Download or read book CAUTION Men in Trees written by Darrell Spencer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nine stories of CAUTION Men in Trees capture the pressure, need, and frequent helplessness of people confronted with intractable reality. As suggested by the collection's epigraph from Superman—"Did you say kryptonite?"—the characters in these stories have reached a point where they realize that parts of their lives are coming undone, and that their own thoughts and actions—or, frequently, the failure to act soon enough—are the cause. Though settings and situations vary, the same sense of overwhelming urgency recurs throughout the collection. The stories reflect a world distressed by conflict and settings fraught with the occurrences of personal violence. Against the background of the O. J. Simpson trial, a man refuses to assist in a friend's suicide and realizes that he has been avoiding many unpleasant truths about himself and his life. A son faced with his father's debilitating stroke sees that he must ultimately confront the mortality and feelings of grief that he has been concealing. In the title story, the film Bugsy and talk about the disappointing reality of pop-culture heroes set the scene for a husband's frightening confrontation with his own limitations. The shock of stark revelation combines with tightly wound chains of suggestive events to create a collection of gripping, edgy stories about characters who, however battered, survive.
Download or read book CAUTION Men in Trees written by Darrell Spencer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nine stories of CAUTION Men in Trees capture the pressure, need, and frequent helplessness of people confronted with intractable reality. As suggested by the collection's epigraph from Superman—"Did you say kryptonite?"—the characters in these stories have reached a point where they realize that parts of their lives are coming undone, and that their own thoughts and actions—or, frequently, the failure to act soon enough—are the cause. Though settings and situations vary, the same sense of overwhelming urgency recurs throughout the collection. The stories reflect a world distressed by conflict and settings fraught with the occurrences of personal violence. Against the background of the O. J. Simpson trial, a man refuses to assist in a friend's suicide and realizes that he has been avoiding many unpleasant truths about himself and his life. A son faced with his father's debilitating stroke sees that he must ultimately confront the mortality and feelings of grief that he has been concealing. In the title story, the film Bugsy and talk about the disappointing reality of pop-culture heroes set the scene for a husband's frightening confrontation with his own limitations. The shock of stark revelation combines with tightly wound chains of suggestive events to create a collection of gripping, edgy stories about characters who, however battered, survive.
Download or read book Ate It Anyway written by Ed Allen and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the limbo bounded by rebellion and resignation, belonging and solitude, Ed Allen's middle Americans seem to be either freely adrift or uncomfortably vested in an exit strategy wholly inadequate for their circumstances. These sixteen darkly humorous stories gauge the tension between what we really feel and what we outwardly express, what we should do and what we manage to get done. In "Celibacy-by-the-Atlantic," Phil negotiates a lingering, low-intensity regret brought on by the annual family get-together at his parents' beach house, where memories of his aimless, privileged adolescence mingle with forebodings of his aimless, privileged middle age. In "A Lover's Guide to Hospitals," Carl lies in bed, pining over a stillborn romance through a moody, post-op haze of painkillers. As a consoling needle through the heart, the object of Carl's unrequited affections also turns out to be his nurse. In "Burt Osborne Rules the World," a precocious boy ponders his childhood in "a world protected against anything you could imagine doing to make it more interesting." Sensing that only more of the same awaits him as an adult, Burt charts a different course—as a class clown with a truly toxic sense of mischief. Others, like Lydia in "Ralph Goes to Mexico," assert their individuality more effortlessly, for they're just too naturally odd to be cowed by convention. Lydia's dilemma is whether she should have her leukemic cat stuffed and mounted or turned into a hat after he dies. These lyrical tales celebrate the ordinary—and the not so ordinary—with a flourish of Nabokovian wit that combines grandeur, kitsch, and the author's broad empathy with his characters.
Download or read book Black Elvis written by Geoffrey Becker and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this funny, touching collection about music, identity, liars, and love, Geoffrey Becker brings us into the lives of people who have come to a turning point and lets us watch as they take, however clumsily, their next steps. In the title story, an aging black singer who performs only Elvis songs despite his classic bluesman looks has his regular spot at the local blues jam threatened by a newly arrived Asian American with the unlikely name Robert Johnson. In “Man Under,” two friends struggling to be rock musicians in Reagan-era Brooklyn find that their front door has been removed by their landlord. An aspiring writer discovers the afterlife consists of being the stand-in for a famous author on an endless book tour in “Another Coyote Story.” Lonely and adrift in Florence, Italy, a young man poses as a tour guide with an art history degree in “Know Your Saints.” And in “This Is Not a Bar,” a simple night on the town for a middle-aged guitar student and jazz buff turns into a confrontation with his past and an exploration of what is or is not real. In his depictions of struggling performers, artists, expectant parents, travelers, con-men, temporarily employed academics, and even the recently deceased, Becker asks the question, Which are more important: the stories we tell other people or the ones we tell ourselves?
Download or read book Silent Retreats written by Philip F. Deaver and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caught in the muddle of modern life, eyes gazing at the middle distance, the characters in Silent Retreats search, down roads paved by custom and dotted by the absurd, for escape, refuge, or, at least, merciful diversion. Many of the men in Philip Deaver's stories, having drifted out of their native Illinois to the far corners, find comfort from empty jobs and blank relationships in healing, often hilarious, seductions. In "Why I Shacked Up With Martha" a distracted DC executive pierces the gray blur of his glass box on Dupont Circle with illicit, painfully superficial notes passed to his beautiful, liberated coworker. In "Marguerite Howe," a businessman from Texas at a cocktail party in New Haven accosts his hostess, blindly convinced that she is the woman of his college day-dreams at the University of Virginia. And, in Nebraska, a defeated legal aid attorney escapes the cold wind of failure and a near suicidal woman in the deep warmth of "Fiona's Rooms." Other characters, still within the radius of central Illinois, tread through the familiar scenery of the past, measuring with landmarks of memory the distance, and yet the circularity, time has wrought in their lives. In the title story, Martin Wolf—overcome with tears during the morning commute and craving connection and the cleansing rituals of his Catholic youth—learns from the words of a parish priest, crackling through the lines of a pay phone as cars screech by on Roosevelt Road, that silence has become self-indulgent. And in "Infield," Carl Landen savors the well-ordered tableau of the Pony League diamond where he played shortstop and where his son now plays that position. Recalling the ache in the shoulder after an overhand throw, seeing in his mind the figure of his father intruding at the edge of the field, he relaxes the pain of generations, the soreness that comes from knowing a town too well. A well-known theme of Philip Deaver's stories is "what happened to men after what happened to women." The stories in Silent Retreats trace the tentative journeys of men as they redefine who they are in a changed world while still coping with memory and desire in the old ways. Above all, these stories chronicle a search for absolution—for the elusive freedom lurking among the very syllables of the word.
Download or read book Break Any Woman Down written by Dana Johnson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson explores race, identity, and alienation with unflinching honesty and vibrant language. Hip and seductive, her stories often feature women discovering their identities through sexual and emotional intimacy with the men in their lives. In the title story, La Donna is a black stripper whose white boyfriend, an actor in adult movies, insists that she stop stripping. In "Melvin in the Sixth Grade," eleven-year-old Avery has a crush on a white boy from Oklahoma who, like Avery, is an outsider in their suburban Los Angeles school. "Markers" is as much about a woman's relationship with her mother as it is about the dissolution of her relationship with an older Italian man. Dana Johnson has an intuitive sense of character and a gift for creating authentic voices. She effortlessly captures the rhythmic vernaculars of Los Angeles, the American South, and various immigrant communities as she brings to life the sometimes heavyhearted, but always persevering, souls who live there.
Download or read book Unified Field Theory written by Frank Soos and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories on general subjects. In Trip to Sometimes Island, a man realizes the limit of his ability, When the Hoot Owl Moves Its Nest is on a wife's adultery, while If You Meet the Buddha by the Road is on a precocious student.
Download or read book Spinning Away from the Center written by Ethan Laughman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home—thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.
Download or read book Drowning Lessons written by Peter Selgin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author introduces readers to the choppy waters of human relationships with empathy and wit in a provocative collection of thirteen tales that incorporates the presence of water as both a vital and a potentially hazardous element in our lives. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Download or read book The Invention of Flight written by Susan Neville and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the stories of a grandmother suffering from cancer, a woman who helps her neighbor throw out her husband, a traveling magician, a pianist and his wife, and a young daydreamer
Download or read book Close Ups written by Sandra Thompson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sandra Thompson takes us inside the lives of women struggling to find their places among lovers, husbands and ex-husbands, mothers, and children in relationships where old rules do not apply and new rules have not yet been set. Thompson’s characters live in a world where dreams often supersede reality and things are not as they seem. Her style is sophisticated and subtle, and we experience her stories almost by osmosis. They stay with us afterwards to question their own realities.
Download or read book No Lie Like Love written by Paul Rawlins and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shady financier visits his small hometown, a middle-aged divorcé emerges from a life of drastic austerity and self-denial, a sick and dying professor discovers the healing touch of a former student. From the South African veldt to the barren Utah desert, from the green lawns of suburbia to moonlit Pueblo ruins, the people in Paul Rawlins's debut story collection brave the Big Questions about relationships, love, and death, finding more often than not that their happiness to just get by is not enough. Asking for truth or understanding, but hoping the answers will be simple, they struggle with feelings often too deep, too new, too disquieting to articulate. The voices we hear most often belong to men—good men who have somehow come up short on love, answers, peace, time. Like the pro football player with a torn-up knee in "Big Texas," the HIV-positive teen in "The Matter of These Hours," or the recovering heroin addict in "August—Staying Cool," they find that age, accident, or self-made circumstances have stolen their abilities, stung their pride, or worse. Dangerously distanced from the women they should have loved more, they draw closer to buddies, brothers, fathers, and sons. But like the alkali flats in "Good for What Ails You," transformed by flash-flooding into an inland sea, Rawlins's characters show themselves capable of quick and fundamental change. Farmers and soldiers, athletes and scholars, rebels and high rollers, they fit our preconceptions only in the shallowest sense. In the ways they connect with Rawlins's elemental imagery—sun, water, earth—these people play with our essential notions about men and women as they surprise themselves about their strengths, about what they really desire and what others desire in them.
Download or read book Stories from the Flannery O Connor Award written by Nancy Zafris and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories selected from winning volumes published in the past fifteen years, from Frank Soos’s Unified Field Theory (1998) to Hugh Sheehy’s The Invisibles (2012).
Download or read book Down on the Sidewalk written by Ethan Laughman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as they offer answers.
Download or read book The Bigness of the World written by Lori Ostlund and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lori Ostlund’s debut collection people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind. In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, Ostlund offers characters that represent a different sort of everyman—men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In “Upon Completion of Baldness” a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. The precocious narrator of “All Boy” finds comfort when he is locked in a closet by a babysitter. In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment” a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. A lesbian couple whose relationship is disintegrating flees to the Moroccan desert in “The Children beneath the Seat.” And in “Idyllic Little Bali” a group of Americans gathers around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and ends up witnessing a man’s fatal flight from his wife. In the eleven stories in The Bigness of the World we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.
Download or read book The Dance Boots written by Linda LeGarde Grover and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In "Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth," this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling. The Dance Boots narrates a century's evolution of Native Americans making choices and compromises, often dictated by a white majority, as they try to balance survival, tribal traditions, and obligations to future generations.
Download or read book Spit Baths written by Greg Downs and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories follows Embee, Rudy, Peg, and similar young folks who live off the map in the South and Midwest, tying their identities to place above all else as the world becomes increasingly detached.
