Download or read book Pushcart Prize XXX written by Bill Henderson and published by Pushcart Prize Anthologies. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories, essays, and poems, culled from small presses and literary journals.
Download or read book Pushcart Prize XXXI written by Bill Henderson and published by Pushcart Press. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most honored literary series in America begins its fourth decade. With a brilliant collection of stories, essays, memoirs, and poems selected from hundreds of the best small presses, the annual Pushcart Prize sets the standard of excellence for literary anthologies. Each year it invites nominations from a wide array of little magazines and small presses and presents over sixty of the best; and each year its annual volume is hailed as a touchstone of literary discovery. For its thirty-first anniversary celebration, the Pushcart Prize surpasses its own reputation with an astonishing diversity of writers—some renowned and many others destined for fame.
Download or read book The Animal Girl written by John Fulton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five heartbreaking and radiant stories in John Fulton's The Animal Girl explore the awkwardness of situations in which grief and erotic love collide. Here are people in extremis, struggling mightily, and often failing, to keep it together. In the Pushcart Prize--winning "Hunters," Fulton contrasts the humorous clumsiness of dating with the grim realities of death in the tale of a middle-aged woman who keeps her cancer a secret when she starts a relationship with an avid hunter. In the novella-length title story, a lonely adolescent girl deals with the recent loss of her mother and the alien presence of her father's new girlfriend by taking out her aggression on her boss and on the animals she cares for in her summer job at a research laboratory. The final story in the collection, "The Sleeping Woman," delves into the inner life of Evelyn, a divorced professional woman who falls in love with Russell, a man whose wife is permanently brain damaged and has been unresponsive for years. The ghostly presence of Russell's wife haunts Evelyn as she discovers how her lover has been scarred by his misfortune and searches for ways they might build a long-term relationship in the wake of personal tragedy. These powerful stories approach the often sentimentalized subject of romance with tenderness and insight into the heart-worn perspective of characters who have failed at love in the past. In lucid, revelatory prose, Fulton navigates the complexity of both mid-life courtship and adolescent rage with humor and intelligence.
Download or read book On Looking written by Lia Purpura and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly Lia Purpura’s daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura’s hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson’s words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.” In “Autopsy Report,” Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the “dripping fruits” of organs and the spine in its “wet, red earth.” A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in “On Form,” where she notes that “in order to see their particular beauty . . . we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction.” Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. Above all, Purpura’s essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror. As she says: “By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.” This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry. “Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing.” —Albert Goldbarth “Purpura’s prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.” —Sven Birkerts
Download or read book Romey s Order written by Atsuro Riley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to “bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.
Download or read book Riding Westward written by Carl Phillips and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself --the words to the song--leave him, as he lets each go, the wind carrying most of it, some of the words, falling, settling into instead that larger darkness, where the smaller darknesses that our lives were lie softly down." --from "Riding Westward" What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? What is the difference, Phillips asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.
Download or read book The Pushcart Prize VII written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Powers written by Valerie Sayers and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1941 is a year of drama and spectacle for Americans. Joe DiMaggio’s record-breaking hitting streak enlivens the summer, and winter begins with the shock and horror of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The news from Europe is bleak, especially for the Jewish population. Joltin’ Joe, possessing a sweet swing and range in center, also has another gift: he can see the future. And he sees dark times ahead. In her inventive novel The Powers, Valerie Sayers, in both realistic and fantastic chapters, transports the reader to an age filled with giants: Dorothy Day and Walker Evans appear beside DiMaggio. The problems they face, from Catholic antisemitism to the challenge of pacifism in the face of overwhelming evil, play out in very public media, among them the photography of Evans and the baseball of DiMaggio. At once magical and familiar, The Powers is a story of witness and moral responsibility that will, like Joe DiMaggio, find some unlikely fans.
Download or read book The Lives of Rocks written by Rick Bass and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007-10-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Stop-in-your-tracks short stories” of survival, sorrows, and the power of our connection to the earth (Booklist, starred review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Rocky Mountain News Best Book of the Year Finalist for the Story Prize At once expertly crafted and undeniably moving, these ten stories deftly explore our immutable connection with nature. The centerpiece of the collection is the arresting title story, in which a woman alone in her mountain cabin confronts a terminal illness. In the equally remarkable “Her First Elk,” the same character recalls her most memorable and significant hunting experience. Set in locations ranging from Montana to Texas to Mississippi, the remaining stories further illuminate the consequences of our attitudes toward the environment and each other. This masterly collection lays bare the essentials of life with unparalleled passion and grace. “Bass captures quiet human truths amidst his astonishing portraits of life in the wilderness.” —People “Nature is as much a character in this sterling collection . . . .as are any of the oddly off-center but otherwise endearing people who inhabit it.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Digs deeply into the geology of the human condition . . . highly polished gems.” —Seattle Times “One of this country’s most intelligent and sensitive short-story writers.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book 2003 Pushcart Prize XXXVII written by Bill Henderson and published by Pushcart Press. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most honored literary series in America, The Pushcart Prize has been named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and hailed with Pushcart Press as "among the most influential in the development of the American book business" by Publishers W For the 2003 edition, The Pushcart Prize presents scores of brilliant short stories, poems, and essays selected from hundreds of presses and literary journals with the help of over 200 distinguished contributing editors. This is a stunning presentation of new and celebrated authors, picked from almost 8,000 nominations.
Download or read book Outlaw Style written by R. T. Smith and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlaw Style is a collection of narrative and lyric poems, many of them in the tradition of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. While gothic imagery, humor, and nineteenth-century diction and reference alternate and interweave, the four thematic currents that converge in the collection are music, race, spirituality, and the impact of monstrosity on somewhat innocent bystanders. Poems like “Dar He,” “Scuppernongs,” and “Plantation of the Mad” address the history of American racial intolerance with muted horror, while the final series of poems explores the roots and impact of traditional music, from unsettling songs of the Carter Family through Delta Blues and the haunting ballad “Strange Fruit.” The collection also features poems, such as “Shepherd Ollie Strawbridge on the Chicken Business,” which question the nature of spirituality; and the central section, “The Booth Prism,” performs a kind of séance in which the author channels the voices of many of the people—from Anna Surratt Tonry to Booth’s lovers and siblings—whose lives were altered by contact with Lincoln’s assassin. Throughout Outlaw Style formal and vernacular rhythms stand in counterpoint, images of violence excavate a stark and troubling beauty, and history and mystery fuse and feud, as the landscape and culture of the American South are presented for interrogation and understanding.
Download or read book Green Light written by George Gessert and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How humans' aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants. Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are prized for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen's hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution. Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants—the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers.
Download or read book Rescue Missions written by Frederick Busch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rescue Missions" collects stories of mercy and need among lovers, family, and friends by "one of our very best short-story writers" (Anne Beattie).
Download or read book Poets Writers written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ghost Farm written by Pamela Stewart and published by PBS Publications. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pamela (Jody) Stewart has published several chapbooks and five full-length volumes of poetry, the most recent being The Red Window (University of Georgia Press, 1997). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Dog Music, New York: Poems and two Pushcart Prizes. A Guggenheim Fellowship took her to Cornwall in the U.K. where she lived for seven years. She's happily ended up on a farm in Hawley, Massachusetts.
Download or read book Drunk in Sunlight written by Daniel Anderson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible and wry, at times comic, and often mournful, Daniel Anderson's poetry is relentlessly attentive to the splendors of the natural world. But the poems collected here—previously published in such leading literary journals as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, and Southwest Review—are not relegated simply to the realm of pastoral meditation. They give voice to the sorrowful and sometimes unfortunate things we say and think. They chronicle, with both precision and care, the many ways in which jubilation and lament frequently reverse themselves. Above all else, each poem crystallizes in its wake a freshly minted moment, one that articulates an experience that reaches beyond the poet's own time and place. Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snow" in Tennessee—Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.
Download or read book Uke Rivers Delivers written by R. T. Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts. A Confederate reenactor receives a message from the beyond to lay to rest the remains of Stonewall Jackson's horse. A docent at Washington and Lee University's Lee Chapel offers prim instruction on the facts and legends about "the General" with both reverence and irony. The young son of a lewd, alcoholic, self-dubbed evangelist acquires the wits -- and the will -- for survival by protecting the family's sunflower crops. A midget ukulele virtuoso is so surprised by his own eruption into violence that he can attribute it only to genetics. One of Jeff Davis's fellow cross-dressers; the killer of John Wilkes Booth; a Rebel deserter whose superior exacts his pound of flesh -- all these characters and more, through their twisted and torn vernaculars, seek understanding and revival in R. T. Smith's superb collection.
