, former editor, The Yale Review These are stories of unexpected encounters far from home, told with a vivid sense of place. A white man with more wives than money becomes Africa's least-competent thief, two Americans contemplate love's costs and possibilities in Mexico's mountains, a seasick missionary bumps into God on the equator. George Rosen's characters seek, and sometimes find, a reality in which "everywhere, there is something remarkable."Honeymoon
By Merrill Joan Gerber. 1985
Year of Fire
By David Lynn. 2011
"The stories of this collection occupy the gray borderland where betrayal mixes with trust, violence with affection, humiliation with lust.…
The effect is quietly haunting."--Publishers Weekly"Lynn writes with virtuosity about angry people, the complexities of love and betrayal, and the effect of the past on present lives."--BooklistAlive
By Ha Jin. 2000
An eBook short.From one of our most celebrated contemporary writers, winner of the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award: Ha…
Jin's staggering story "Alive," from the collection The Bridegroom. Tong Guhan is a regular businessman, husband, and father, trying to find a job for his daughter and an apartment for his son in rural China. He's next in line to be Vice Director of the cannery where he works. One morning in late July he makes the eleven hour train trip from Muji City to Taifu, to conduct business for his company that he hopes will finally lead to a promotion and the easy life. The events that follow are nothing short of astonishing, as the very earth shifts under Guhan's feet. This is Ha Jin's moving, strange, captivating story of an earthquake and a common man, the ties of family and the powers of circumstance: the perfect introduction to an internationally acclaimed modern master.By the Light of the Jukebox
By Dean Paschal. 2012
An unusual first collection of fiction from a truly original and gifted Southern writer. The stories gathered here are wonderfully…
imaginative, erotically charged, unforgettable. Dean Paschal explores a variety of different worlds, like that of "Sautéing the Platygast," where evolution and the culinary arts have run amok.The Business of Naming Things
By Michael Coffey. 2015
"Riveting . . . vibrant and unsparing." -Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)"Superb. . . . Startlingly original." -Library Journal…
(starred review)"Once I started reading these stories, I couldn't stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language-the language of a poet." -JAY PARINI, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last Station"Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories-spare, rich, wise and compelling-go to the heart." -FREDERIC TUTEN, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New World"Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who's made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey's protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?" -EDMUND WHITE, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy's Own StoryAmong these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life's end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey's exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and 27 Men Out, a book about baseball's perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration to America, which was a companion volume to a PBS documentary series. He divides his time between Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York. The Business of Naming Things is his first work of fiction.Carniepunk: A Chance in Hell
By Jackie Kessler. 2013
Jackie Kessler brings her "fluid prose and dark humor" (Kirkus Reviews) to the Carniepunk anthology with this very sexy urban…
fantasy short story you won't want to miss.The former succubus Jezebel has to prepare herself to battle the King of Hell...tomorrow. Tonight, she's taking a break. With her friend Ceci Baker (a.k.a the one-time stripper Candy), she visits a traveling carnival on the outskirts of a small town in upstate New York, only to discover that the barker is a demon of Greed, and getting marked means way more than playing a rigged game. That's okay; Jezebel's been known to gamble before--and there's nothing like blood, sweat, and leers to bring out the demon in her.The Would-be Father
By Charles Baxter. 2011
An eBook short.From the collection Gryphon, Charles Baxter's luminous story of caretaking under any circumstance. Burrage never thought he'd be…
the responsible one. When his brother and sister-in-law die in a car accident, he becomes caretaker to his young nephew, a fragile boy who wants to know what the future will be. Burrage begins writing the boy's horoscope--stars, trains, and hide-and-seek--until his predictions begin to fail, in a rowboat, in the middle of a lake.Charles Baxter is one of our finest short story writers, a modern master. "The Would-be Father" is one of his first published short stories.Down the Road to Eternity
By Marion Farrant. 2009
Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant's work dating from 1985 to…
2009, including the complete suite of eighteen stories, The North Pole, in which our individual existences are bludgeoned by the threat of "end times"-climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics.It Takes a Worried Man
By Tracy Daugherty. 2002
The eight stories in Tracy Daugherty's second collection move through the streets of Houston with the quick step of country…
music and the melancholy humor of the blues. Romance and friendship develop in unlikely places, as people meet across the divide of race and class. In the tradition of James Joyce's Dubliners, Daugherty's stories explore the highs and lows of city life with its messiness and grace, celebrate the surprises and contradictions of community, and present a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary America's energy and vitality.Prophecies, Libels & Dreams: Stories
By Ysabeau S. Wilce. 2014
These inter-connected stories are set in an opulent quasi-historical world of magick and high manners called the Republic of Califa.…
The Republic is a strangely familiar place-a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony-yet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig. By turn whimsical and horrific (sometime in the same paragraph), Wilce's stories have been characterized as "screwball comedies for goths" but they could also be described as "historical fantasies" or "fanciful histories" for there are nuggets of historical fact hidden in them there lies.Ysabeau S. Wilce is the author of Flora Segunda, Andre Norton Award-winner Flora's Dare, and Flora's Fury, and she has published work in Asimov's, Steampunk!, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. She lives in San Francisco, California.The Cross
By Lamed Shapiro, Leah Garrett. 2007
Lamed Shapiro 1878 1948 was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories novellas …
and essays Himself a tragic figure Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossings alcoholism and failed ventures yet his writings are models of precision psychological insight and daring Shapiro focuses intently on the nature of violence the mob violence of pogroms committed against Jews the traumatic aftereffects of rape murder and powerlessness the murderous event that transforms the innocent child into witness and the rabbi s son into agitator Within a society on the move Shapiro s refugees from the shtetl and the traditional way of life are in desperate search of food shelter love and things of beauty Remarkably and against all odds they sometimes find what they are looking for More often than not the climax of their lives is an experience of ineffable terror This collection also reveals Lamed Shapiro as an American master His writings depict the Old World struggling with the New extremes of human behavior combined with the pursuit of normal happiness Through the perceptions of a remarkable gallery of men women children of even animals and plants Shapiro successfully reclaimed the lost world of the shtetl as he negotiated East Broadway and the Bronx Union Square and vaudeville Both in his life and in his unforgettable writings Lamed Shapiro personifies the struggle of a modern Jewish artist in search of an always elusive homeErrantry
By Elizabeth Hand. 2012
Praise for Elizabeth Hand: "Fiercely frightening yet hauntingly beautiful."--Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl "A sinful pleasure."--Katherine Dunn, author…
of Geek Love No one is innocent, no one unexamined in award-winner Elizabeth Hand's new collection. From the summer isles to the mysterious people next door all the way to the odd guy one cubicle over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable dreams that surely can never come true. Elizabeth Hand's novels include Shirley Jackson Award-winner Generation Loss, Mortal Love, and Available Dark.Death in Vancouver
By Garry Thomas Morse. 2009
Since the debut of Garry Thomas Morse's first collection deemed "experimental fiction," Death in Vancouver has drawn fervid enthusiasm from…
many West Coast writers and artists. Set in Vancouver, B.C., this gathering of stories superimposes aspects of literary classics on local urban space to express increasing dissonance and alienation in the groaning "necropolis" that is the contemporary global city."One Helen" is a woman subject to poetic idealization who reveals her own interior monologue on Bloomsday in "Another Helen" in this two-part romantic comedy where love may arrive too late. In "Nailed," an incident from The Book of Judges becomes zagadka without razgadka, or one of Gogol's riddles without resolution. "Salt Chip Boy" presents homogenized global jargon from an Orwellian vision of a future Vancouver where denizens controlled by implanted desiccants enter virtual worlds to enjoy vintage language and scenarios. In "Two Scoops," an attractive reporter investigates a government-funded project that involves supermarket products and sexual hallucinations. In "The Book," a Dostoyevskian drunkard contemplates Mallarmé's suggestion that everything exists to end up in a book while en route to "the stone that drives men mad" as described in Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver. "Dry Gray," who takes his name from a burger chain receipt while trying to stay sober, grapples with lingering questions from an Asperger's test.These stories culminate in the title novella, a restatement of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in which a retired ballet dancer called Padam falls under the spell of a young man in the lounge of the Istoria (fictional double to the Sylvia Hotel). When a hotel renovation leads Padam to believe that cosmetic injections will resolve his unrequited passion, he finds himself suddenly face to face with an unslaked desire for historical vengeance in the beak of a First Nations bird monster.This Outcast Generation and Luminous Moss
By Sanford Goldstein, Taijun Takeda, Yusaburo Shibuya. 1967
The two novelettes by contemporary Japanese writer Taijun Takeda that are contained in this book were chosen for their overall…
excellence to be included in our current Library of Japanese Literature series. Both stories are relatively modern, one dealing with an incident of cannibalism in Hokkaido during World War II and the other about the Japanese who lived in Shanghai following the defeat. This Outcast Generation, according to the translators," is basically an existentialist novel and it reminds of Camus, but it is of course Japanese in essence."The story tells of the life of a man who as a member of a defeated nation living in a foreign country, feels no responsibility to anyone but himself--and this only in relation to food and water. Eventually, the hero is given the chance to initiate a change in his aimless life and he acts, for mankind or for love, in committing what is meant to be a Dostoyevskian axe-type murder.Translator Goldstein calls Luminous Moss "a real tour-de-force. I know nothing like it in any literature, though of course the problem of cannibalism has been treated by others."Girls in the Grass
By Melanie Rae Thon. 1991
"A bold variety of stories about characters ranging in age from ten to ninety. These tales push swiftly to the…
heart of pain, need, and understanding." --Chicago Tribune A failed seduction . . . the dangerous, nearly fatal bonds of sisterhood . . . madness and murder in pre-Civil War Georgia. From the inner-city streets of Detroit to the heart of Idaho, in prose that can shimmer like stardust or cut like a scalpel, these passionate and sometimes-terrifying stories expose lives shadowed by guilt, love, random cruelties, and tender mercies.History of Cold Seasons
By Joshua Harmon. 2014
An old fisherman recites his "sea-sorrow;" two sisters search for their runaway brother and the girl they believe he keeps…
tied to a tree; a mother recounts her son's rescue from a snowstorm. The landscape comes alive as these stories chart families broken apart and stitched back together over the course of harsh New England seasons.Aftermath: Stories
By Scott Nadelson. 2011
THE CHARACTERS IN SCOTT NADELSON'S third collection are living in the wake of momentous events-- the rupture of relationships, the…
loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of forging on with their lives, making accommodations that are sometimes delusional, sometimes destructive, sometimes even healthy. In "Oslo," a thirteen-year-old boy on a trip to Israel with his grandparents grapples with his father's abandonment and his own rocky coming-of-age. In "The Old Uniform," a young man left by his fiancée revisits the haunts of his single days, and on a drunken march through nighttime Brooklyn, begins to shed the false selves that have kept him from fully living. And in the title story, a couple testing out the waters of trial separation quickly discover how deeply the fault lines of their marriage run and how desperately they want to hang onto what remains. Mining Nadelson's familiar territory of Jewish suburban New Jersey, these fearless, funny, and quietly moving stories explore the treacherous crossroads where disappointments meet unfulfilled desire.