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Showing 1 - 20 of 444 items
By Laura Furman. 2018
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous…
year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction."The Tomb of Wrestling," Jo Ann Beard, Tin House "Counterblast," Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review "Nayla," Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner "Lucky Dragon," Viet Dinh, Ploughshares "Stop ’n’ Go," Michael Parker, New England Review "Past Perfect Continuous," Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review "Inversion of Marcia," Thomas Bolt, n+1 "Nights in Logar," Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space "How We Eat," Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch "Deaf and Blind," Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?," Jenny Zhang, n+1 "An Amount of Discretion," Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review "Queen Elizabeth," Brad Felver, One Story "The Stamp Collector," Dave King, Fence "More or Less Like a Man," Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review "The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies," Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope "Up Here," Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares "The Houses That Are Left Behind," Brenda Walker, The Kenyon Review "We Keep Them Anyway," Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review "Solstice," Anne Enright, The New YorkerPrize Jury for 2018: Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth TallentBy Henry James.
By Golda Fried. 1998
These stories are diary shreds of young women who are in school but things happen anyway. Girls with their hears…
open like agar petri dishes. The setting could be Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, a Gothic castle or a bathtub. What people say matters. The girl might finally find someone she can talk to but falls asleep too soon. She will fall down taking the scenery with her. Stars are brought down into sugar containers and stirred into coffee. A couch is thrown out on the grass and you're invited to have a seat.By Otto Penzler. 2013
Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty…
of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories--many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant. Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you're in the mood for--suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural--can be found in these pages. FEATURING:- Unscrupulous Santas- Crimes of Christmases Past and Present- Festive felonies- Deadly puddings- Misdemeanors under the mistletoe- Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.By John Kelly. 2014
This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed…
octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading up to the visit of the U. S. President. When the unthinkable happens and the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering what's happened to those in his care and, along the way, to the late President -- but this is not, he insists, the story of an assassination. Nor is it a thriller. It's the truth.By Martha Brooks. 1994
By Thornton Wilder. 1955
The publication of volume two of this landmark collection celebrates the close of the centennial year of Thornton Wilder's birth.…
This volume collects 17 plays from the author's three-minute and five-minute plays for five actors series and includes the full-length play The Alcestiad, a major work by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth which has long been unavailable.By Louisa May Alcott. 2015
Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel 'Little Women.' In the mid-1860s, Alcott…
wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced wholesome stories for children, and after their positive reception, she did not generally return to creating works for adults. Alcott continued to write until her death.By Nadine Gordimer. 2010
A stunning selection of the best short fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature This collection of Nadine…
Gordimer’s short fiction demonstrates her rich use of language and her unsparing vision of politics, sexuality, and race. Whether writing about lovers, parents and children, or married couples, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. The selection, which spans the course of Gordimer’s career to date, presents the range of her storytelling abilities and her brilliant insight into human nature. From such epics as “Friday’s Footprint” and “Something Out There” to her shorter, more experimental stories, Gordimer’s work is unfailingly nuanced and complex. Time and again, it forces us to examine how our stated intentions come into conflict with our unspoken desires. This definitive volume, which includes four new stories from the Nobel laureate, is a testament to the power, force, and ongoing relevance of Gordimer’s vision.By John Steinbeck. 2012
It would be impossible to overstate John Steinbeck's enduring influence on American letters. Profuse with a richness of language, sly…
humor, and empathy for even his most flawed characters, Steinbeck's books are still widely read and deeply relevant today. The Portable Steinbeck is a grand sampling of his most important and popular works. Here are the complete novels Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony, together with self-contained excerpts from several longer novels, the text of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a fascinating introduction by Pascal Covici, Jr. , son of Steinbeck's longtime editor, and a new introduction from leading Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw that puts Steinbeck in the context of the 21st century .By Gregory Norminton. 2013
Beacons throws down the gauntlet, challenging best-selling and award-winning authors to imagine where we, and out planet, might be headed…
and, in imagining, help us transform the way we look at our world and change things for the better. From Joanne Harris' powerful vision of a near future where 'outside' has become a thing of history to Nick Hayes' beautifully illustrated tale of the bond between man and nature, Beacons sees the coming together of dystopian satire, speculative and historical fiction, metaphorical flights of fancy, quiet tragedy, and farcical comedy in stories that are as various as our possible futures. Provocative, encouraging, and deeply moving, Beacons represents the best of short story writing - and collectively illuminates the immediacy of the ecological problems at hand.All author royalties will go to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, one of the largest groups of people dedicated to action on climate change and limiting its impact on the world's poorest people.By Charles Bukowski. 1983
These mad immortal stories, now surfaced from the literary underground, have addicted legions of American readers, even though the high…
literary establishment continues to ignore them. In Europe, however (particularly in Germany, Italy, and France where he is published by the great publishing houses), he is critically recognized as one of America's greatest living realist writers.Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 and brought to America at the age of two. Eighteen or twenty books of prose and poetry, Bukowski, after publishing prose in Story and Portfolio, stopped writing for ten years. He arrived in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, hemorrhaging as a climax to a ten year drinking bout. Some say he didn't die. After leaving the hospital he got a typewriter and began writing again--this time, poetry. He later returned to prose and gained some fame with his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man. After 14 years in the Post Office he resigned at age 50, he says, to keep from going insane. He now claims to be unemployable and eats typewriter ribbons.By Igor Savelyev, Gulla Khirachev, Polina Klyukina, Alexei Lukyanov, Denis Osokin. 2010
Squaring the Circle is Russian prose by a new generation of authors from various parts of Russia who never lived…
in the USSR and who, unlike older writers, are not fighting the Soviet past. Young people have no algorithms for building their lives and careers. There are no guarantees, but anything is possible.By Dinah Cox. 2016
Set within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people, landscape, and the distinctive way it…
is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in Oklahoma, the state is almost a character--neither protagonist nor antagonist--but instead the weird next-door-neighbor you're perhaps too ashamed of to take anywhere. Who is the embarrassing one--you or Oklahoma?Dinah Cox lives in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches in the English department at Oklahoma State University and is an associate editor at Cimarron Review.By Su Tong. 2003
By Elnathan John, Segun Afolabi, Masande Ntshanga, Namwali Serpell, F. T. Kola. 2015
Now in its sixteenth year, the Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa's leading literary prize, and is awarded to…
a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This collection collects the five 2015 shortlisted stories, along with stories written at the Caine Prize Writers' Workshop, which took place in April 2015.By Zitkala-Sa. 2003
Zitkala-Sa wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation,…
she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today. .By Barry Gifford. 2015
In Writers, great American storyteller Barry Gifford paints portraits of famous writers caught in imaginary vulnerable moments in their lives.…
In prose that is funny, grotesque, and a touch brutal, Gifford shows these writers at their most human, which is to say at their worst: they are liars, frauds, lousy lovers, and drunks. This is a world in which Ernest Hemingway drunkenly sets explosive trip wires outside his home in Cuba, Marcel Proust implores the angel of death as a delirious Arthur Rimbaud lies dying in a hospital bed, and Albert Camus converses with a young prostitute while staring at himself in the mirror of a New York City hotel room.In Gifford's house of mirrors, we are offered a unique perspective on this group of literary greats. We see their obsessions loom large, and none more than a shared needling preoccupation with mortality. And yet these stories, which are meant to be performed as plays, are also tender and thoughtful exercises in empathy. Gifford asks: What does it means to devote oneself entirely to art? And as an artist, what defines success and failure?From the Hardcover edition.By Marian Schwartz, Mikhail Shishkin, Ivan Goncharov. 2008
Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, before the ideal of industrious modern man, when idleness was still looked…
upon by Russia's serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, there was Oblomov. Indolent, inattentive, incurious, given to daydreaming and procrastination--indeed, given to any excuse to remain horizontal--Oblomov is hardly the stuff of heroes. Yet, he is impossible not to admire. He is forgiven for his weakness and beloved for his shining soul. Ivan Goncharov's masterpiece is not just ingenious social satire, but also a sharp criticism of nineteenth-century Russian society.Translator Marian Schwartz breathes new life into Goncharov's voice in this first translation from the generally recognized definitive edition of the Russian original, and the first as well to attempt to replicate in English Goncharov's wry humor and all-embracing humanity, chosen by Slate as one of the Best Books of 2008.By Cyn Vargas. 2015
Cyn Vargas's debut explores the whims and follies of the heart. When a mother disappears in Guatemala, her daughter refuses…
to accept she's gone; a divorced DMV employee falls in love during a driving lesson; a young girl shares a well-kept family secret; a bad haircut is the last straw in a crumbling marriage.Cyn Vargas is a member of 2nd Story. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.