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Writers talking
By John Metcalf, Claire Wilkshire. 2003
Includes interviews with and commentaries from eight Canadian writers. Listen in to Terry Griggs on where stories come from, Michael…
Winter on writing Newfoundland, and K.D. Miller on being 'an actor who writes'. Also features short stories by these authors. Some descriptions of sex and some strong language. 2003.Divas, Dames & Daredevils
By Maria Elena Buszek, Mike Madrid. 2013
ComicsAlliance and ComicsBlend Best Comic Book of the YearBUST Magazine "Lit Pick" RecommendationCertified CoolTM in PREVIEWS: The Comic Shop's Catalog"Mike…
Madrid gives these forgotten superheroines their due. These 'lost' heroines are now found-to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere." -STAN LEEWonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s, but many other heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Through twenty-eight full reproductions of vintage Golden Age comics, Divas, Dames & Daredevils reintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds.Each spine-tingling chapter opens with Mike Madrid's insightful commentary about heroines at the dawn of the comic book industry and reveals a universe populated by extraordinary women-superheroes, reporters, galactic warriors, daring detectives, and ace fighter pilots-who protected America and the world with wit and guile.In these pages, fans will also meet heroines with striking similarities to more modern superheroes, including The Spider Queen, who deployed web shooters twenty years before Spider Man, and Marga the Panther Woman, whose feral instincts and sharp claws tore up the bad guys long before Wolverine. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but their influence on popular culture, and the heroes we're passionate about today, is unmistakable.Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. Madrid, a San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, also appears in the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines.Bacacay
By Witold Gombrowicz, Bill Johnston. 2004
A balloonist finds himself set upon by erotic lepers...a passenger on a ship notices a human eye on the deck...a…
group of aristocrats enjoy a vegetarian dish made from human flesh...a virginal young girl gnaws raw meat from a bone...a notorious ruffian is terrorized by a rat. Welcome to the bizarre universe of Witold Gombrowicz, whose legendary short story collection is presented here for the first time in English. These tales, hilarious, disturbing, and brilliantly written, are utterly unique in world literature. After reading them, you'll never be the same.Bloodknots
By Ami Sands Brodoff. 2005
"Bloodknots is a truly singular and remarkable book of stories. Lyrical and disturbing, this is the work of a writer…
of unmistakable talent."--Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven, a National Book Award nominee"Bloodknots is a marvelous collection peopled by unforgettable characters."--Nalini Warriar, author of Blues from the Malabar Coast and a McAuslan Book Award winnerA collection of beguiling stories from an American writer who excels at depicting the family ties that bind: fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters whose connections to one another are as fragile as they are irrevocable. Stubbornly honest, and imbued with a sensibility that speaks to the author's Jewish heritage, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with authority, passion, and razor-sharp detail about identity and the longing for human connections in the face of loss and exclusion. Her stories evoke the delicate familial weaves of Alice Munro, exposing the raw nerves of shattered lives redeemed by the willingness to forgive. Written close to the senses, Bloodknots penetrates to the core.Ami Sands Brodoff is from New York and also lived in Princeton, New Jersey, before relocating with her husband to Montreal, where she writes and teaches creative writing. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and has been anthologized in numerous journals and book collections. Her first book, Can You See Me?, received wide acclaim, including a rave from Publishers Weekly.Skin Folk
By Nalo Hopkinson. 2001
Throughout the Caribbean there are stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these folk their human shape.…
When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. And whatever the burden their skin bears, once they remove it, skin folk can fly...Nalo Hopkinson has gained universal acclaim as one of the most impressively original authors to emerge in years. Her debut novel, "Brown Girl in the Ring," won the "Locus" Award for Best First Novel, became a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and garnered Hopkinson the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her second novel, "Midnight Robber," was a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards.Now she presents "Skin Folk," a richly vibrant collection of short fiction that ranges from Trinidad to Toronto, from fantastic folklore to frightening futures, from houses of deadly haunts to realms of dark sexuality. Powerful and sensual, disturbing and triumphant, these tales explore the surface of modern existence... and delve under the skin of eternal legends.The Storyteller Essays
By Walter Benjamin. 2019
A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes…
short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work.“The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.Sunset: A Ch'ae Manshik Reader (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
By Manshik Ch'Ae. 2017
Ch’ae Manshik is one of the most accomplished modern Korean writers yet is underrepresented in English translation because of the…
challenges posed by his distinctive voice and colloquial style. Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader is the first English-language anthology of his works and features a variety of genres—novella, short fiction, anecdotal essay, travel writing, children’s story, one-act play, three-act play, and roundtable discussion.This anthology moves beyond the usual “representative works” to provide a well-rounded selection of writing by one of Korea’s most innovative and memorable voices, drawing on Ch'ae's ten-volume Complete Works. This edition also provides a comprehensive introduction outlining the limitations of existing approaches to Ch'ae. It contextualizes the anthology's contents both in terms of the author's career and the rich Korean tradition of intertextuality and intermediality that he reflects from the country's earliest times to the new millennium.The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection
By Oscar Wilde. 2020
An innovative new edition of nine classic short stories from one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era.“I cannot…
think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration.Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six.Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner…
life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances. Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.The Taste of Apples (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By Huang Huang Chun-ming. 2001
From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of…
everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius. In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.Huang's characters—generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty—come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By Kim Chew Ng. 2016
"Dream and Swine and Aurora," "Deep in the Rubber Forest," "Fish Bones," "Allah's Will," "Monkey Butts, Fire, and Dangerous Things"—Ng…
Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile. Ng creatively captures the riot of cultures that roughly coexist on the Malay Peninsula and its surrounding archipelago. Their interplay is heightened by the encroaching forces of globalization, which bring new opportunities for cultural experimentation, but also an added dimension of alienation. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these sensitively crafted, resonant stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes, communities pressured by violence, and minority Malaysian Chinese in dynamic tension with the Islamic Malay majority. Told through relatable characters, Ng's tales show why he has become a leading Malaysian writer of Chinese fiction, representing in mood, voice, and rhythm the dislocation of a people and a country in transition.The Mini-Cycle (Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature)
By Allan Weiss. 2021
While scholars have been studying the short story cycle for some time now, this book discusses a form that has…
never before been identified and named, let alone analyzed: the mini-cycle. A mini-cycle is a short story cycle made up, in most cases, of only two or three stories. This study looks at mini-cycles spanning the period from Anton Chekhov’s "little trilogy" (1898) to the "Alphinland" stories in Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress (2014), including texts by such authors as Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, Robert Olen Butler, and Clark Blaise. Consideration is also given to marginal examples, like Sherwood Anderson’s "Godliness—A Tale in Four Parts" (1919), which can be seen as one story or four distinct texts unified under one title, and to what is called the "exploded" mini-cycle: one whose component stories are published with intervening stories between them rather than consecutively. For each mini-cycle, the analysis is based on close reading of both the linking elements—character, imagery, symbolism, and so forth—and the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of the mini-cycle’s being made up of distinct stories rather than constructed as one long narrative.Mandarins: Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
By Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Charles Dewolf. 2007
Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the…
shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a cast of characters at odds with the society around them, singular portraits that soar effortlessly toward the universal. "What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?" Akutagawa once mused. Both piercing intelligence and "useful melancholy" buoy this remarkable collection. Mandarins contains three stories published in English for the first time: "An Evening Conversation," "An Enlightened Husband," and "Winter."American Gothic Tales
By Joyce Carol Oates. 1996
This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at…
how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers.The 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 Official Report on Human Activity (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
By Kim D. Hunter. 2018
The Official Report on Human Activity by kim d. hunter, which is neither official nor a report, is a collection…
of long stories that are linked by reoccurring characters and their personal struggles in societies rife with bigotry, in which media technology and capitalism have run amok. These stories approach the holy trinity of gender, race, and class at a slant. They are concerned with the process and role of writing intertwined with the roles of music and sound. The four stories range from the utterly surreal—a factory worker seeking recognition for his writing gives birth to a small black elephant with a mysterious message on its hide—to the utterly real—a nerdy black teen’s summer away from home takes a turn when he encounters half-white twins on the run from the police. Prominently known as a Detroit poet, hunter creates illusions and magic while pulling back the curtain to reveal humanity—the good, bad, and absurd. Readers will find their minds expanded and their conversations flowing after finishing The Official Report on Human Activity. The Official Report on Human Activity is sure to appeal to readers of literary fiction, particularly those interested in postmodernism and social justice.Devotion
By Patti Smith. 2017
From the renowned artist and author Patti Smith, an inspired exploration of the nature of creative invention A work of…
creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing. The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.Running Mother and Other Stories (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By Songfen Guo. 2009
Guo Songfen's short stories are masterful psychological portraits that play with the echoes of history and the nature of identity.…
One of the few modernists to truly capture the fallout from such events as the February 28th Incident and the White Terror, Guo Songfen illuminates the quiet core of his characters through a spare and immediate style that is at once a symptom and an allegory of the trauma in which they live.In "Running Mother," a man is torn between his fear of abandonment and his guilt over leaving his family, and therefore his symbolic home, behind. "Moon Seal" follows a woman caught between traditional and modern worlds. In "Wailing Moon," a wife learns a shocking secret after her husband's death, realizing he was never the man she thought him to be. Set in the United States and Taiwan, "Snow Blind" is a multigenerational triptych that portrays the consequences of spiritual malaise, and in "Brightly Shines the Stars Tonight," a general wrestles with issues of memory and self-perception in the final moments before his execution. Guo Songfen's stories play with the hazards of miscommunication, the malevolence of human will, the arbitrary nature of fate, and the burden of historical circumstance. As the general discovers, life is a game of chess, the outcome of which is never certain though it might be logically designed. Showcasing the best of Taiwan's modernist style, these stories are not only an indictment of the human condition but also a powerful comment on the experience of postretrocession Taiwan.To the Stars and Other Stories (Russian Library)
By Fyodor Sologub. 2022
A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane…
of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane.Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.Voices of the Lost and Found: Voices Of The Lost And Found
By Dorene O'Brien. 2007