Download or read book Birds of America written by Lorrie Moore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories that’s “one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" (The New York Times Book Review). A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language. From the opening story, "Willing"—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People" ("There is nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being"), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is. In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties. In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.

Download or read book The United Stories of America written by Rolf Lundén and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the American short story composite, or short story cycle, a neglected form of writing consisting of autonomous stories interlocking into a whole. The critical work done on this genre has so far focused on the closural strategies of the composites, on how unity is accomplished in these texts. This study takes into consideration, to a greater degree than earlier criticism, the short story composite as an open work, emphasizing the tension between the independent stories and the unified work, between the discontinuity and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the totalizing strategies, on the other. The discussion of the genre is illustrated with references to numerous American short story composites.

Download or read book Short Stories of the New America written by Various and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Stories of the New America: Interpreting the America of this age to high school boys and girls by various and edited by Mary Augusta Laselle is a collection of stories that help boys and girls understand what life was like for the first Europeans to settle in the new world. Each of its stories give a unique glimpse into history. The tales it contains are A Little Kansas Leaven, The Survivors, Singmaster, The Wildcat, The Citizen, The Indian of the Reservation, The Night Attack, The Path of Glory, Sergt. Warren Comes Back from France, The Coward, and Château-Thierry.

Download or read book The Last Chicken in America A Novel in Stories written by Ellen Litman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-09-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve linked, wryly humorous stories about an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world. Masha is just out of high school when her family arrives in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. With touching lightheartedness and tremendous humor, these stories trace her struggles and those of other Russians in the community to find their own place in the new society--seniors alienated from their children, spouses trying to hold their families together while grappling with unemployment and depression, young adults searching for love. In "Dancers" the home of a married couple is invaded by a pair of hedonistic and financially unstable performers. The hero of "The Trajectory of Frying Pans" falls for a coworker who may or may not be trapped in a green-card marriage. In "About Kamyshinskiy" a man, living under the scrutiny of his daughters and neighbors, is trying to start over after the death of his wife. This is an impressive debut about the sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious collision of cultures, religions, and generations in contemporary America.

Download or read book Super America written by Anne Panning and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In settings as different as Honolulu, Hawaii, small-town Minnesota, and Taxco, Mexico, these nine stories and a novella show blue-collar characters struggling to achieve the American Dream—and sometimes alienating friends and family as they try to upgrade their working-class pedigree. Anne Panning’s people, despite their mixed record of success, make us root for them on their sometimes heartbreaking journeys of entrepreneurship, love, and loss. In “Tidal Wave Wedding” a tsunami in Honolulu yields surprising results for a couple on their honeymoon. In “All-U-Can-Eat,” a woman tries to stave off the investment of her inheritance into a restaurant specializing in frog legs. In the novella, “Freeze,” a teenage son’s future is forever complicated after a “life altering” accident confines his father to a wheelchair and accelerates the disintegration of his parents’ marriage. An eerie clinical replay of another accident—this one on a bicycle in Hawaii—is at the center of “What Happened,” and in the title story a college theater major gets caught up in his father’s exotic pets scheme. Panning’s stories show an acute awareness of place, and—whether it be a seventeenth-century former-monastery in Mexico, a suburban housing development in Minnesota, or a hard-luck laundromat on the Oregon coast—each setting often tells us something about the characters who occupy them. Sometimes sad and often funny, Super America takes risks with our notions about the American Dream through characters caught between their working-class roots and grandiose visions.

Download or read book The Atonement and Other Stories written by Louis Auchincloss and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1997-09-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gaze into the lives of the twentieth century’s wealthy and declining WASP establishment in these twelve stories by the author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax. No one else writes about the moral life of America’s moneyed class with anything approaching Louis Auchincloss’s understanding, sympathy, irony, and humor. In this, his first book of short fiction since the acclaimed Collected Stories, he again brings us news that no other writer can deliver, news about how America’s great families and fortunes are run and the axes and crises on which they turn. Here is how the privileged view their privilege—some with smugness, some with style, some with a crushing sense of civic and personal responsibility. Here is how the rich marry, how they divorce, and, more important, why. Here, definitively and indelibly, is the eastern seaboard’s Wasp establishment—sometimes in its glory, more often in its decline, and always with its values, assumptions, and increasingly fragile sense of self held up for our scrutiny by a master, the most subtle critic of American manners since Edith Wharton. Praise for The Atonement and Other Stories “The 12 stories collected in “The Atonement” reveal a writer at, or very near, the top of his form.” —Los Angeles Times “In this PC world, Auchincloss’ crisp, confident tales of the WASP elite almost qualify as guilty pleasures. These 12 stories . . . will satisfy longtime fans and initiates alike with their portraits of investment bankers, lawyers, and socialites testing the limits of silver-plated social niches . . . . As usual, Auchincloss etches out the moral dilemmas of the blue-chip social stratum with reassuring clarity. A” —Entertainment Weekly “Fragile, often smug, and sometimes silly characters populate this noteworthy collection . . . . these glimpses of the Eastern elite’s manners and moral quandaries will provide an accessible first taste for the Auchincloss novice and an enjoyable read for longtime fans.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Download or read book Go East Young Man written by Sinclair Lewis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brand-new collection of Sinclair Lewis's prolific body of short fiction, focusing on the author's primary concerns: the issue of class, work and money in America.

Download or read book Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail written by Bobbie Ann Mason and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2002-07-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable book, the author of Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and other award-winning books gives us powerful new stories that capture the restless energy of life in contemporary America. The characters here are travelers and seekers, feeling their way toward, or away from the defining moments of their lives. They roam out into the world to England, Alaska, Texas, Saudi Arabia, or ricochet back home to Kentucky, ceaselessly searching, exploring, testing for limits. I felt strange, says Chrissy in With Jazz, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place. In Charger, a teenage boy races along the interstate, seeking the father who abandoned him years before. In Rolling into Atlanta, a young woman searches for the kind of authenticity she remembers from her rural childhood. In Proper Gypsies, Nancy deals with the shock of being robbed in London. In The Funeral Side, Sandra comes home to try to fulfill her responsibilities to her family, but yearns to escape again to Alaska and the northern lights that haunt her. Writing in the spare, precise, beautifully nuanced language for which she is famous, Bobbie Ann Mason expands her art here in dramatic and illuminating fashion. These fascinating stories bring to life surprising individuals whose journeys shine a bright light on life as it is lived by many Americans today. Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is a beautiful book by one of America's finest writers, a book full of drama, humor, and startling insights into the timeless longings of the human heart.

Download or read book The Hohenzollerns in America written by Stephen Leacock and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Board the S.S. America. Wednesday At last our embarkation is over, and we are at sea. I am so glad it is done. It was dreadful to see poor Uncle William and Uncle Henry and Cousin Willie and Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria, coming up the gang-plank into the steerage, with their boxes on their backs. They looked so different in their rough clothes. Uncle William is wearing an old blue shirt and a red handkerchief round his neck, and his hair looks thin and unkempt, and his moustache draggled and his face unshaved. His eyes seem watery and wandering, and his little withered arm so pathetic. Is it possible he was always really like that? At the top of the gang-plank he stood still a minute, his box still on his back, and said, "This then is the pathway to Saint Helena." I heard an officer down on the dock call up, "Now then, my man, move on there smartly, please." And I saw some young roughs pointing at Uncle and laughing and saying, "Look at the old guy with the red handkerchief. Is he batty, eh?" The forward deck of the steamer, the steerage deck, which is the only place that we are allowed to go, was crowded with people, all poor and with their trunks and boxes and paper bags all round them. When Uncle set down his box, there was soon quite a little crowd around him, so that I could hardly see him. But I could hear them laughing, and I knew that they were "taking a rise out of him," as they call it, -just as they did in the emigration sheds on shore. I heard Uncle say, "Let wine be brought: I am faint;" and some one else said, "Yes, let it," and there arose a big shout of laughter.

Download or read book Gallegher written by Richard Harding Davis and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Middleman written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile . . . profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture’s traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book The Silverado Squatters written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 1910 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Louis Stevenson's volume grew out of a few weeks' sojourn of the author and his wife in a deserted miner's cabin on the heights of Mount Saint Helena, in the California Coast Range. In a series of short sketches or chapters, Mr. Stevenson describes the incidents which befell him and his companion. One can conceive that a most entertaining history might be written of a summer's residence in a sequestered nook among stately and remote mountains. The smallest everyday affairs rise out of the commonplace in such quaint and picturesque circumstances, affording abundant matter for a ready writer to work upon.

Download or read book The Beautiful and Damned illustrated written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by Osmora Incorporated. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It portrays the Eastern elite during the Jazz Age, exploring New York café society. As in Fitzgerald's other novels, the characters are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The book is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's relationship with Zelda Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch, a 1910s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, his relationship with his wife, Gloria, his service in the army, and his alcoholism.[1][2] Toward the end of the novel, Fitzgerald references himself: You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read "This Side of Paradise." Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. will original illustrations

Download or read book Flying to America written by Donald Barthelme and published by Counterpoint Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barthelme (1931-1989) was one of the great 20th-century American absurdists. The 45 stories in this collection include stories Barthelme himself excluded from his two major collections and little that went previously unpublished. Packed with whimsical facts, Emma Green Is 81, which was the lead story in Barthelme's first book, concerns the verbose narrator's testy desire that Emma continue to finance the Journal of Tension Reduction, of which he is the editor.

Download or read book The Beautiful and Damned written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch, a 1910s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, and his courtship and relationship with his wife Gloria Gilbert. It describes his brief service in the Army during World War I, and the couple's post-war partying life in New York, and his later alcoholism. Gloria and Anthony's love story is much more than just a couple falling in love. Their story deals with the hardships of a relationship, especially when each character has a tendency to be selfish. Novel also explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after "the Great War" and in the early 1920s.

Download or read book Daisy Miller written by Henry James and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book America Street written by Anne Mazer and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen stories by American authors from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, including Duane Big Eagle, Nicholasa Mohr, Lensey Namioka, and Robert Cormier