Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 8506 items
The Best American Travel Writing 2021 (The Best American Series)
By Jason Wilson. 2021
&“The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person&’s experience in some other physical place…
and culture,&” writes Padma Lakshmi in her introduction, &“and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space.&” The essays in this year&’s Best American Travel Writing are an antidote to the isolation of the year 2020, giving us views into experiences unlike our own and taking us on journeys we could not take ourselves. From the lively music of West Africa, to the rich culinary traditions of Muslims in Northwest China, to the thrill of a hunt in Alaska, this collection is a treasure trove of diverse places and cultures, providing the comfort, excitement, and joy of feeling elsewhere. THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2021 INCLUDES KIESE MAKEBA LAYMON • LESLIE JAMISON • BILL BUFORD • JON LEE ANDERSON • MEGHAN DAUM LIGAYA MISHAN • PAUL THEROUX and othersThe Best American Short Stories 2013 (The Best American Series)
By Elizabeth Strout. 2013
&“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch…
location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,&” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. &“It&’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.&” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world. In &“Miss Lora,&” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the &“Magic Man.&” Kirstin Valdez Quade&’s &“Nemecia&” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham&’s &“The Tunnel&” is a tragic love story about a mother&’s declining health and her daughter&’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink&’s &“Breatharians&” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents&’ estrangement.&“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one&’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,&” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. &“Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.&”Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement
By Toni Morrison. 2009
Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the…
meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.As Americans we often take our freedom of speech for granted. When we talk about censorship we talk about China, the former Soviet Union, or the Middle East. But recent political developments—including the passage of the Patriot Act—have shined a spotlight on profound acts of censorship in our own backyard. Burn This Book features a sterling roster of award-winning writers offering their incisive, uncensored views on this most essential topic, including such revered literary heavyweights as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman, and Nadine Gordimer, among others.Both provocative and timely, Burn This Book is certain to inspire strong opinions and ignite spirited, serious dialogue.Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself
By Michael J. Rosen. 1989
“Thurber is. . . a landmark in American humor. . . he is the funniest artist who ever lived.” — New…
RepublicJames Thurber spent most of his career at the New Yorker magazine, drawing cartoons and writing essays and stories. Collecting Himself is a one-of-a-kind compilation of James Thurber's vintage writings, featuring previously unanthologized articles, essays, interviews, reviews, cartoons, parodies, as well as Thurber's reflections on his work in theater and at the New Yorker. An eclectic body of work that offers a glimpse into Thurber the man, the philosopher, and the critic.The Artist of Disappearance: Three Novellas
By Anita Desai. 2011
Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction&“The excellent strength [the novellas] share is a gracefulness and dreamlike sonority, reminiscent of…
writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and W.G. Sebald, wherein strange evolutions of solitary lives are the rule, and readers are held by the stately, hypnotic dignity of the voice that tells them.&” – San Francisco ChronicleSet in modern India, these three novellas move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement. An unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures where he discovers a surprise "relic." A translator blurs the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unraveling her desires and achievements. In the title novella, a hermit hidden away in the woods with a secret is discovered by a film crew, which compels him to withdraw even further until he magically disappears . . . Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these novellas remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer. &“Desai, at her best, offers enchanting, subtle, and deeply observed portraits of layered characters trapped between worlds.&” – Daily Beast&“Lingers in the memory the same way these landscapes and people of India prove impossible to forget.&” – Boston GlobeTranslator Translated: A Novella
By Anita Desai. 2011
Distraught by her own lack of accomplishment -- especially in comparison to that of a childhood rival who has become…
a famous and successful publisher -- a middle-aged woman has the opportunity of a lifetime: to translate the work of an unknown literary star and, in the process, impress the woman she most admires.The Best American Short Stories 2014 (The Best American Series)
By Heidi Pitlor. 2014
“The literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” — Shelf Awareness…
for ReadersThe Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as “a new classic of American fiction.” Egan “possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart” (New York Times Book Review).The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 (The Best American Series)
By Daniel Handler. 2014
“Lively, eclectic and surprising.” — Minneapolis Star TribuneDaniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the enormously popular young adult series A Series of…
Unfortunate Events, takes over as editor for this volume. He will work with the students of 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs to compile new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and other category-defying gems, ensuring that “if you need to fall in love with reading again — or just want a reminder that high school students deserve a lot more than their reading lists give them — then this is the book for you” (Bust).The Best American Essays 2021 (The Best American Series)
By Robert Atwan. 2021
A collection of the year&’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz&“The world is abundant…
even in bad times,&” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, &“it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.&” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year.The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER • HILTON ALS • GABRIELLE HAMILTON • RUCHIR JOSHI • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD• CLAIRE MESSUD • WESLEY MORRIS • BETH NGUYEN • JESMYN WARD and othersThe Best American Essays 2020 (The Best American Series)
By André Aciman, Robert Atwan. 2020
A collection of the year&’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. &“An…
essay is the child of uncertainty,&” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. &“The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.&” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father&’s confrontation of his son&’s illness, to a divorcée&’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and othersThree Gothic Novels
By Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, William Beckford. 1968
The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and…
exotic settings.This volume, with its erudite introduction by Mario Praz, presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: The Castle of Otranto, published pseudonymously in 1765, is one of the first of the genre and the most truly Gothic of the three. Vathek (1786), an oriental tale by an eccentric millionaire, exotically combines Gothic romanticism with the vivacity of The Arabian Nights and is a narrative tour de force. The story of Frankenstein (1818) and the monster he created is as spine-chilling today as it ever was; as in all Gothic novels, horror is the keynote.Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs
By John Pilger. 2004
Tell Me No Lies is a celebration of the very best investigative journalism, and includes writing by some of the…
greatest practitioners of the craft: Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre; Paul Foot on the Lockerbie cover-up; Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s; Gunter Wallraff, the great German undercover reporter; Jessica Mitford on 'The American Way of Death'; Martha Gelhorn on the liberation of the death camp at Dachau. The book - a selection of articles, broadcasts and books extracts that revealed important and disturbing truths - ranges from across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past fifty years. Along the way it bears witness to epic injustices committed against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Palestine. John Pilger sets each piece of reporting in its context and introduces the collection with a passionate essay arguing that the kind of journalism he celebrates here is being subverted by the very forces that ought to be its enemy. Taken as a whole, the book tells an extraordinary 'secret history' of the modern era. It is also a call to arms to journalists everywhere - before it is too late.Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship
By Bee Rowlatt, May Witwit. 2010
A London mum and Iraqi teacher should have nothing in common. Yet now, despite their differences, they're the firmest of…
friends . . . Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit is a touching and poignant portrait of an unlikely friendship.Would you brave gun-toting militias for a cut and blow dry?May's a tough-talking, hard-smoking, lecturer in English. She's also an Iraqi from a Sunni-Shi'ite background living in Baghdad, dodging bullets before breakfast, bargaining for high heels in bombed-out bazaars and battling through blockades to reach her class of Jane Austen-studying girls. Bee, on the other hand, is a London mum of three, busy fighting off PTA meetings and chicken pox, dealing with dead cats and generally juggling work and family while squabbling with her globe-trotting husband over the socks he leaves lying around the house.They should have nothing in common.But when a simple email brings them together, they discover a friendship that overcomes all their differences of culture, religion and age. Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad is the story of two women who share laughter and tears, and swap their confidences, dreams and fears. And, between the grenades, the gossip, the jokes and the secrets, they also hatch an ingenious plan to help May escape the bombings of Baghdad . . .Bee Rowlatt is a former show-girl turned BBC World Service journalist. A mother of three and would-be do-gooder, she can find keeping her career going while caring for her three daughters (and husband) pretty tough, even in leafy North London. May Witwit is an Iraqi expert in Chaucer and sender of emails depicting kittens in fancy dress. She is prepared to face every hazard imaginable to make that all-important hairdresser's appointment.'It was a very momentous day, the day on which I was to be slaughtered' Bringing together tales of melancholy…
and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to works of contemporary fiction, it includes Hoffmann's hallucinatory portrait of terror and insanity 'The Sandman'; Chamisso's influential black masterpiece 'Peter Schlemiel', where a man barters his own shadow; Kafka's chilling, disturbing satire 'In the Penal Colony'; the Dadaist surrealism of Kurt Schwitters' 'The Onion'; and Bachmann's modern fairy tale 'The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran'. Macabre, dreamlike and expressing deep unconscious fears, these stories are also spiked with unsettling humour, showing stylistic daring as well as giving insight into the darkest recesses of the human condition.Peter Wortsman's powerful translations are accompanied by brief overviews of the lives of each author, and an introduction discussing the notion of 'angst' and the stories' place in the context of German history.Translated, selected and edited with an introduction by Peter WortsmanThe Tales of Ise
By Donald Keene and Peter MacMillan, Peter Macmillan. 2016
One of the three seminal works of Japanese literature, this beautiful collection of poems and tales offers an unparalleled insight…
into ancient Japan.Along with the Tale of Genji and One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, The Tales of Ise is considered one of the three most important works of Japanese literature. A poem-tale collection from the early Heian period, it contains many stories of amorous adventures, faithful friendship and travels in exile, framing the exquisite poems at the work's heart. The Tales of Ise has influenced waka, Noh, tales and diaries since the time it was written, and is still the source of endless inspiration in novels, poetry, manga and cartoons. This volume has been translated by Peter MacMillan and includes a preface by the renowned Japanologist Donald Keene.'MacMillan's Tales of Ise adds to the treasures of Japanese literature that can now be enjoyed in English translation. It is the most poetic translation of this work to date and establishes MacMillan as an outstanding translator of Japanese poetry' - Donald KeeneTales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings
By Alexander Pushkin. 1998
Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed…
his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. The Tales of Belkin, his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them 'The Shot', in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque 'The Undertaker'. Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment Roslavlev and the Egyptian Nights, the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. A Journey to Arzrum, the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.Tales from 1,001 Nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba And Other Favourites
By Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons, Robert Irwin, Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons,, Nick Laird. 2010
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end…
this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.The Sun Book Of Short Stories
By Various. 2007
To celebrate the launch of Quick Reads in 2006, The Sun ran a short story competition called 'Get Britain Reading'…
in order to find the hidden talent among its ten million readers.It was judged by Sun columnist and bestselling author Jane Moore.The Sun Book of Short Stories contains a selection of the winning entries.They may make you smile, laugh or cry - but all of them are sure to entertain you.Sugar & Spice
By Various. 2013
'The imprint that has legitimised erotica for women.'Publishing NewsThis is the long-awaited first anthology of Black Lace erotic short stories.…
The book contains 20 unique, original and arousing tales guaranteed to ignite and excite. With contributions from women from Europe, America and Australia, this compendium provides a variety of settings and themes. Explicitly sexual and highly entertaining, Sugar and Spice is a kaleidoscope of female fantasy. This is unashamed erotic indulgence for women.Winter Brides: A Year of Weddings Novella Collection (A Year of Weddings Novella)
By Denise Hunter, Deborah Raney, Betsy St. Amant. 2014
Cozy up by the fireplace for three heartwarming stories of love and weddings in the wintertime.The honor of your presence…
is requested at three winter weddings . . .A December Bride by Denise HunterWhen Layla O'Reilly and Seth Murphy make their engagement public, she knows it's only to convince a major client that she's high-society enough to work for his agency. Seth has secretly loved Layla for years, but she&’s never given him the time of day. For Layla, this engagement of convenience is the chance to save her career. And for Seth, it's the chance to finally win her heart.A January Bride by Deborah RaneyNovelist Madeleine Houser arranges a temporary office in a local bed and breakfast to escape the distracting renovations on her own house. Although she's never laid eyes on the inn's owner, an unlikely friendship blossoms between them as they leave daily notes for each other, and before long, Maddie finds herself falling for her mysterious host—a man likely many years her senior—and a man she's never even met.A February Bride by Betsy St. AmantHistory repeats itself when Allie Andrews escapes the church on her wedding day—wearing the same wedding dress passed down for generations of women in her family, all women with histories of failed marriages. Allie loves Marcus but fears she's destined to repeat her family's mistakes. When thrown unexpectedly together for a wedding months later, Allie and Marcus discover their own story might be far from over.