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 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 225 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 Chariton Review 38 1 written by Truman State University Press and published by Truman State University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chariton Review Spring 2015
Download or read book Deer Michigan written by Jack C. Buck and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Something quite wonderful happens when you allow yourself to drift through life without a plan of direction," writes Jack Buck in his poignant debut story collection. The writing in 'Deer Michigan' takes this philosophy to heart, embracing the flux of fate in over fifty ethereal narratives. In one story we meet an exiled Mao on a hiking trail, in another the narrator mourns the graceful disappearance of birds. Buck's stories ripple with nostalgia, a reverence for the natural world and an America with room in which to wander. Though the stories in 'Deer Michigan' are short-in one case spun out in a single sentence-they bottle up an expanse of human experience, offering us a stunning universe of feeling. Allegra Hyde, author of 'Of This New World'
Download or read book Stories No One Hopes Are about Them written by A. J. Bermudez and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.
Download or read book November Storm written by Robert Oldshue and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 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. 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.
Download or read book What Counts as Love written by Marian Crotty and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these nine stories, Marian Crotty inhabits the lives of people searching for human connection. Her characters, most often young women, are honest, troubled, and filled with longing. In the title story, a young woman begins a job on a construction site after leaving an abusive marriage. In “Crazy for You,” two girls spy on a neighbor’s sex life, while their own sexuality hovers in the distance. In “A Real Marriage,” a college student marries a boyfriend to help him stay in the United States. In “The Fourth Fattest Girl at Cutting Horse Ranch,” the daily life of a residential treatment center for eating disorders is disrupted by the arrival of a celebrity. The stories are set in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Persian Gulf, and often touch on themes of addiction, class, sexuality, and gender. What Counts as Love is a poignant, often funny collection that asks us to take it and its characters seriously.
Download or read book Of This New World written by Allegra Hyde and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of This New World offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres—from historical fiction to science fiction, realism to fabulism—but all ask that fundamental human question: is paradise really so impossible? Over the course of twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor, and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal eco-society on an island in The Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her un-groovy grandmother. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous family for help. And in the final story, a former drug addict chases a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program. An unmissable debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.
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 The Man in the Banana Trees written by Marguerite Sheffer and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in The Man in the Banana Trees take place in the past, present, and future—from the American Gulf South to the orbit around Jupiter. We meet teachers and students, ghosts and aliens. An ice cream consultant in the year 2036 predicts a devastating flavor trend and a disgruntled New England waiter investigates a mysterious tanker crash. Although wildly varied in setting, length, and genre, a thread of the fantastic unites these stories, as characters struggle to understand that thing lurking at the edge of their perception: something sinister, or maybe—miraculous.
Download or read book No Use Pretending written by Thomas A. Dodson and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable, and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering via connections with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). This collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human.
Download or read book Chariton Review 39 1 written by Truman State University Press and published by Truman State University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chariton Review Spring/Summer 2016
Download or read book Sonata in Wax written by Edward Hamlin and published by Green City Books. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sonata in Wax is a terrific novel—immersive, compelling, smart, the story propelled by a cast of complex, full-bodied characters and the author’s absolute mastery of the musical worlds he conjures...I’m knocked flat with admiration for this splendid novel.” —Ben Fountain, New York Times bestselling author of Devil Makes Three From award-winning author Edward Hamlin comes an immersive, time-hopping musical mystery that intertwines the stories of Elisabeth Garnier, a young Frenchwoman living in World War I Boston, and Ben Weil, an acclaimed music producer whose life is consumed by a lie—and by a bizarre, breathtaking sonata that could destroy him if he can’t uncover its composer’s identity in time. As the Great War rages, a French pianist sits down to play an arrestingly original sonata—a piece so strange and inspired that it could change the course of classical music. The moment is captured on wax cylinders, the recording medium of the day. But in the tumult of war the fragile cylinders vanish, and with them the identity of the brilliant composer and the virtuoso pianist. A century later, five timeworn wax cylinders land on the desk of Ben Weil, a revered classical music producer. From the moment he first plays them in his Chicago studio, Ben knows he’s in the presence of genius. The dazzling piece is years ahead of its time, more Coltrane than Debussy—how could it be? Brought low by a painful divorce, Ben throws himself into unlocking the sonata’s mysteries. But when a renowned pianist stumbles upon the work and takes credit for unearthing it, he’s swept into a lie that could shatter his reputation and his private life at a stroke. Somehow Ben must find a way to tell the truth—a dangerous quest that will lead him not only to the sonata’s surprising origins, but to his own.
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 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 Everything Flirts written by Sharon Wahl and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life's trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back? With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.
