Download or read book Western Avenue and Other Fictions written by Fred Arroyo and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories by Fred Arroyo.
Download or read book Real Life and Other Fictions written by Susan Coll and published by Harper Muse. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***"If you're fascinated by unexplained phenomena, hop in a beat-up Audi with the kooky and supersmart Cassie Klein and her dog Luna for a voyage of discovery involving a giant moth, a West Virginia bridge collapse and a hot cryptozoologist. The droll Ms. Coll strikes again!"--People Magazine*** Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren't lining up. In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she's an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true. She stood by her once-doting husband when his meteorology career took a nosedive, and now she has learned that the man who became an internet meme has been cheating on her. She's had enough. She scoops up a teething puppy and embarks on a road trip that's heavy on impulse and light on planning. She's not sure where she's going, but she knows she might as well start at the beginning. What really happened to her parents all those years ago? In this comically surreal, warmhearted journey, she encounters people she never knew existed--chief among them, an enigmatic cryptozoologist, who helps her in the quest to discover her past. And along the way, she looks for answers regarding curious sightings of a creature known as the Mothman in the months before her parents died. As the line between real life and fiction blurs, Cassie finds herself grappling with the nature of stories, myths, and who gets to write the endings.
Download or read book America and Other Fictions written by Ed Simon and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches.
Download or read book The Religious and Other Fictions written by Christina Milletti and published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut collection of short stories by Christina Milletti.
Download or read book Zero and Other Fictions written by Fan Huang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of huang Fan's work in English. The anthology includes 'Zero', a futuristic novella that won the Unitas Prize, and three critically acclaimed short stories.
Download or read book Rockville Pike written by Susan Coll and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Kramer never imagined a life selling discount furniture and commuting between grocery stores and soccer fields via minivan. But when her father-in-law has a heart attack, she and her husband, Leon, trade in their glamorous New York life for a stint running the family business on Rockville Pike, a tributary of the suburban sprawl line extending outward from Washington, D.C. Kramer's Discount Furniture Depot sits away from several lanes of traffic, near the tombstone of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is here that Jane escapes each day at lunchtime to ponder her confusing turn in life. At age forty-one, she has a teenage Goth son, her husband is increasingly overweight and quick-tempered, and their business is in a state of crisis, both financially and legally. Jane finds herself wishing for something more. First, add to the mix Delia, a mysterious and strangely predatory patio-furniture saleswoman who seems to have her sights set on Leon, and then an attack on the store expansion plans by historic preservationists. When potentially disturbing findings about Delia's past come to light, Jane finds herself learning that, despite life's reversals, it is possible to reinvent herself by tapping into talents and desires she didn't realize she still had. Rockville Pike is a smart, witty, and funny read that revels in the joy of discovering what life has in store.
Download or read book Azadi written by Arundhati Roy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chant of "Azadi!"—Urdu for "Freedom!"—is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
Download or read book Four for a Quarter written by Michael Martone and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four is the magic number in Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter. In subject—four fifth Beatles, four tie knots, four retellings of the first Xerox, even the sex lives of the Fantastic Four—and in structure—the book is separated into four sections, with each section further divided into four chapterettes—Four for a Quarter returns again and again to its originating number, making chaos comprehensible and mystery out of the most ordinary.
Download or read book Zero and Other Fictions written by Fan Huang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Huang Fan burst onto Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s, publishing pointed urban portraits and political satires that captured the reading public's attention. After decades of innovative work, he is now one of Asia's most celebrated authors, crucial to understanding the development of Taiwanese literature over the past fifty years. The first collection of Huang Fan's work to appear in English, this anthology includes Zero, a prize-winning dystopian novella echoing George Orwell's chilling 1984. Set in a postapocalyptic world, Zero features Xi De, a young man raised in an elite community who risks everything to challenge his society's charismatic leader and technocratic rule. Huang Fan's novella poignantly illustrates the quandary of an idealistic man trapped among conflicting claims to truth, unsure whether to think of himself as heroic or foolish in his ultimate choice of resistance and sacrifice. This anthology also features three critically acclaimed short stories: "Lai Suo," which established Huang Fan's reputation as a groundbreaking author; "The Intelligent Man"; and "How to Measure the Width of a Ditch." In "Lai Suo," a naïve individual becomes the pawn of powerful men intent on political advancement. In "How to Measure the Width of a Ditch," an unreliable narrator spins an absurdist, metafictional tale of his childhood in Taipei, and in "The Intelligent Man," Huang Fan weaves an allegorical satire about political reunification set against a backdrop of Taiwanese migration to the United States, with a trenchant look at expanding business interests in mainland China and Southeast Asia. All together, these remarkable works portray the tensions and aspirations of modern Taiwan.
Download or read book Boundaries and Other Fictions written by R. Rawdon Wilson and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boundaries, and Other Fictions is a collection of smart, sophisticated stories that test the limits of genre and form. Wilson spans the fictional distance from the fantastic to the utterly personal, exploring the individuality of human response and the universality of feeling and need.
Download or read book The Fictions that Shape Men s Lives written by Christopher Kilmartin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fictions that Shape Men’s Lives is structured around a number of key ‘fictions’ of masculinity, such as beliefs in biological determinism, the inevitability of men’s violence and the opposition of the sexes, and proceeds to expose them to be wholly or partially unfounded. Examining the social pressure to behave and experience the self in ways that culture prescribes for the bodies we are perceived as having, this book provides an awareness of widely-held but distorted assumptions of gender. It also seeks to put men into the position to resist masculine social pressures when conforming to it conflicts with important life goals or values and/or causes harm. Making use of an informal, storytelling style provides an accessibility to those interested in breaking down their preconceptions of gender and masculinity, as well making links to key theories and concepts. This is a lively and engaging book for undergraduates studying introduction to Gender, Sexuality and Masculinity courses.
Download or read book The Man Who Walked Away written by Maud Casey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a trance-like state, Albert walks-from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia-all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images. Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.
Download or read book Apt Imaginings written by Jonathan Gilmore and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apt Imaginings addresses the question of how our emotions and desires for the contents of fictions, fantasies, and other products of the imagination relate to the feelings we have about things in the real world. A contribution to the theory of the emotions, the philosophy of fiction, and the psychology of art, this book argues that the normative criteria that determine the fit, morality, or rationality of our feelings for what we believe are distinct from those criteria that apply to what we imagine.
Download or read book The Complete History of New Mexico written by Kevin McIlvoy and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Compelling and complex . . . Strange and wonderful." —The New York Times Book Review, in praise of McIlvoy's previous fiction I am going to write about the state of New Mexico and put in some maps and stuff from the encyclopedia. My theme is the Don Juan Onate trail and the Jornada Del Muerto. But I might write some other important things which as it turns out my stepmother got angry about and said she wouldn't type this until my Dad said "Dammit now it is history" and told her maybe there weren't commas in those days. "The Complete History of New Mexico" is no ordinary research paper, and this is no ordinary collection of short stories. Eleven-year-old Chum's "history" unfolds over three distinctive and increasingly disturbing sections. He writes that "Coronado explored around and found Santa Fe in 1610"; that "William Becknell was tracking wagons over everyplace in 1821"; and that every day his best friend, Daniel, is afraid to go home. Kevin McIlvoy intersperses the title novella with equally distinctive stories set in New Mexico. Laura, a plain, overweight nurse, encounters a terrified young man on his way to the Vietnam War and takes matters into her own hands. Zach spends time with his "white-trash" relatives and finds love's terrible and true face. The Complete History of New Mexico is a stunningly original collection that will further McIlvoy's growing reputation.
Download or read book Fictions Lies and the Authority of Law written by Steven D. Smith and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law discusses legal, political, and cultural difficulties that arise from the crisis of authority in the modern world. Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life—“cancel culture,” the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems are all a consequence of what Hannah Arendt described as the disappearance of authority in the modern world. In this perceptive study, Steven D. Smith offers a diagnosis explaining how authority today is based in pervasive fictions and how this situation can amount to, as Arendt put it, “the loss of the groundwork of the world.” Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law considers a variety of problems posed by the paradoxical ubiquity and absence of authority in the modern world. Some of these problems are jurisprudential or philosophical in character; others are more practical and lawyerly—problems of presidential powers and statutory and constitutional interpretation; still others might be called existential. Smith’s use of fictions as his purchase for thinking about authority has the potential to bring together the descriptive and the normative and to think about authority as a useful hypothesis that helps us to make sense of the empirical world. This strikingly original book shows that theoretical issues of authority have important practical implications for the kinds of everyday issues confronted by judges, lawyers, and other members of society. The book is aimed at scholars and students of law, political science, and philosophy, but many of the topics it addresses will be of interest to politically engaged citizens.
Download or read book Self Portraits Fictions written by Frederic Tuten and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the stories the author read to his possibly illiterate Sicilian grandmother as a child, these nested narratives are told by couples traveling through hallucinatory, romantic landscapes. As the traveler in "Self Portrait with Sicily" rides a train through the Bronx, boundaries between worlds, geography, and generations blur, transporting him through Sicily and the rural landscape of his Nonna. On a honeymoon in Spain, the narrator of "Self Portrait with Bullfight" decides that "forbearance" is the key to a lasting marriage and proceeds to try the patience of his new bride with a long-winded tale of the "frisson of rivalry" between two youths vying for the attentions of a Gypsy woman. In "Self Portrait with Cheese," an allegory about a family of bears that flees the circus only to languish, bored, in their freedom, offers a convoluted fable about the needs of artists. Tuten's (The Green Hour) polished stories of beauty, longing, and loss are relatable, yet strange enough that they constantly pique--Publisher's Weekly.
Download or read book The World of Science Fiction 1926 1976 written by Lester del Rey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1980, is a guide to the major forces in the subculture of science fiction. It analyses the history of the field and the related developments, for instance the Bomb, that have shaped the literature. It examines the complex of activity and background tradition, the body of accepted beliefs and conventions, and the ethics and values of the world of science fiction.
