Download or read book Knockemstiff written by Donald Ray Pollock and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-03-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More engaging than any new fiction in years." —Chuck Palahniuk An unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place. Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2014 written by Jennifer Egan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Download or read book Best Short Stories written by Az Writers and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Large Print Edition of "Best Short Stories Book One" by AZ Writers contains over 40 captivating stories written by 37 different authors possessing an outstanding range of talent. Unlike many other Short Story collections, in this book, the reader will experience the writing voice and style of many authors. Whereas in most other collections the reader is confronted with a dozen or more stories written by one author who writes stories with the same voice, the same style, and with the same plot, which after a story or two, becomes quite boring. Or, as in many other collections, the reader will find stories written 100 years ago by authors who are no longer with us. In "Best Short Stories Book One" by AZ Writers, the reader will find a contemporary multi-genre collection of stories by dozens of authors who are still, as of this writing, on the green side of the grass. AZ Writers "Best Short Stories Book One" includes memoir stories, historical fiction, creative non-fiction, and many other well-written pieces that will amuse, intrigue, and captivate the reader. A few of these stories may make you laugh, and a few may bring a tear to your eye. In this collection, you will find well-crafted stories with irony, sarcasm, adventure, mystery, crime, and a couple of stories with a bit of romance.
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2016 written by Junot Díaz and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning and best-selling author Junot Díaz guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.
Download or read book My Best Stories written by Alice Munro and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Best Stories is a dazzling selection of stories—seventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories are arranged in the order in which they were written, allowing even the most devoted Munro admirer to discover how her work developed. "Royal Beatings" shows us right away how far we are from the romantic world of happy endings. "The Albanian Virgin" smashes the idea that all of her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario's "Alice Munro Country." "A Wilderness Station" breaks short story rules by transporting us back to the 1830s and then jumping forward more than a hundred years. And the final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which was adapted into the film Away from Her, leads us far beyond the turkey-plucking world of young girls into unflinching old age. Every story in this selection is superb. It is a book to read—and reread—very slowly, savouring each separate story. This collection of small masterpieces deserves a place in every book lover's home.
Download or read book My Favorites written by Ben Bova and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection, Ben Bova has compiled fourteen of his favorite short stories. Each story includes an all-new introduction with compelling insight into the narrative. Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike! Stories included in this collection: “Monster Slayer,” “Muzhestvo,” “We’ll Always Have Paris,” “The Great Moon Hoax, or A Princess of Mars,” “Inspiration,” “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” “The Supersonic Zeppelin,” “Mars Farts,” “The Man Who Hated Gravity,” “Sepulcher,” “The Café Coup,” “The Angel’s Gift,” “Waterbot,” and “Sam and the Flying Dutchman.”
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2003 written by Katrina Kenison and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author Walter Mosley has selected the year's top fiction from voices well-known and new. Here several authors bring their stories to vivid life for a banner audio edition.
Download or read book Going to Meet the Man written by James Baldwin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major collection of short stories by one of America’s most important writers—informed by the knowledge the wounds racism leaves in both its victims and its perpetrators. • “If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize-winner of The English Patient In this modern classic, "there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
Download or read book Carried Away written by Alice Munro and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-09-26 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood. Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Albanian Virgin," a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own. Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.
Download or read book The Swimmer written by and published by Pioneer Drama Service, Inc.. This book was released on with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories written by Horacio Quiroga and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and Jack London, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer. In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study. Many of his stories are set in the steaming jungle of the Misiones district of northern Argentina, where he spent much of his life, but his tales possess a universality that elevates them far above the work of a regional writer. The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.
Download or read book The Yellow Wall Paper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published by Modernista. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.
Download or read book My Favorite Horror Story written by Mike Baker and published by Ibooks. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this startling new collection of 19th century horror tales, editor Martin H. Greenberg presents: * An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce * Schalken the Painter, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu * The Doom of the Griffiths, by Mrs. Gaskell * The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, by Rudyard Kipling * Markheim, by Robert Louis Stevenson * The Adventure of the German Student, by Washington Irving * Desiree's Baby, by Kate Chopin * The Story of the Brazilian Cat, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Download or read book The Stories of John Cheever written by John Cheever and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 1093 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheever’s crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." —The Guardian
Download or read book This Isn t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You written by Jon McGregor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful first collection of short stories by Jon McGregor. From the publication of his first Booker-nominated novel at the age of twenty-six, Jon McGregor's fiction has consistently been defined by lean poetic language, a keen sense of detail, and insightful characterization. Now, after publishing three novels, he's turning his considerable talent toward short fiction. The stories in this beautifully wrought collection explore a specific physical world and the people who inhabit it. Set among the lowlands and levees, the fens and ditches that mark the spare landscape of eastern England, the stories expose lives where much is buried, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won. The narrators of these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell us what they believe to be important-in language inflected with the landscape's own understatement-while the real stories lie in what they unwittingly let slip. A man builds a tree house by a river in preparation for a coming flood. A boy sets fire to a barn. A pair of itinerant laborers sit by a lake and talk,while fighter-planes fly low overhead and prepare for war. This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is an intricate exploration of isolation, self-discovery, and the impact of place on the human psyche. Praise for Even the Dogs: "A rare combination of profound empathy and wonderful writing." -Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Download or read book My Favorite Short Stories written by Albert E. Farrar Jr. and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are love and adventure stories for the most part about many different people totally unrelated. From an Angel who appears in a small town, to a man searching for his daughter, a tender moment In life of finding someone you never knew existed. Other adventures and a nun’s past life. All interesting reading.
Download or read book Lust written by Susan Minot and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV DIVDIVTwelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan/divDIV /div/divDIVFor the twelve narrators of Susan Minot’s breathtaking collection—artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings—love in New York doesn’t come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. /divDIV /divDIVIn intense snapshots of these women’s most intimate moments, Minot brings to life their dreams and disappointments, hopes and heartbreaks, and highlights the emotional fissures that divide women and men./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of Susan Minot, including artwork by the author and rare documents and photos from her personal collection./div /div
