Download or read book The Specialty of the House written by Stanley Ellin and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a quaint old restaurant, a chef relies on a devilish secret ingredient In Sbirro’s restaurant, there is no electric lighting, no music, and no menu. The only sound is the contented sighs of the regulars, who come every night in hopes that Sbirro will treat them to his signature dish, the famed lamb Amirstan, which comes from a beast so rare, only Sbirro knows how to obtain it. Tonight, two diners at this spectacular relic of a forgotten age will find that lamb Amirstan costs more than they are willing to pay. “The Specialty of the House” was the first story published by Stanley Ellin, who would go on to become one of the great short fiction authors of the twentieth century. From crime to horror to grim tragedy, every story in this collection is as delectable as a cut of meat prepared by Sbirro himself.
Download or read book The Back of the House and Other Stories written by Chris Hallman and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Whale House and Other Stories written by Sharon Millar (Lecturer of prose fiction) and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A boy is killed on a government minister s orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country s lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament. Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, which range across the country s different ethnic communities, across rural and urban settings, from locals and expatriates to the moneyed elite and the poor scrabbling for survival. What ties the collection together is Sharon Millar s achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humor and the possibility of redemption."
Download or read book The House on Mango Street written by Sandra Cisneros and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
Download or read book House of the Ancients and Other Stories written by Clifford Garstang and published by Press 53. This book was released on 2020-05-03 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobody's perfect, but some of us--mostly men--are blinded by our hubris and baser urges. Judgment is impeded. Mistakes are made. The stories in House of the Ancients and Other Stories, many of them set outside the U.S., explore some of the consequences of these common failings.
Download or read book Bedtime and Other Stories from the President s Guest House written by Benedicte Valentiner and published by . This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benedicte Valentiner invites the reader behind the scenes of one of the world's most prestigious official guest houses: the historic, charming, and beautiful Blair House, across from the White House. For more than thirteen years Mrs. V hosted Chiefs of State and Heads of Government during their official visits with Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Her anecdotes about the world's most powerful leaders are revealing, entertaining, and dramatic; we are present when George H. W. Bush plays with his grandchildren, when an inebriated Boris Yeltsin is discovered wandering through Blair House, and when the Togo delegation's luggage reveals a smoked monkey, an enormous lizard, and giant cockroaches. Mrs. V also writes about the year spent in raptor research in Iran, about weaving in Mexico, and how she very early decided on the career which led her to one of the world's most prestigious hospitality positions. PROLOGUE On the first night of Boris Yeltsin s?visit in September 1994 our two security officers on duty got a bigger adventure than they could ever have imagined. At about 12:30 am Officers Paul Besett and Michael Cooney saw on their computer screen an astonishing sight. Clad but sparsely, having forgotten to put on his pajamas, the mighty President of the Russian Federation was briefly dressed as he negotiated the back stairs with the certainty of a person who had a directional problem. He was stoned out of his skull and he was almost naked. Our security officers were glued to the computer screen. At the bottom of the circular emergency staircase going from the dressing room in the Primary Suite and leading to the New Executive Office building s garage, they saw Boris Yeltsin trying to open the garage door and nearly jumping out of his briefs from fright as it gave off a loud signal. Then the security officers lost him on the screen. Frantically they called the USSS Command Post to alert them that their man was loose in the house. And when they turned away from the screen they had another shock. There was Boris Yeltsin in the flesh and such a lot of it too holding on for dear life to the door frame of their office. Without a word, he bowed gravely to them and staggered out, rolling around the corner into the Leslie Coffelt Room. This room, named for the security guard who gave his life defending President Harry S Truman during an assassination attempt by Puerto Rican Nationalists on November 1, 1950, was set aside as a down-room for the Metropolitan Police and USSS uniformed police so that during their strenuous and long hours protecting our visitors they could come in out of the cold and refresh themselves. During that particular night there were thirty sitting around when Yeltsin turned up. There is a drunken Russian in here, someone casually said to which another one replied: This is not a drunken Russian. It s B o r i s Y e l t s i n!
Download or read book Bobcat and Other Stories written by Rebecca Lee and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Believer Book Award. At turns heartbreaking and wise, tender and wry Bobcat and Other Stories establishes Rebecca Lee as one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary fiction. A university student on her summer abroad is offered the unusual task of arranging a friend's marriage. Secret infidelities and one guest's dubious bobcat-related injury propel a Manhattan dinner party to its unexpected conclusion. Students at an elite architecture retreat seek the wisdom of their revered mentor but end up learning more about themselves and one another than about their shared craft. In these acutely observed and scaldingly honest stories Lee gives us characters who are complex and flawed, cracking open their fragile beliefs and exposing the paradoxes that lie within their romantic and intellectual pursuits. Whether they're in the countryside of the American Midwest, on a dusty prairie road in Saskatchewan, or among the skyscrapers and voluptuous hills of Hong Kong, the terrain is never as difficult to navigate as their own histories and desires. Rebecca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The City Is a Rising Tide and the short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories. She has been published in The Atlantic and Zoetrope, and in 2001 she received a National Magazine Award for her short fiction. Originally from Saskatchewan, Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. 'Bobcat and Other Stories is nothing short of brilliant. Rebecca Lee writes with the unflinching, cumulatively devastating precision of Chekhov and Munro, peeling back layer after layer of illusion until we're left with the truth of ourselves ...This extraordinary story collection is sure to confirm its author as one of the best writers of her generation.' Ben Fountain, author of Billy Flynn's Long Halftime Walk 'Mesmirisingly strange...[Lee's] eccentric eloquence...makes Bobcat so potent and powerful.' New York Times 'In all these stories, confused, sometimes misdirected men and women struggle to figure out their places in the world, stumble into often unhappy situations and sometimes, to their great misfortune, get exactly what they were hoping for...Lee captures little pieces of all of us and she does it in language so delicate and precise that you'll re-read passages for the joy of it.' Star Tribune 'Slim, sly and brilliant.' Oprah.com 'Lee writes with an unflinching eye toward the darkest and saddest aspects of life, often finding humor where least expected. This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed.' Publisher's Weekly 'This is a potent, quietly daring and sturdily imagined collection, rich with a subtlety in short supply in our current short-fiction landscape, where writers seem to settle for lobbing verbal grenades in the reader's general direction. In stories like "Bobcat" and "Fialta," there is the real sense of significance, as though a whole subway system's worth of meaning is roaring beneath the text, ready to whisk the reader anywhere they need to go.' National Post
Download or read book Wines of the Rhone Valley written by Robert M. Parker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there wines to rival the greatest first-growths of Bordeaux and the grand crus of Burgundy? Robert Parker’s answer is a resounding Yes—they are to be found among the finest wines of the Rhone Valley. With this new edition of Wines of the Rhone Valley, Robert Parker, the world’s most influential wine critic, provides the key to enjoying the winemaking world’s best-kept secret. The area contains the oldest vineyards in France—indeed the heyday of some of the Rhone Valley wines was 2,000 years ago, around the time of the Roman conquest of France. In recent centuries, these wines have been misunderstood and ignored—and consequently undervalued. All of which means that some of the great wines of the world are available for a fraction of the cost of those from better-known regions. Wines of the Rhone Valley is the ultimate resource for every wine lover, highlighting both the greatest wines of the Rhone Valley and the region’s finest wine values. With his trademark thoroughness, Parker has fully revised and expanded this edition to reflect changes in the region, new personalities, and the latest vintages. In this edition, Parker returns to the region closest to his heart, exploring the sun-drenched Rhone Valley in unprecedented candor and detail.
Download or read book Flying Home written by Ralph Ellison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" (Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of (Ellison's) lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan). First serial to The New Yorker. NPR sponsorship.
Download or read book Stories and Prose Poems written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the Russian Nobelist's collection of novellas, short stories, and prose poems Stories and Prose Poems collects twenty-two works of wide-ranging style and character from the Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose shorter pieces showcase the extraordinary mastery of language that places him among the greatest Russian prose writers of the twentieth century. When the two superb stories "Matryona's House" and "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" were first published in Russia in 1963, the Moscow Literary Gazette, the mouthpiece of the Soviet literary establishment, wrote: "His talent is so individual and so striking that from now on nothing that comes from his pen can fail to excite the liveliest interest." The novella For the Good of the Cause and the short story "Zakhar-the-Pouch" in particular—both published in the Soviet Union before Solzhenitsyn's exile—fearlessly address the deadening stranglehold of Soviet bureaucracy and the scandalous neglect of Russia's cultural heritage. But readers who best know Solzhenitsyn through his novels will be delighted to discover the astonishing group of sixteen "prose poems." In these works of varying lengths—some as short as an aphorism—Solzhenitsyn distills the joy and bitterness of Russia's fate into language of unrivaled lyrical purity.
Download or read book Mendocino and Other Stories written by Ann Packer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With humor, wisdom and tenderness, Ann Packer offers ten short stories about women and men--wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and lovers--who discover that life's greatest surprises may be found in that which is most familiar. In the title story, on the anniversary of their father's suicide a young woman discovers that her brother may have found a "reason for living" in the love of a good woman. In "Nerves," a young man realizes that the wife he is separated from no longer loves him but that it is his own life he misses, not her. The narrator of "My Mother's Yellow Dress" is a gay man remembering his deceased mother and their vital and troubling intimacy. In "Babies"--which was included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series --a single woman in her mid-thirties finds that everyone, including her best friend at work, is pregnant, and that their joy can only be observed, not shared. In these and six other stories, Ann Packer exhibits an unerring eye for the small ways in which people reveal themselves and for the moments in which lives may be transformed.
Download or read book The Houseguest And Other Stories written by Amparo Dávila and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
Download or read book The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories written by George Gissing and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories is a series of political tales focusing on such topics as white-collar poverty, class differences, and social ambitions. Excerpt: "In England, during the sixties and seventies of the last century the world of books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book and novel became almost synonymous in houses that were not Puritan, yet where books and reading, in the era of few and unfree libraries, were strictly circumscribed. George Gissing was no exception to this rule. The English novel was at the summit of its reputation during his boyish days."
Download or read book The Hidden Girl and Other Stories written by Ken Liu and published by Gallery / Saga Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories. Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.
Download or read book Shiloh and Other Stories written by Bobbie Ann Mason and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.
Download or read book Dimanche and Other Stories written by Irene Nemirovsky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A never-before-translated collection by the bestselling author of Suite Française Written between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem-like stories mine the same terrain of Némirovsky's bestselling novel Suite Française: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity. Moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career.
Download or read book The Old Man in a State House Other Stories written by Tanure Ojaide and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2012 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old Man in a State House and Other Stories is a literary canvas which captures the restless matrix that is today's Africa: the corruptive influence of a corrosive oil economy, environmental degradation, wealth and hubris, love and more. Tanure Ojaide has published sixteen collections of poetry, a memoir, three novels, two short story collections and scholarly works. He has numerous literary prizes and is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
