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Showing 1 - 20 of 40 items
By Alan Brown, Gabrielle Roy. 1982
By Hugh Nissenson. 1988
Short stories and journal entries which describe the Jewish experience from the turn of the century to the aftermath of…
the Holocaust and the beginning of the state of Israel. 1988.By Harriet Harvey Wood, P. D James. 2001
Published to promote and support the work of the Royal National Institute for the Blind's Talking Books, Sightlines includes pieces…
from many of Britain's foremost writers, all of whom have contributed their work without fee. Introduced by Sue Townsend, who recently lost her sight, Sightlines includes many previously unpublished stories, essays, and poems by authors such as Louis de Bernieres, Antonia Fraser, Frederick Forsyth, Doris Lessing, A.S.Byatt, and Reginald Hill. 2001.By Rudy Wiebe. 1995
These twenty-two pieces by the Governor General's Award winning author Rudy Wiebe include fictional short stories often set in the…
West or the Arctic, as well as memories of his Mennonite childhood and his conflict with the community. c1995.By Garth Nix, Kathleen Jennings, Tehani Wessely, Tansy Rayner Roberts. 2015
This collection of twenty-two stories features an array of women challenging conventional wisdom about appropriate female behavior throughout history. The…
protagonists include both the iconic and all-but-forgotten. Authors include, among others, Garth Nix, Jane Yolen, Liz Barr, Kirstyn McDermott, and Foz Meadows. 2015By Walter Dean Myers. 1999
The life of an African princess who was about to be killed in a ritual sacrifice in 1850 when she…
was rescued by Commander Forbes, taken to England, and presented to Queen Victoria as Sarah Forbes Bonetta. The queen became Sarah's protector and godmother to her first child. For grades 5-8By Marietta Holley, Jane Curry. 1983
A contemporary of Mark Twain, Holley was famous in her day and often compared to him. Samantha "rastles" with questions…
concerning history's treatment of women, the need for women's suffrage, women and the church, social status, role assumptions, and more. Of course, many of her sage observations still resonate for us. Adult. UnratedBy David Sedaris. 2009
A humorous memoir of bizarre and absurd experiences with family, friends, and strangers. The title essay recounts the author's visit…
to a nudist colony, where he painfully faces coming to terms with his naked self. Strong language and some descriptions of sex. 1997By Avner Mandelman. 2005
Nine stories about the Israeli experience. In "Terror" a father beats the son who fails to stand up for his…
five-year-old brother, thus instilling the precept that, right or wrong, family comes first, even before justice or fear. Strong language and some violence. Sophie Brody Medal. 2005By Rivka Galchen. 2016
Rivka Galchen's Little Labors is a droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies and…
literature Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book--a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen's new book--contains a list of "Things That Make One Nervous." And wouldn't the blessed event top almost anyone's list? Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen's puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of "women writers"; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favorite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today's new chic color for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies gold mines; babies as tiny Godzillas ... Little Labors-atomized and exploratory, conceptually byzantine and freshly forthright-delights.By Renee Rodin. 2010
Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, Subject to Change is a series…
of portraits along the road of a life well-lived. These stories are articulate, intelligent, passionate records of how encounters with others have changed and shaped the humanity, character and community - the "subject" - of the writer.By Jason Grunebaum, Uday Prakash. 2012
A street sweeper discovers a cache of black market money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage…
mistress; an Untouchable races to reclaim his life that's been stolen by an upper-caste identity thief; a slum baby's head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter and smarter, while his family tries to find a cure. One of India's most original and audacious writers, Uday Prakash, weaves three tales of living and surviving in today's globalized India. In his stories, Prakash portrays realities about caste and class with an authenticity absent in most English-language fiction about South Asia. Sharply political but free of heavy handedness.By Wayne P. Lammers, Junzo Shono. 1992
"Shono conveys both intimacy and distance, tranquility and tension, as he explores the shifting relations between husband and wife, father…
and son, brother and sister." -Publishers Weekly"These stories are so artful... they seem like the artless productions of life itself." -Kenyon College Book Review -- Kenyon College Book Review"This collection should be sipped and savored like warm sake." -Small PressWinner of the Pen Center West Award, this delicate collection of thirteen linked tales reveals the flow of daily life in the modern Japanese family. Junzo Shono's artful layering of commonplace events, images, and conversations has been compared to haiku poetry crossed with an Ozu film.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.By Chuck Klosterman. 2019
Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from…
the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong?A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties with the new generation of students. An obscure power pop band wrestles with its new-found fame when its song "Blizzard of Summer" becomes an anthem for white supremacists. A couple considers getting a medical procedure that will transfer the pain of childbirth from the woman to her husband. A woman interviews a hit man about killing her husband but is shocked by the method he proposes. A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50. A man sees a whale struck by lightning, and knows that everything about his life has to change. A lawyer grapples with the unintended side effects of a veterinarian's rabies vaccination. Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. If Saul Steinberg and Italo Calvino had adopted a child from a Romanian orphanage and raised him on Gary Larsen and Thomas Bernhard, he would still be nothing like Chuck Klosterman. They might be good company, though. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it, it marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.By Raymond Carver. 1985
More than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two…
of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver&’s literary development.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.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 Avner Mandelman. 2005
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shaped the consciousness of a generation, but never before has it been brought to life in…
such vivid and telling prose. Part Tim O'Brien and part Bernard Malamud, Avner Mandelman's Talking to the Enemy ranges from boisterously entertaining tales of domestic squabbles to dark narratives from disillusioned soldiers. Awarded the Jewish Book Award when it was published in Canada and supplemented with recent stories, Talking to the Enemy is the powerful American debut of an international favorite."Pity" draws the reader through the descending layers of horror of an Israeli soldier who is party to an assassination attempt gone terribly wrong. In "Terror" a man recalls a traumatic childhood incident that taught him family comes first--before justice, before fear. On a lighter note, "Mish-Mash" is a comical tornado set off when a winning lottery ticket is discovered in a less-than-conventional family, best described as "Sholem Aleichem writes Peyton Place on speed" (Montreal Gazette). Underneath their often brash exteriors Mandelman's characters search for reconciliation and fulfillment in a land where conflict is a part of everyday life. Mandelman ensnares readers in intense plot-driven narratives that are pierced through with unexpected and ingenious twists. Beneath the surface of the often sparse prose lies evocative, unanswered questions about humanity. Every story delivers a thoroughly engrossing read with an unforgettable ending.By Andrei Codrescu, Barry Gifford, Thomas A. Mccarthy. 2003
"Everything I have to say about race and religion and politics is in the novels," declares Barry Gifford. The Rooster…
Trapped in the Reptile Room gathers generous portions of all thirteen novels and novellas, as well as first-person essays, generous helpings of poetry, journalism, and a new interview with the author. The broad contours of an episodic output emerge--a full-length view of the freaks and freakish incidents that populate Gifford's unique human comedy. A world, as Lula, the author's favorite of all his characters, reflects, "wild at heart and weird on top."The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room provides essential reading for anyone after the soul of American writing.