Download or read book Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories written by Xhenet Aliu and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just down the highway from Connecticut’s Gold Coast is the state’s rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu’s Domesticated Wild Things: the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all. These are the children of immigrants who found boarded-up brass mills instead of the gilded streets of America; they’re the teenaged girls raised in the fluorescent glow of Greek diners, the middle-aged men with pump trucks and teratomas. These are people who have fled, or who should have. And if they are indeed familiar, it is because Aliu writes what is real, whether we ourselves, her readers, have seen it up close or not. And her stories make sense in a way that matters. A young mother buys into a real-estate investment seminar offered on an infomercial, only to be put back into her place by a bully in foreclosure. A closeted wrestler befriends a latchkey seven-year-old neighbor who harbors secrets of her own. A YMCA counselor tries to reclaim shoes stolen by a troubled young camper. What they share is a biting humor, an eye for the absurd, and fumbling attempts at human connection, all rendered irresistible—and as moving as they are amusing—by a writer whose work is at once edgy and endearing and prize winning for reasons any reader can appreciate.

Download or read book A Prairie Schooner Princess written by Mary Katherine Maule and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From under the curving top of a canvas-covered "prairie schooner" a boy of about fifteen leaned out, his eyes straining intently across the brown, level expanse of the prairies. "Father," he called, with a note of anxiety in his voice, "look back there to the northeast! What is that against the horizon? It looks like a cloud of dust or smoke." In a second prairie schooner, just ahead of the one the boy was driving, a man with a brown, bearded face looked out hastily, then continued to scan the horizon with anxious gaze. Beside him in the wagon sat a blue-eyed, comely woman with traces of care in her face. As the boy's voice reached her she started, then leaned out of the wagon, her startled gaze sweeping the lonely untrodden plains over which they were traveling. Inside the wagon under the canvas cover a boy of nine, two little girls of seven and twelve, a curly-headed little girl of five, and a baby boy of two years, lay on the rolled-up bedding sleeping heavily. The time was midsummer, 1856, and the family of Joshua Peniman, crossing the plains to the Territory of Nebraska, which had recently been organized, were traveling over the uninhabited prairies of western Iowa. "Does thee think it could be Indians, Joshua?" asked Hannah Peniman, her face growing white as she viewed the cloud of dust which appeared momentarily to be coming nearer. "I can't tell—-I can't see yet," answered her husband, turning anxious eyes from the musket he was hastily loading toward the cloud of dust. "But whatever it is, it is coming this way. It might be a herd of elk or buffalo, but anyway, we must be prepared. Get inside, Hannah, and thee and the little ones keep well under cover." In the other wagon two younger boys had joined the lad who was driving. On the seat beside him now sat a merry-faced, brown-eyed lad of fourteen, and leaning on their shoulders peering out between them was a boy of twelve, the twin of the twelve-year-old girl in the other wagon, with red hair, laughing blue eyes, and a round, freckled face. Sam was the mischief of the family, and was generally larking and laughing, but now his face looked rather pale beneath its coat of tan and freckles, and the eyes which he fastened on the horizon had in them an expression of terror. "Do you suppose it's Indians, Joe?" he whispered huskily. "Did you hear what that man told Father at Fort Dodge the other day? He said that Indians had set on an emigrant train near Fontanelle and murdered the whole party."

Download or read book Prairie Schooner written by Lowry Charles Wimberly and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese American Stories written by Katherine Vaz and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. ø From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl?s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother?s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Download or read book What Isn t Remembered written by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family's genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later. Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn't Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.

Download or read book The Conditions of Love written by Dale M. Kushner and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A teenage girl endures fire, flood and the loss of her parents in this bracing, oddly uplifting debut” set in the American Midwest of the mid-20th century (Kirkus). Dale M. Kushner’s acclaimed debut novel traces the journey of a girl from childhood to adulthood as she reckons with her parents’ abandonment, her need to break from society’s limitations, and her overwhelming desire for love both spiritual and erotic. In 1953, ten-year-old Eunice lives in the backwaters of Wisconsin with her outrageously narcissistic mother, a manicureeste and movie star worshipper. Abandoned by her father as an infant, Eunice worries that she will become a misfit like her mother. But when a freak storm sends Eunice away from all things familiar, a strange odyssey begins. Through her capacity to redefine herself, reject bitterness and keep her heart open, Eunice survives and even flourishes despite hardship, heartbreak and loss.

Download or read book Half an Inch of Water written by Percival Everett and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories centered around the West includes tales of a deaf Native American girl wandering in the desert and a young boy coping with the death of his sister by angling for trout in the creek where she drowned.

Download or read book Love Me Back written by Merritt Tierce and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive. Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

Download or read book Now We Will Be Happy written by Amina Gautier and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one. The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles. Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.

Download or read book Best of Prairie Schooner written by Hilda Raz and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now celebrating seventy-five years of continuous publication, Prairie Schooner has been called one of the best magazines in America by Nan Talese, "the roots" in Esquire's garden of contemporary literature, and one of the best places for "fabulous fiction" by the Washington Post. One of the oldest and most prestigious literary journals in the country, it ranks among Writer's Digest's "Nineteen Magazines That Matter." This anthology collects some of the best fiction and poetry from the writers who have appeared in the journal's pages.

Download or read book Route 66 75th Anniversary Edition written by Michael Wallis and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-06-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Definitive book on the most famous road in American history.

Download or read book Reliquaria written by R. A. Villanueva and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.

Download or read book The Prairie Schooner written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book WILD WEST Boxed Set 150 Western Classics in One Volume written by Mark Twain and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 12836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'WILD WEST Boxed Set: 150+ Western Classics in One Volume' is an expansive anthology that brings together a diverse array of literature encapsulating the essence and mythos of the American West. This collection spans a broad range of literary styles, from the gritty realism of frontier life to romanticized tales of adventure and conflict, offering readers an unparalleled exploration of the genre. Within its pages, iconic narratives coalesce with lesser-known gems, providing a rich tapestry of the cultural, moral, and existential themes that have shaped the American identity. The inclusion of seminal works by this esteemed cohort highlights the anthology's significance as an encompassing repository of Western literary tradition. The contributing authors and editors of this anthology are titans of American literature and art, each bringing their unique perspective and voice to the theme of the Western frontier. From Twain's keen wit to London's raw depiction of nature and human endurance, the collection is a cross-section of American literary greatness. These authors collectively represent a wide array of historical, cultural, and literary movements, from the romanticism of the early 19th century to the realism and naturalism that followed. Their contributions illuminate the complexities of frontier life, reflecting both the brutality and the beauty of the Wild West, thereby enriching readers understanding of this pivotal era in American history. This anthology is a must-read for anyone with an interest in American literature, history, or culture. It offers readers a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the variegated narratives that have shaped the mythos of the American West. Through its comprehensive scope and the multitude of voices it encompasses, the collection succeeds in fostering a dialogue between different epochs, perspectives, and literary styles. For scholars, enthusiasts, and casual readers alike, this boxed set is an invaluable resource for understanding the evolution of Western literature and its enduring influence on the American imagination.

Download or read book Return to my Native Land written by Aime Cesaire and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity. More praise: "The greatest living poet in the French language."--American Book Review "Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." --Bloomsbury Review "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." --Nicolas Sarkozy "Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land - Martinique." --The Times

Download or read book If the Body Allows It written by Megan Cummins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame--about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath--are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they've lost everyone else, including themselves. Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.

Download or read book Born Again Vintage written by Bridgett Artise and published by Potter Craft. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fashion designer Bridgett Artise believes in second chances—a philosophy that extends all the way to her clothing line, B. Artise Originals. Fashion gave her a second chance at happiness and success, and, in turn, she gives vintage garments that have lost their luster another chance at being fashionable. Mixing contemporary clothing with the best elements of a vintage piece—like the collar of a funky fifties housedress or the pockets of a seventies-style jacket—and piecing them back together in a whole new way, she creates one-of-a-kind garments that are both trend setting and timeless. An old-fashioned ruffled shirt with terrific buttons, plus an inexpensive tank top, can become a unique top. A poodle skirt and that so-last-year’s knee-length cardigan sweater can be turned into anything from a mini-poncho to a structured tube top. With fashions for every season, Born-Again Vintage contains patterns for: •Pants that pair perfectly with winter boots and a sweater dress that’s sexy and simple •A cropped jacket + sweater corset that are perfect for a flirty spring fling •Dresses + bags to keep summer easy and breezy •Pretty-in-a-blink dresses + accessories for a big night out Born-Again Vintage updates the trends of fashion eras gone by and brings the unparalleled quality of vintage into a new age. Complete with a vintage shopping guide, handy style tips, and ideas for reinventing disused cast-offs, Born-Again Vintage is a must-have for vintage shoppers and sewers alike.