Download or read book Little Sinners and Other Stories written by Karen Brown and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Brown’s Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of women and men grappling with the loss and pain of everyday existence, people inhabiting a suburban landscape haunted by ghosts: a mother who leaps from a ridge, a mistress found at the bottom of the Connecticut River, a father who dresses in a pale blue-custom suit—and disappears. The dead leave behind postcards, houses, bottles of sherry, bones. They become local legends, their stories part of the characters’ own: an expectant mother in an isolated cottage on Long Island Sound uncovers an unsettling secret in her backyard; a troubled housewife is lured to a dinner party by a teenage girl whose mother has vanished under mysterious circumstances; a woman and her lover swim the pools of their neighborhood under cover of darkness; a young heiress struggles with mortality and the abandonments in her past. These stories capture the domestic world in all its blighted promise—a world where women’s roles in housekeeping, marriage, childbirth, and sex have been all too well defined, and where the characters fashion, recklessly and passionately, their own methods of escape.
Download or read book We Sinners written by Hanna Pylväinen and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning debut novel—drawn from the author's own life experience—tells the moving story of a family of eleven in the American Midwest, bound together and torn apart by their faith The Rovaniemis and their nine children belong to a deeply traditional church (no drinking, no dancing, no TV) in modern-day Michigan. A normal family in many ways, the Rovaniemis struggle with sibling rivalry, parental expectations, and forming their own unique identities in such a large family. But when two of the children venture from the faith, the family fragments and a haunting question emerges: Do we believe for ourselves, or for each other? Each chapter is told from the distinctive point of view of a different Rovaniemi, drawing a nuanced, kaleidoscopic portrait of this unconventional family. The children who reject the church learn that freedom comes at the almost unbearable price of their close family ties, and those who stay struggle daily with the challenges of resisting the temptations of modern culture. With precision and potent detail, We Sinners follows each character on their journey of doubt, self-knowledge, acceptance, and, ultimately, survival.
Download or read book Sinners and the Sea written by Rebecca Kanner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the fate of the world rested on Noah's shoulders, the survival of the human race rested on hers.
Download or read book Combustible Sinners and Other Stories written by Myra Infante and published by Vao Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lissi Linares is a pastor's daughter whose love for others contrasts with her fear of eternal damnation. Little Jasmine "Jazzy Moon" Luna is determined to save Jesus from being crucified. Naida Cervantes hides a brutal secret behind shapeless, florid dresses. Hermana Gracie tries to set her son up with a good Christian girlfriend, only to make a surprising discovery. Zeke wants a new guitar and Ben wants a cool girlfriend, but what they find as migrant workers in Arkansas changes their desires. These individuals and others try to negotiate the often rocky intersection of faith and culture in seven independent but intertwining tales that explore life in an evangelical Christian, Mexican-American community. Frank, funny and heart-breakingly real, this volume explores themes of identity, culture, religion and sexuality in the context of a little-known subset of Hispanic culture.
Download or read book Boundless Deep and Other Stories written by Gen Del Raye and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-09 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance. At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.
Download or read book Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories written by Xhenet Aliu and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just down the highway from Connecticut’s Gold Coast is the state’s rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu’s Domesticated Wild Things: the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all. These are the children of immigrants who found boarded-up brass mills instead of the gilded streets of America; they’re the teenaged girls raised in the fluorescent glow of Greek diners, the middle-aged men with pump trucks and teratomas. These are people who have fled, or who should have. And if they are indeed familiar, it is because Aliu writes what is real, whether we ourselves, her readers, have seen it up close or not. And her stories make sense in a way that matters. A young mother buys into a real-estate investment seminar offered on an infomercial, only to be put back into her place by a bully in foreclosure. A closeted wrestler befriends a latchkey seven-year-old neighbor who harbors secrets of her own. A YMCA counselor tries to reclaim shoes stolen by a troubled young camper. What they share is a biting humor, an eye for the absurd, and fumbling attempts at human connection, all rendered irresistible—and as moving as they are amusing—by a writer whose work is at once edgy and endearing and prize winning for reasons any reader can appreciate.
Download or read book Saints and Sinners written by Edna O'Brien and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who-whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York-remind us of our own humanity. In Send My Roots Rain, Miss Gilhooley, a librarian, waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel-expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. The Irish workers of "The Shovel Kings" have pipe dreams of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland-exiles in both places. "Green Georgette" is a searing anatomy of class, through the eyes of a little girl; "Old Wounds" illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.
Download or read book The Sinners Garden written by William Sirls and published by BroadStreet Publishing Group LLC. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andy Kemp’s young life has been as ravaged as his scarred face. Disfigured by an abusive father, the teenager hides behind his books and an impenetrable wall of cynicism and anger. As Andy’s mother struggles to reconnect with him, his Uncle Rip returns transformed from a stint in prison and wants to be a mentor to the reclusive boy, doing everything he can to help end Andy’s pain. When Andy begins hearing strange music through his iPod and making near-prophetic announcements, Rip is convinced that what Andy is hearing is the voice of God. Elsewhere, police officer Heather Gerisch responds to a late-night breaking and entering in one of the poorest homes in town. She soon realizes that the masked prowler has left thousands of dollars in gift cards from a local grocery store. As the bizarre break-ins continue and Heather pursues the elusive “Summer Santa,” Andy and Rip discover an enormous and well-kept garden of wildflowers that seems to have grown overnight at an abandoned steel mill. The identity of the gardener surprises them all—and a spree of miracles transfigures this small town from a place of hopelessness into a place of healing and beauty.
Download or read book Sourdough and Other Stories written by Angela Slatter and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sinner written by Sierra Simone and published by Sierra Simone. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Romance of 2018! I'm not a good man, and I've never pretended to be. I don't believe in goodness or God or any happy ending that isn't paid for in advance. In fact, I've got my own personal holy trinity: in the name of money, sex, and Macallan 18, amen. So when the gorgeous, brilliant Zenny Iverson asks me to teach her about sex, I want to say yes, I really do. Unfortunately, there are several reasons to say no--reasons that even a very bad man like myself can't ignore. 1. She's my best friend's little sister. 2. She's too young for me. Like way too young. 3. She's a nun. Or about to be anyway. But I want her. I want her even with my best friend and God in the way, I want to teach her and touch her and love her, and I know that makes me something much worse than a very bad man. It makes me a sinner. And it's those very sins that are about to save me... ***Sinner is a standalone companion to Priest about Father Bell's brother Sean. You do not have to read Priest or Midnight Mass to read Sinner***
Download or read book With a Silken Thread and Other Stories written by Elizabeth Lynn Linton and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pins Needles written by Karen Brown and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction In Pins and Needles, Karen Brown explores the dynamics of love and longing between mother and child, husband and wife, close friends, and virtual strangers, often peeling back the facade of a seemingly stable suburban life to reveal the secrets and transgressions that even good people can be guilty of. In “She Fell to Her Knees,” Nell inherits the neglected house in which her mother died years before, and begins an affair with the neighbor. The narrator of “Apparitions,” who has recently returned the blind grandson she was raising to the care of his mother, invites a confused young man into her home. In “The Ropewalk,” a bartender haunted by her abandonment of her own child aids a customer in a struggle for custody of her daughters. A pregnant teenager in “Unction” comes to accept the reality of her situation while working a summer job in a bookbinding shop. Annie, the young mother with a tragic past in “Pins and Needles,” leaves her infant daughter to go on an errand in a snowstorm, and picks up a boy she doesn't know. Evocative, sexy, and haunting, these are stories that readers won't soon forget.
Download or read book Black Jesus and Other Superheroes written by Venita Blackburn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments -- Black Jesus -- Brim -- A Savior, Belief, Tupac, and Balloons -- We Buy Gold -- The Hurt Will Make You Stronger -- Chew -- Take Me to the Water -- In the Middle of Everything There Are Ribbons of Light -- String Theory -- A Brief Excerpt from the History of Salt -- Ephemeros -- Dog People -- Barbers -- End of the World -- Ways to Mourn an Asshole -- Rites -- They Only Look Like They're Smiling -- The Immolator -- There Are No Ninjas in the End -- Hold 'til Warm -- Ravished -- Not Like You, Not at All -- The Annie Oakley Gun Training for Women -- Scars -- Run Away Screaming
Download or read book Churchboys Other Sinners written by Preston L. Allen and published by Blair. This book was released on 2003 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preston Allen's stories explore the boundary between boy and man, church and smut shack in spare, deadpan prose.
Download or read book Thanks for This Riot written by Janelle Bassett and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went "okay"). Grouped by types of riot--external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots--Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.
Download or read book Better Times written by Sara Batkie and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on what’s happening in places people don’t think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in women’s lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for “troubled women” imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times. Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.
Download or read book What Isn t Remembered written by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in this collection explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home.
