Download or read book Best of the Small Presses written by Bill Henderson and published by Pushcart Prize Anthologies. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of short stories, essays, and poems from throughout the year, culled from small presses and literary journals.
Download or read book The Pushcart Prize XL written by Bill Henderson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This annual volume tops all others. The quality is exceptional; the diversity ditto.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review 2015 edition) Edited with the assistance of over 200 distinguished Contributing Editors, including Poetry Editors Kim Addonizio and David Bottoms, Pushcart Prize XL celebrates 65 stories, essays and poems from dozens of little magazines and small presses. This 40th Anniversary Edition continues as a testament to the flourishing of American literature in our independent presses. As reviews of last year’s collection have indicated each edition of The Pushcart Prize has increased from strength to strength:Library Journal in a starred review commented, “A continuation of the series’ noble and classic tradition.”Donna Seaman noted in Booklist, “One of the zestiest and most impressive installments in Pushcart’s proud reign as the most bountiful and exciting of literary harvests.”From previous reviews: “The Pushcart Prize has become a literary institution…perhaps the single best measure of the state of affairs in American literature today.” - New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Bar at Twilight written by Frederic Tuten and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE An incomparable storyteller serves up an enchanting concoction of art, love, and longing In fifteen masterful stories, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires—Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau—a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. Whether set in Tuten’s beloved Lower East Side, Rome’s Borghese Gardens, or a French seaside resort, these stories shift seamlessly between the poignancy of memory into the logic of fairytales or dreams, demonstrating Tuten’s exceptional ability to transmute his passion for art and life to the page.
Download or read book The Bible in the American Short Story written by Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible in the American Short Story examines Biblical influences in the post-World War II American short story. In a series of accessible chapters, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins offer close-readings of short stories by leading contemporary writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Allegra Goodman, Tobias Wolff and Kirstin Valdez Quade that highlight the biblical passages that they reference. Exploring episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and both Jewish and Christian heritages, this book is an important contribution to understanding the influence of the Bible in contemporary literature.
Download or read book A Cabinet of Curiosity written by Bradford Morrow and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Diane Ackerman, and more explore the double-edged sword of curiosity . . . Curiosity is as central to life as breathing. And like breath itself, when it ceases, the vibrancy of life fades and disappears. Curiosity leads to discoveries both beneficent and, at times, destructive. It often occasions wonderment, but also terror. It prompts the precise scientist, but also the nosy gadfly. A double-edged sword, curiosity has forever held a crucial role in myth, literature, science, philosophy, history—nearly every field of human endeavor. While most of us know the old saying about curiosity killing the cat, we must also remember that “satisfaction brought it back.” Curiosity incites and compels, taketh away and giveth. In this issue, curiosity impels a personal assistant to learn hidden truths about her deceased employer—a famed playwright—and his relationship with the woman who directs an Italian arts foundation to which he donated his priceless library of first editions. A novelist, inspired by a different kind of curiosity, studies the traditional teachings of his Cherokee forebears after reading the notebook his beloved grandfather possessed when he died. Elsewhere, a young boy removes his clothes and, driven by dangerous curiosity, crawls into the gaping darkness of a sewer pipe, where he mysteriously vanishes, altering the lives of everyone who knew him. While most of the stories, poems, and memoirs here investigate the places where curiosity transports us—from forgotten burial grounds to natural history museums, from alluring lakes to postapocalyptic seaside shanties—A Cabinet of Curiosity also features a singular visit to an archetypal curiosity cabinet in Amsterdam with its treasury of specimens, of oddities in jars and on shelves, of things pinned and things afloat. Curiosity in all its guises is the wellspring of revelation. It is a prime mover behind our deeds, good or evil, simple or complicated. While the thirty-one writers gathered here individually explore many of the ways in which curiosity drives and defines us, together they propose that the realms of curiosity are, finally, inexhaustible. A Cabinet of Curiosity includes contributions from Laura van den Berg, Ann Beattie, Brandon Hobson, Eleni Sikelianos, Greg Jackson, Julianna Baggott, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, William Lychack, Joanna Scott, Catherine Imbriglio, Dave King, Lauren Green, Can Xue (Translated by Karen Gernant, Chen Zeping), Nathaniel Mackey, A. D. Jameson, Quintan Ana Wikswo, Lynn Schmeidler, Samuel R. Delany, Kelsey Peterson, Sarah Blackman, Gerard Malanga, Martine Bellen, Maud Casey, Gregory Norman Bossert, Stephen O’Connor, Matt Bell, Madeline Kearin, Bin Ramke, Diane Ackerman, Elizabeth Hand.
Download or read book The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part XL written by David Marcum and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2024-01-04 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring Contributions by: Roger Riccard, Tracy Revels (2 stories), Liese Sherwood-Fabre, Brenda Seabrooke (2 stories), Gordon Linzner, Mike Adamson, Hugh Ashton, David Marcum, Jane Rubino, Brett Fawcett, Susan Knight, Alan Dimes, Arthur Hall, Paula Hammond, Tim Newton Anderson, Robert Stapleton, and a poem by Joseph W. Svec III 53 New Traditional Canonical Holmes Adventures Collected in Three Companion Volumes Throughout the original Holmes Canon, there were hints and teases of other intriguing cases - The Tarleton Murders . . . The Grice-Paterson Curse . . . The Abernetty Tragedy. Watson mentions over one-hundred-and-twenty of these, which have collectively come to be known as The Untold Cases. Now, once again MX Publishing brings us fifty-three of these adventures in three simultaneously published volumes, with all royalties going to support the Undershaw school for special needs children, located at one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former homes. "Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine . . . ." - Dr. John H. Watson So wrote Dr. Watson in "The Problem of Thor Bridge" - and ever since, Sherlockians have been seeking to know more about these tales from the legendary Tin Dispatch Box. While Watson's original Literary Agent only edited the pitifully few sixty stories that make up the original Canon, there have since been literally thousands of traditional adventures about the true Sherlock Holmes - and yet there will never be enough! In 2018, MX Publishing presented Parts XI and XII of this acclaimed and ongoing series, Some Untold Cases, and then in 2020, Parts XXII, XXIII, and XXIV returned to that theme with Some More Untold Cases. Now that concept is revisited with more Sherlock Holmes adventures that further explore those many tantalizing references to some of Holmes's other Untold Cases, as mentioned in The Canon. Join us as we return to Baker Street and discover more authentic adventures of Sherlock Holmes, described by the estimable Dr. Watson as "the best and wisest . . . whom I have ever known."
Download or read book The Best Women s Travel Writing Volume 11 written by Lavinia Spalding and published by Travelers' Tales. This book was released on 2017-04-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since publishing the original edition of A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been the recognized national leader in women’s travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women’s travel writing of the year. This title is the tenth in that series—The Best Women’s Travel Writing—presenting stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.
Download or read book My Wilderness written by Maxine Scates and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner’s threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Excerpt from “Dear Maple” Nothing will save you now unless the small branches sprouting like a halo from your eight-foot stump take hold. The young women at the Farmer’s Market are already selling the most beautiful turnips, glowing like pearls, and all spring the swale of camas shone blue in the morning light. How can any of us know what will save us?
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 Imaginative Argument written by Frank L. Cioffi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than merely a writing text, The Imaginative Argument offers writers instruction on how to use their imaginations to improve their prose. Cioffi shows writers how they can enliven argument--the organizing rubric of all persuasive writing--by drawing on emotion, soul, and creativity, the wellsprings of imagination. While Cioffi suggests that argument should become a natural habit of mind for writers, he goes still further, inspiring writers to adopt as their gold standard the imaginative argument: the surprising yet strikingly apt insight that organizes disparate noises into music, that makes out of chaos, chaos theory. Rather than offering a model of writing based on established formulas or templates, Cioffi urges writers to envision argument as an active parsing of experience that imaginatively reinvents the world. Cioffi's manifesto asserts that successful argument also requires writers to explore their own deep-seated feelings, to exploit the fuzzy but often profoundly insightful logic of the imagination. But expression is not all that matters: Cioffi's work anchors itself in the actual. Drawing on Louis Kahn's notion that a good architect never has all the answers to a building's problems before its physical construction, Cioffi maintains that in argument, too, answers must be forged along the way, as the writer inventively deals with emergent problems and unforeseen complexities. Indeed, discovery, imagination, and invention suffuse all stages of the process. The Imaginative Argument offers all the intellectual kindling that writers need to ignite this creativity, from insights on developing ideas to avoiding bland assertions or logical leaps. It cites exemplary nonfiction prose stylists, including William James, Ruth Benedict, and Erving Goffman, as well as literary sources to demonstrate the dynamic of persuasive writing. Provocative and lively, it will prove not only essential reading but also inspiration for all those interested in arguing more imaginatively more successfully. This edition features new chapters that cover the revision process in greater depth, as well as the particular challenges of researching and writing in the digital age, such as working with technology and avoiding plagiarism. The book also includes new sample essays, an appendix to help instructors use the book in the classroom, and much more.
Download or read book Night Hawks written by Charles Johnson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, “the celebrated novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and essayist…comes a small treasure, one to be read and considered and reread” (The New York Times Book Review), showcasing his incredible range and resonant voice. Charles Johnson’s Night Hawks presents an eclectic, masterful collection of stories tied together by Buddhist themes and displaying all the grace, heart, and insight for which he has long been known. Spanning genres from science fiction to realism, “Johnson’s writing, filled with the sort of long, layered sentences you can get happily lost in, conveys a kindness; a sense that all of us…have our own stories” (The Seattle Times). In “The Weave,” Ieesha and her boyfriend carry out a heist at the salon from which she has just been fired—coming away with thousands of dollars of merchandise in the form of hair extensions. “Night Hawks,” the titular story, draws on Johnson’s friendship with the late playwright August Wilson to construct a narrative about two writers who meet at night to talk. In “Kamadhatu,” a lonely Japanese abbot has his quiet world upended by a visit from a black American Buddhist whose presence pushes him toward the awakening he has long found elusive. “Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” about a cab driver who decides to rob the home of a wealthy passenger, reminds readers to be grateful for what they have. And “The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” combines the real-life story of a “superhero” in the city of Seattle with an invented narrative about an aging English professor who decides to join him. With precise, elegant, and moving language, Johnson creates an “arresting” array of “indelible moments that show Johnson to be a master of the short form” (Library Journal, starred review). Night Hawks is “a masterpiece…[that] ultimately offers a message of empowerment and hope” (Oprah.com).
Download or read book Staff Picks written by George Singleton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s Father’s Day 1972 and a young boy’s dad takes him to visit a string of unimpressive ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother; the unconventional detective work of a koan-speaking, Kung Fu–loving uncle solves a case of arson during a pancake breakfast; and a former geology professor, recovering from addiction, finds himself sharing a taxicab with specters from a Jim Crow–era lynching. Set in and around the fictional town of Steepleburg, South Carolina, the loosely tied stories in George Singleton’s Staff Picks place sympathetic, oddball characters in absurd, borderline surreal situations that slowly reveal the angst of southern history with humor and bite. In the tradition of Donald Barthelme, T. C. Boyle, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, Singleton creates lingering, darkly comedic tales by drawing from those places where familiarity and alienation coexist. A remarkable and distinct effort from an acclaimed chronicler of the South, Staff Picks reaffirms Singleton’s gift for crafting short story collections that both deliver individual gems and shine as a whole.
Download or read book Some Other Frequency written by Larry McCaffery and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McCaffery converses with the young, recklessly daring, and furiously productive William Vollmann and with Marianne Hauser, who published her first novel nearly sixty years ago ... with Native American trickster novelist Gerald Vizenor and "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe (whose literary technique is to "plant a bomb, sneak away") ... with stark minimalist Lydia Davis and text-and-collage artist Derek Pell ... with muscular pop icon Mark Leyner and proto-punk diva Kathy Acker. They are a diverse lot, shaped by very different literary and personal influences, and addressing divergent readerships.
Download or read book Living in the Weather of the World written by Richard Bausch and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In stories by turns suspenseful, comic, subtle, and profound, Richard Bausch probes the fault lines of daily life. At three in the morning a man tries not to wake his sleeping wife while fielding calls from his suicidal mistress. A successful real estate agent with two grown sons tries an online dating service on a whim and is surprised by the complicated result. And after being held up at gunpoint, a police officer commiserates with his assailant about their unhappy marriages. Wherever he casts his gaze, Bausch illuminates shades of human experience that defy understanding.
Download or read book Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones written by Lucia Perillo and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake."—Booklist "The poems [are] taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry."—The New York Times Book Review MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as a New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From "Again, the Body": When you spend many hours alone in a room you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself— this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it, from scratching off the juicy scab?... Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a major in wildlife management, and subsequently worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington.
Download or read book Crossing Borders written by Lynne Sharon Schwartz and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.
Download or read book Where the Dead Sit Talking written by Brandon Hobson and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface - that is, until he meets 17-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings towards Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.
