Download or read book DIRTY REALISM SHORT STORIES written by and published by Guido Natale. This book was released on 2023-05-06 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book you are thinking of buying is explosive. Not because it will activate a strange mechanism that will blow everything out of the air; it is pure napalm. It permeates your memory and after you have identified with each of the situations and characters it slowly but systematically corrodes your conception of reality. Martín Segovia bursts into literature with a book of short stories in a transversal way; against trends and fashions, in the dark room of those who are not afraid to tell the truth. Faithful to a literary tradition that is much named but infrequent in writing (Bukowski, Celine, Sábato), Natale's literature has a trait of moral incorrectness; his stories always narrate the fall of our convictions through small epiphanies. If the fallen angels are beings who recover the earthly dirt, the characters change the focus of their fall; it is an inverse fall, from below to above; because they know that above, in their desperate search for communication, for love, for meaning, there is only an instant of flotation where suddenly, in the comedy of nothingness itself, everything comes crashing down again. Fernando Krapp, periodista página/12.
Download or read book Dirty Realism written by Bill Buford and published by Granta: The Magazine of New Writing. This book was released on 1983 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of Granta that defined a new school of American writers: Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederic Barthelme, Carolyn Forché and others.
Download or read book There Must Be Some Mistake written by Frederick Barthelme and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." (The New Yorker). Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair. He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense. Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.
Download or read book The Rock Eaters written by Brenda Peynado and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of 2021 NYPL 10 Best Books for Adults, 2021 A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their “thoughts and prayers” will protect them from the world’s violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. “The Great Escape” tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she’s hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded. With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying, and marvelous nature of humanity.
Download or read book Highland Whirl written by Anna Larner and published by Bold Strokes Books. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When city girl about town Roxanne Barns reluctantly accepts a holiday invite to her best friend Eve's birthday party in the Scottish Highlands, the last thing she expects is to fall for the very person she's been dreading seeing again-the feisty Highlander, Alice Campbell. The moment Alice learns that Roxanne is visiting her home hamlet of Newland, she couldn't be more suspicious or defensive. A warm welcome is certainly not the plan, let alone falling in love. Despite Eve's warnings that Roxanne is not relationship material, Alice can't ignore her growing attraction. She absolutely trusts Eve's judgment, but taking her advice just might break Alice's heart. Highland Whirl reunites readers with the characters and landscape of Highland Fling in an emotionally enthralling story of trust, friendship, family, and love.
Download or read book Machine Dreams written by Jayne Anne Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called “an enduring literary achievement . . . astonishing” by The New York Times, this highly acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small-town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history—from the Depression to the Vietnam War. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Here is a stunning chronicle that is revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each member of the Hampson family. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to complete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off to Vietnam, Danner becomes the sole bond linking her family, whose dissolution mirrors the fractured state of America in the 1960s. Deeply felt and vividly imagined, this lyrical novel is "among the wisest of a generation to grapple with a war that maimed us all" (The Village Voice), by a master of contemporary fiction.
Download or read book All of Us written by Raymond Carver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich collection of poems from not only “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), but one of America’s most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Raymond Carver’s stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy. This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.
Download or read book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love written by Raymond Carver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-05-25 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Dog of the Marriage written by Amy Hempel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Hempel's compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life. In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce. These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.
Download or read book Dirty Havana Trilogy written by Pedro Juan Gutierrez and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, this picaresque novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former Cuban journalist living from hand to mouth in the squalor of contemporary Havana, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of so many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once-elegant apartment houses that line Havana's waterfront, Pedro Juan's days and nights have been reduced by the so-called special times -- the harsh recession that followed the Soviet Union's collapse -- to the struggle of surviving the daily grit through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger -- all the while observing his lovers and friends, strangers on the street, and their suffering with an unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye.
Download or read book The Quick and the Dead written by Joy Williams and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."
Download or read book Highland Fling written by Anna Larner and published by Bold Strokes Books Inc. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eve Eddison describes her ideal woman to her best friend, Roxanne, over pints in their local pub a few days before she travels to the Scottish Highlands. There she falls head over heels for an enigmatic local, Moira Burns, and the usually reticent Eve wants more than a holiday romance. Forestry officer Moira Burns has no intention of letting go—either of past pain or for present pleasure. If that means she misses out on her chance at happiness, so be it. Convinced Eve is headed for heartbreak, Roxanne advises her to let Moira go…but has Eve found her ideal woman at last? From the breathtaking Highlands of Scotland to the buzz of a Leicester gay bar, family and friendship are tested to breaking point, as letting go proves painfully hard.
Download or read book Fast Lanes written by Jayne Anne Phillips and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jayne Anne Phillips has always been a master of portraiture, both in her widely acclaimed novels and in her short fiction. The stories in Fast Lanes demonstrated the breadth of her talent in a "tour de force" of voices, offering elegantly rendered views into the lives of characters torn between the liberation of detachment and the desire to connect. Three stories are collected in this edition for the first time: in "Alma," and adolescent daughter is made the confidante of her lonely mother; "Counting" traces the history of a dommed love affair; and "Callie" evokes memories of the haunting death of a child in 1920's West Virginia. Along with the original seven stories from Fast Lanes--each told in extraordinary first person narratives that have been hailed by critics as virtuoso performances--these incandescent portraits offer windows into the lives of an entire generation of Americans, demonstrating again and again why Jayne Anne Phillips remains one of our most powerful writers.
Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1980 1990 written by D. Quentin Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History has not been kind to the 1980s. The decade is often associated with absurd fashion choices, neo-Conservatism in the Reagan/Bush years, the AIDS crisis, Wall Street ethics, and uninspired television, film, and music. Yet the literature of the 1980s is undeniably rich and lasting. American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 seeks to frame some of the decade's greatest achievements such as Toni Morrison's monumental novel Beloved and to consider some of the trends that began in the 1980s and developed thereafter, including the origins of the graphic novel, prison literature, and the opening of multiculturalism vis-à-vis the 'canon wars'. This volume argues not only for the importance of 1980s American literature, but also for its centrality in understanding trends and trajectories in all contemporary literature against the broader background of culture. This volume serves as both an introduction and a deep consideration of the literary culture of our most maligned decade.
Download or read book Searoad written by Ursula K. Le Guin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the inhabitants and visitors of a sandy track that runs between the town of Klatsand and the Pacific Ocean and relates their experiences.
Download or read book Woman s Story written by Francine Rodriguez and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The stories of these Latina women's lives depict conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world. But these stories also tell of these women's celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. These stories resonate on a deeply emotional level"--
Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
