Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 1 - 20 of 21 items
By K. M. Walton, David Arnold, G. Love, K. M. Walton. 2017
An anthology of stories and personal essays exploring how music inspires creativity and can change a person's life. The pieces…
are written by award-winning young adult authors and contemporary musicians. Some strong language. For senior high and older readers. 2017By Shirley Jackson, Laurence Hyman, Sarah Hyman DeWitt. 2015
Since her death in 1965, Shirley Jackson's reputation as a master of creepy short stories has only grown. Stories featuring…
her signature eerie style, as well as essays about writing and her family, make up the fifty-six entries in this collection, most previously unpublished. Some violence. 2015By Marina Keegan. 2014
Collection of essays and short stories by Keegan (1989-2012), who was killed in a car accident five days after her…
college graduation. In the title essay--which appeared in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News--she reflects on the bright future awaiting the graduates. Bestseller. 2014By Garrison Keillor. 2014
"A man faces the serious and mysterious consequences of his unusual paternity. A young peasant girl takes an eccentric villager…
as her lover and pays for her audacity. A group of revelers experience horror at the abuses and vicissitudes of a strange visitor. We accompany a sick man on his journey through the landscapes of his feverish delirium, only to get lost along the way and arrive at the end that was not. A man emigrates from his homeland in search of a bait in the form of a woman and ends up facing a fantastic opponent. These are some of Pedro Cabiya's Tremendous Stories, the first book by the then very young writer and a fundamental text that forever changed the rules of the game in Caribbean literature." -- Translation provided by NLSBy Kevin Kling. 2009
National Public Radio commentator pens good-humored autobiographical stories about holidays throughout the year. Describes celebrating his fourth birthday inside a…
glass "cage" at the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, after measles postponed his operation, and holding his breath--and fainting--during Easter services at church. 2009By B. Z. Vukovina. 2013
On Highway 17 by B. Z. R. Vukovina where passion burns brighter than fame as an idealistic guitarist makes his…
way to California, and the young musician is suddenly forced to question his destiny.By Amélie Hope. 2013
Raw by Amélie Hope is about lust and love and rock 'n' roll. A young groupie craves the pounding music…
and sexual freedom of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Will she ever be able to find love in this playground of music and lust?By Stella Harris. 2013
In Well Played by Stella Harris a young cellist has the chance of a lifetime at a very prestigious institution.…
But her position is soon compromised by her frustratingly gifted, handsome and manipulative section leader.By Harper Eliot. 2013
In And the Midnight Trio by Harper Eliot, a jazz singer teases with her eyes, her body and her voice,…
as the wealthy patrons appraise her body as intently as they appraise her songs. But the singer's lover plays piano in their little trio, and he is a very protective man...By Shirley Jackson, Ruth Franklin, Laurence Hyman, Sarah Hyman Dewitt. 2015
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * From the renowned author of "The Lottery" and…
The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings. Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces--more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson's children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother's papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children's games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community--the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist. This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.Praise for Let Me Tell You"Stunning."--O: The Oprah Magazine"Let us now--at last--celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson's heretofore unpublished works--uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life."--Vanity Fair "Feels like an uncanny dollhouse: Everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right."--NPR "There are . . . times in reading [Jackson's] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O'Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she's just incomparable."--The Washington Post "Offers insights into the vagaries of [Jackson's] mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson."--The New York Times Book Review"The best pieces clutch your throat, gently at first, and then with growing strength. . . . The whole collection has a timelessness."--The Boston Globe"[Jackson's] writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has such enduring power--she brings out the darkness in life, the poltergeists shut into everyone's basement, and offers them up, bringing wit and even joy to the examination."--USA Today"The closest we can get to sitting down and having a conversation with . . . one of the most original voices of her generation."--The Huffington PostFrom the Hardcover edition.By Shirley Jackson, Ruth Franklin, Laurence Hyman, Sarah Hyman Dewitt. 2015
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * From the renowned author of "The Lottery" and…
The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings.Features "Family Treasures," nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces--more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson's children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother's papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children's games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community--the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist. This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.Praise for Let Me Tell You"Stunning."--O: The Oprah Magazine"Let us now--at last--celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson's heretofore unpublished works--uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life."--Vanity Fair "Feels like an uncanny dollhouse: Everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right."--NPR "There are . . . times in reading [Jackson's] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O'Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she's just incomparable."--The Washington Post "Offers insights into the vagaries of [Jackson's] mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson."--The New York Times Book Review"The best pieces clutch your throat, gently at first, and then with growing strength. . . . The whole collection has a timelessness."--The Boston Globe"[Jackson's] writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has such enduring power--she brings out the darkness in life, the poltergeists shut into everyone's basement, and offers them up, bringing wit and even joy to the examination."--USA Today"The closest we can get to sitting down and having a conversation with . . . one of the most original voices of her generation."--The Huffington PostFrom the Hardcover edition.By Ruth Franklin, Sarah Hyman Dewitt, Shirley Jackson, Laurence Hyman. 2015
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * From the renowned author of "The Lottery" and…
The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings.Features "Family Treasures," nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces--more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson's children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother's papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children's games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community--the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist. This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.Praise for Let Me Tell You"Stunning."--O: The Oprah Magazine"Let us now--at last--celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson's heretofore unpublished works--uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life."--Vanity Fair "Feels like an uncanny dollhouse: Everything perfectly rendered, but something deliciously not quite right."--NPR "There are . . . times in reading [Jackson's] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O'Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she's just incomparable."--The Washington Post "Offers insights into the vagaries of [Jackson's] mind, which was ruminant and generous, accommodating such diverse figures as Dr. Seuss and Samuel Richardson."--The New York Times Book Review"The best pieces clutch your throat, gently at first, and then with growing strength. . . . The whole collection has a timelessness."--The Boston Globe"[Jackson's] writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has such enduring power--she brings out the darkness in life, the poltergeists shut into everyone's basement, and offers them up, bringing wit and even joy to the examination."--USA Today"The closest we can get to sitting down and having a conversation with . . . one of the most original voices of her generation."--The Huffington PostFrom the Hardcover edition.By Lore Segal. 2019
"Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation; this lovely collection is a fine introduction to…
her work."—Kirkus Reviews A DEFINITIVE COLLECTION FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S FINEST WRITERS—INCLUDING NEW AND NEVER-BEFORE-COLLECTED WORK From the award-winning New Yorker writer comes this essential volume spanning almost six decades. Admired for “a voice unlike any other” (Cynthia Ozick) and a style both “wry and poignant” (The New Yorker), Lore Segal is a master literary stylist. This volume collects some of her finest work—including new and uncollected writing—and selections from her novels, stories, and essays. From her very first story—which appeared in The New Yorker in 1961—to today, Segal’s voice has been unique in contemporary American literature: Hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental. Segal has often used her own biography as both subject and inspiration: At age ten she was sent on the Kindertransport from Vienna to England to escape the Nazi invasion of Austria; grew up among English foster families; and eventually made her way to the United States. This experience was the impetus for her first novel, Other People’s Houses, and one that she has revisited throughout her career. From that beginning, Segal’s writing has ranged widely across form as well as subject matter. Her flawless prose and light touch belie the rigor and intelligence she brings to her art—qualities that were not missed by the New York Times reviewer who pointedly observed, “though it was not written by a man . . . Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.” With this volume comes a long-awaited career retrospective of an important American Writer.By Franz Kafka. 2020
'Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who's…
standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.' Joshua Cohen, from his preface to He: Shorter Writings of Franz KafkaThis is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo and a diary entry, also including popular favourites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka's preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food and exercise, each in his signature style.Cohen's selection emphasises the stately structure of utterly coherent logic, within an utterly incoherent illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator, but the absence of the universe's only reliable narrator. Who is God.By Percy Quirk. 2013
The Vicar's Organ by Percy Quirk tells a tale of indiscretion and exploitation running rife through the congregation of a…
quaint country parish. But, as the faithful flock reveal their secrets, who is truly the lamb and who is the lion?By Osa Atoe. 2022
A cut & paste celebration of Black punk and outsider identity, this is the only complete collection of the fanzine…
Shotgun Seamstress, a legendary DIY project that centered the scope of Blackness outside of mainstream corporate consumerist identityIn 2006, Osa Atoe was inspired to create an expression out of the experience of being the only Black kid at the punk show—and Shotgun Seamstress was born.Like a great mixtape where radical politics are never sidelined for an easier ride, Shotgun Seamstress was a fanzine by and for Black punks that expressed, represented, and documented the fullest range of being, and collectively and individually explored &“all of our possibilities instead of allowing the dominant culture to tell us what it means to be Black.&”Laid out by hand, and photocopied and distributed in small batches, each issue featured essays, interviews, historical portraits of important artists and scenes, reviews, and more, all paying tribute to musicians and artists that typify free Black expression and interrupt notions of Black culture as a monolith.Featuring figures such as Vaginal Cream Davis, the seminal Black punk band Death, Poly Styrene, Bay Area rocker Brontez Purnell, British post-punker Rachel Aggs, New York photographer Alvin Baltrop, Detroit garage rocker Mick Collins and so many others, in the pages of this book rock&’n&’roll is reclaimed as Black music and a wide spectrum of gender and sexuality is represented. Collecting and anthologizing the layouts as they were originally photocopied by hand, this collection comprises all eight issues created between 2006 and 2015.By Said Habib. 2021
Under the Gaze of Angels offers treasured views of family and neighborhood life, native to the Galilee, in the years…
leading up to and following the upheavals of 1948. A collection of four stories, told with simplicity and warmth, they include three set during the time of British mandate rule: &“Zuha and the Book Vendor,&” &“The English Gramophone,&” and &“Yildiz the Turkish Woman.&” These are followed by the book&’s title work, a remembrance that travels from childhood to elder years, pursued by loss. Imagined or recalled in exile, these vivid, evocative mementos quietly disarm the violence that surrounds them, restoring a stolen past to memory under the gaze of angels.By David Foster Wallace. 2005
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And…
who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.By Marc Ribot. 2021
The paperback edition of iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot’s darkly funny and subversive collection of writing, featuring brand-new essays not…
included in the hardcover. Throughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in the expanded paperback edition of Ribot’s first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays—including some new material not included in the hardcover—short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film “mistreatment” that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage. In the first section of the book, "Lies and Distortion," Ribot turns his attention to his instrument--"my relation to the guitar is one of struggle; I'm constantly forcing it to be something else"--and reflects on his influences (and friends) like Robert Quine (the Voidoids) and producer Hal Willner (Saturday Night Live), while delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of artists' rights. Elsewhere, we glimpse fragments of Ribot's life as a traveling musician--he captures both the monotony of touring as well as small moments of beauty and despair on the road. In the heart of the collection, "Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties," Ribot offers wickedly humorous short stories that synthesize the best elements of the Russian absurdist tradition with the imaginative heft of George Saunders. Taken together, these stories and essays cement Ribot's position as one of the most dynamic and creative voices of our time.