Download or read book Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona written by Ryan Harty and published by Iowa Short Fiction Award. This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the broad, dry, big-sky land of Arizona, a series of short stories unfold--each one revolving around ordinary characters who confront failing relationships, mortality, and the ever-present reality of the desert.

Download or read book Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona written by Ryan Harty and published by Iowa Short Fiction Award. This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the broad, dry, big-sky land of Arizona, a series of short stories unfold--each one revolving around ordinary characters who confront failing relationships, mortality, and the ever-present reality of the desert.

Download or read book Rim to River written by Tom Zoellner and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sharp examination of Arizona by a nationally acclaimed writer, Rim to River follows Tom Zoellner on a 790-mile walk across his home state as he explores key elements of Arizona culture, politics, and landscapes. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about a vibrant and baffling place.

Download or read book You Never Get It Back written by Cara Blue Adams and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms. Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.

Download or read book Short Story Theories written by and published by Brill. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of perspectives and take the form of historical and aesthetic considerations, gender-centered accounts, and examinations that attend to reader-response theory, cognitive patterns, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, postmodern techniques, and contemporary uses of minimalist forms. Looking ahead, this collection traces the evolution of the short story from Chaucer through the Romantic writings of Poe to the postmodern developments and into the twenty-first century. This volume will prove of interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of the short story and of literature in general. In addition, the readability and analytical transparence of these essays make them accessible to a more general readership interested in fiction.

Download or read book Don t Forget to Write for the Secondary Grades written by 826 National and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantastic strategies for getting high school students excited about writing This book offers 50 creative writing lesson plans from the imaginative and highly acclaimed 826 National writing labs. Created as a resource to reach all students (even those most resistant to creative writing), the off-beat and attention-grabbing lessons include such gems as "Literary Facebooks," where students create a mock Facebook profile based on their favorite literary character, as well as highly practical lessons like the "College Application Essay Boot Camp." These writing lessons are written by experts—and favorite novelists, actors, and other entertainers pitched in too. Road-tested lessons from a stellar national writing lab Inventive and unique lessons that will appeal to even the most difficult-to-reach students Includes a chart linking lessons to the Common Core State Standards 826 National is an organization committed to supporting teachers, publishing student work, and offering services for English language learners.

Download or read book Safe as Houses written by Marie-Helene Bertino and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In "Free Ham," a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. "Has my ham done anything wrong?" she asks when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it. In "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph," a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy "North Of." In "The Idea of Marcel," Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over.

Download or read book This Day in History written by Anthony Varallo and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the verge of maturity--where parents are distant or absent, friendships are often more accidental than deliberate, and restless angst is common--Anthony Varallo's adolescent protagonists dissect the world, and their place in it, with keen perception. This Day in History deftly collects their moments of discovery. “There's a feeling I get whenever I enter an unfamiliar house, as if a secret inventory has been handed to me, and I am made to understand that the sofa cushions are stained underneath, the coffee table nursing one gimp leg, the books along the bookcase stolen from summer rental, and the dining room table used only for Christmas and taxes,” the narrator confesses in the first of Varallo's twelve stories. Here, a birthday party for an unpopular classmate reveals an adult world both familiar and utterly strange. In subsequent stories a young girl longs to be a part of her best friend's family, only to discover the family is less than ideal; two sisters recall the childhood houses they grew up--and apart--in, places inseparable from each woman's notion of the other; and a mother and son set off on a bold and hopeless errand, their suburban neighborhood momentarily transformed into a stage.As these children stand on the brink of adulthood, unsure how to move forward, striving to make sense of the world around them, they often discover that the distance between themselves and others is no nearly so great as first imagined. Funny, sad, and hopeful, Varallo's stories make a gentle argument for connection and community and, in doing so, seek to extend our sympathy toward the world.

Download or read book The Woods written by Janice Obuchowski and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas—a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems—worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions—they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape. What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that’s somehow gotten by all these years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable.

Download or read book Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories written by Edward Hamlin and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories spans the globe, taking us from Belfast to Brazil, Morocco to Manhattan. The teenaged daughter of an IRA assassin flees Northern Ireland only to end up in Baby Doc’s terrifying Haiti. An American woman who’s betrayed her brother only to lose him to a Taliban bullet comes face to face with her demons during a vacation in Morocco. A famed photojournalist must find a way to bring her life’s work to closure before she goes blind, a quest that changes her understanding of the very physics of light. By turns innocent and canny, the characters of Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories must learn to improvise—quickly—when confronted with stark choices they never dreamed they’d have to make. Lyrical, immaculately constructed and deeply felt, these nine stories take us far beyond our comfort zones and deep into the wilds of the human heart.

Download or read book When Mystical Creatures Attack written by Kathleen Founds and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In When Mystical Creatures Attack!, Ms. Freedman’s high school English class writes essays in which mystical creatures resolve the greatest sociopolitical problems of our time. Students include Janice Gibbs, “a feral child with excessive eyeliner and an anti-authoritarian complex that would be interesting were it not so ill-informed,” and Cody Splunk, an aspiring writer working on a time machine. Following a nervous breakdown, Ms. Freedman corresponds with Janice and Cody from an insane asylum run on the capitalist model of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where inmates practice water aerobics to rebuild their Psychiatric Credit Scores. The lives of Janice, Cody, and Ms. Freedman are revealed through in-class essays, letters, therapeutic journal exercises, an advice column, a reality show television transcript, a diary, and a Methodist women’s fundraising cookbook. (Recipes include “Dark Night of the Soul Food,” “Render Unto Caesar Salad,” and “Valley of the Shadow of Death by Chocolate Cake.”) In “Virtue of the Month,” the ghost of Ms. Freedman’s mother argues that suicide is not a choice. In “The Un-Game,” Janice’s chain-smoking nursing home charge composes a dirty limerick. In “The Hall of Old-Testament Miracles,” wax figures of Bible characters come to life, hungry for Cody’s flesh. Set against a South Texas landscape where cicadas hum and the air smells of taco stands and jasmine flowers, these stories range from laugh-out-loud funny to achingly poignant. This surreal, exuberant collection mines the dark recesses of the soul while illuminating the human heart.

Download or read book Lungs Full of Noise written by Tessa Mellas and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This prize-winning debut of twelve stories explores a femininity that is magical, raw, and grotesque. Aghast at the failings of their bodies, this cast of misfit women and girls sets out to remedy the misdirection of their lives in bold and reckless ways. Figure skaters screw skate blades into the bones of their feet to master elusive jumps. A divorcee steals the severed arm of her ex to reclaim the fragments of a dissolved marriage. Following the advice of a fashion magazine, teenaged girls binge on grapes to dye their skin purple and attract prom dates. And a college freshman wages war on her roommate from Jupiter, who has inadvertently seduced all the boys in their dorm with her exotic hermaphroditic anatomy. But it isn’t just the characters who are in crisis. In Lungs Full of Noise, personal disasters mirror the dissolution of the natural world. Written in lyrical prose with imagination and humor, Tessa Mellas’s collection is an aviary of feathered stories that are rich, emotive, and imbued with the strength to suspend strange new worlds on delicate wings.

Download or read book The Water Diviner and Other Stories written by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking collection, Sri Lankan immigrants grapple with events that challenge perspectives and alter lives. A volunteer faces memories of wartime violence when she meets a cantankerous old lady on a Meals on Wheels route. A lonely widow obsessed with an impending apocalypse meets an oddly inspiring man. A maidservant challenges class divisions when she becomes an American professor’s wife. An angry tenant fights suspicion when her landlord is burgled. Hardened inmates challenge a young jail psychiatrist’s competence. A father wonders whether to expose his young son’s bully at a basketball game. A student facing poverty courts a benefactor. And in the depths of an isolated Wyoming winter, a woman tries to resist a con artist. These and other tales explore the immigrant experience with a piercing authenticity.

Download or read book Father Guards the Sheep written by Sari Rosenblatt and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.

Download or read book The Boundaries of Their Dwelling written by Blake Sanz and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she’s never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne’er-do-well opens a Catholic-themed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border. In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.

Download or read book Here Beneath Low Flying Planes written by Merrill Feitell and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2004-10 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in Merrill Feitell’s award-winning collection, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, examine the fleeting and unexpected moments of human connection, reminding us of the indelible impact we have on one another no matter how insignificant or anonymous we might feel under our huge, collective sky. Feitell’s characters deal with shifting dynamics in relationships—whether they be best friends, lovers, family, or even strangers—that consistently leave them torn between two places or commitments. In the title story, Janie has undergone a painful childbirth experience and her group of friends must pioneer new dynamics while she wonders how to bring her old self back. In “Bike New York!” amid thirty thousand cyclists, a man on the brink of marriage meets a young girl who, in a tiny Brooklyn bakery, affirms both who he has been and who he is going to be. On this short detour from normal life he comes to understand “the funny thing about finding your way in the world. There was a place laid out for you . . . and even as you stepped into it, happy for the chance to rest, you wondered how you ever ended up there.” Funny, big-hearted, and deft, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes navigates the reader through the life that happens when you’re planning other things. It is a collection of experiences, roads not taken, and the intense and unforeseen sparks of connection we hope for.

Download or read book November Storm written by Robert Oldshue and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-10 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In each of the stories in Robert Oldshue's debut collection, the characters want to be decent but find that hard to define. In the first story, an elderly couple is told that delivery of their Thanksgiving dinner has been canceled due to an impending blizzard. Unwilling to have guests but nothing to serve them, they make a run to the grocery, hoping to get there and back before the snow, but crash their car into the last of their neighbors. In "The Receiving Line," a male prostitute tricks a closeted suburban schoolteacher only to learn that the trick is on him. "The Field Of Machpelah" features a twenty-something, premed dropout who is guarding a cemetery when a man asks to see his wife's prepaid plot before the hospital disconnects her life support. In "Home Depot," a family uses their foul-mouthed love to survive the birth of a malformed child. A psychiatrist confronts his fear of the past to help a patient in the present in "Mass Mental." In "The Woman On The Road," a twelve-year-old girl negotiates the competing demands of her faith and her family as she is bat mitzvahed in the feminist ferment of the 1980s. The lessons she learns are the lessons learned by a ten-year-old boy in "Fergus B. Fergus," after which, in "Summer Friend," two women and one man renegotiate their sixty-year intimacy when sadly, but inevitably, one of them gets ill. "The Home Of The Holy Assumption" offers a benediction. A quadriplegic goes missing at a nursing home. Was she assumed? In the process of finding out, all are reminded that caring for others, however imperfectly--even laughably--is the only shot at assumption we have. In upstate New York, a November storm is one that comes early in the season. If it catches people off-guard, it can change them in the ways Oldshue's characters are changed by different but equally surprising storms"--