Download or read book Everything Ravaged Everything Burned written by Wells Tower and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
Download or read book Everything Ravaged Everything Burned Stories written by Wells Tower and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
Download or read book The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories written by Ben Marcus and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.” —Ben Marcus, from the Introduction Award-winning author of Notable American Women Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today. Sea Oak by George Saunders Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri Down the Road by Stephen Dixon X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby Short Talks by Anne Carson Field Events by Rick Bass Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell
Download or read book Before I Burn written by Gaute Heivoll and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s, a pyromaniac runs amok in a close-knit community in rural Norway. Homes are burnt to a cinder, and panic spreads, as neighbors wonder who amongst them could be wreaking such fear and anguish. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, a mother comes to realize that her son is lighting the fires. Born into this time of chaos, Gaute Heivoll is indelibly linked to the arsonist intent on such destruction. By juxtaposing the pyromaniac's story with his own, Heivoll explores memory, loss, and the agonizing separation of child from parent that it is a rite of passage for us all. Written in fluid, luminous prose, Before I Burn is a literary sensation, by the foremost Norwegian writer of his generation.
Download or read book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life. In "The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck," three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In "Hello Kitty," a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk," a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members. With original illustrations by Ian Falconer, author of the bestselling Olivia series of children's books, these stories are David Sedaris at his most observant, poignant, and surprising.
Download or read book American Rust written by Philipp Meyer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a beautiful but dying Pennsylvania steel town, American Rustis a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation that arises from its loss.It is the story of two young men bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia and the beauty around them who dream of a future beyond the factories, abandoned homes, and the polluted river. Isaac is the smartest kid in town, left behind to care for his sick father after his mothercommitssuicide and his sisterLee moves away. Now Isaac wants out too. Not even his best friend, Billy Poe, can stand in his way: broad-shouldered Billy, always ready for a fight, still living in his mother's trailer. Then, on the very day of Isaac's leaving, something happens that changes the friends' fates and tests the loyalties of their friendship and those of their lovers, families, and the town itself. Evoking John Steinbeck's novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rustis an extraordinarilymoving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendance, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.
Download or read book You Will Never Be Forgotten written by Mary South and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for “the world’s biggest search engine,” who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child. In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction—one that could only belong to Mary South.
Download or read book Battleborn written by Claire Vaye Watkins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.
Download or read book Everything Ravaged Everything Burned written by Wells Tower and published by . This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
Download or read book Everything Ravaged Everything Burned written by Wells Tower and published by Picador. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gringos written by Charles Portis and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Portis’s fourth novel—a truly brilliant, wonderfully bizarre novel by one of our great American novelists. Jimmy Burns is an expatriate American living in Mexico who has an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd little details that comprise your average American. For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Colombian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing person situation—whatever it takes to remain “the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers.” But when Jimmy’s laid-back lifestyle is seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker called Louise, a sudden wave of “hippies” (led by a murderous ex-con guru) in search of psychic happenings, and a group of archaeologists who are unearthing (illegally) Mayan tombs, his simple South-of-the-Border existence faces a clear and present danger.
Download or read book In Other Rooms Other Wonders written by Daniyal Mueenuddin and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from the elegant drawing rooms of Lahore to the mud villages of rural Multan, a powerful collection of short stories about feudal Pakistan. An impoverished young woman becomes a wealthy relative’s mistress; an electrician on the make confronts his desperate assailant to protect his most prized possession; a farm manager rises far in the world—but his family discovers after his death the transience of power; a maid, who advances herself through sexual favours, unexpectedly falls in love. In these linked stories about the family and household staff of the ageing KK Harouni, we meet masters and servants, landlords and supplicants, politicians and electricians, village women, and Karachi housewives. Part Chekhov, part RK Narayan, these stories are dark and light, complex and humane; at heart about the relationship between the powerful and powerless, bound together in life—and in death. Together they make up a vivid portrait of a feudal world rarely brought alive in the English language. Sensuous, graceful, melancholy, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gives you Pakistan as you have never seen it. It marks the debut of an amazing new talent.
Download or read book You Lost Me There written by Rosecrans Baldwin and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beautiful, brainy, and offbeat" (Entertainment Weekly), a perfect sophisticated summer read. By turns funny, charming, and tragic, Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel introduces leading Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Victor Aaron, who spends his days alternating between long hours in the lab and running through memories of his late wife, Sara. He's preserved their marriage as a perfect, if tumultuous, duet between two opposite but compatible souls. Until the day he discovers a series of index cards in Sara's handwriting that chronicle the major "changes in direction of their marriage." Suddenly this eminent memory expert finds his faith in memory itself unraveling, and he must, along with his support network of strong women-from his lab assistant to Aunt Betsy, the doddering doyenne of the island where they all live-determine a way to move on. Watch a Video
Download or read book Now You See It written by Bathsheba Monk and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's pretty much a straight shot from the upstate New York towns of Richard Russo's books to Bathsheba Monk's Cokesville, PA. This is coal and steel country. The sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck—and two inches means a fat one. And what's the best make-out spot in town? Next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen beguiling, linked stories, spanning fourty-five years, Monk brings a corner of America alive as never before. Her world bursts with indelible characters: Mrs. Szilborski, who bakes great cake, but sprays her neighbors' dogs with mace; and Mrs. Wojic, who believes her husband was reincarnated—as one of those dogs. Then there is the younger generation: Annie Kusiak , who wants to write, and Theresa Gojuk, who dreams of stardom. Cokesville is their Yoknapatawpha; they ache to escape it and the ghosts of their ancestors and the regret of their parents. What ghosts—and what regrets! When Theresa's father Bruno falls into a vat of molten steel, the mill gives the family an ingot roughly his weight to bury. As deliciously wry as Allegra Goodman in The Family Markowitz, and with the matter-of-fact humanity of Grace Paley, Bathsheba Monk leads us into a world that is at once totally surprising and recognizable. These stories glow like molten steel.
Download or read book Young Skins written by Colin Barrett and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blockbuster collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting young voices: “Sharp and lively . . . a rough, charged, and surprisingly fun read” (Interview). A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree * Winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award * Winner of the Guardian First Book Award * Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence. “Lyrical and tough and smart . . . What seems to be about sorrow and foreboding turns into an adventure, instead, in the tender art of the unexpected.” —Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize Award–winning author “Sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, Young Skins touches the heart, as well as the mind.” —Irish American Post
Download or read book Night Train written by Thom Jones and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A posthumous and definitive collection of new and selected stories by "virtuoso of the short story" (Esquire) and National Book Award finalist Thom Jones. This scorching collection from award-winning author Thom Jones features his best new short fiction alongside a selection of outstanding stories from three previous books. Jones's stories are full of high-octane, prose-drunk entertainment. His characters are grifters and drifters, rogues and ne'er-do-wells, would-be do-gooders whose human frailties usually get the better of them. Some are lovable, others are not, but each has an indelible and irresistible voice. They include Vietnam soldiers, amateur boxers, devoted doctors, strung-out advertising writers, pill poppers and veterans of the psych ward, and an unforgettable adolescent DJ radio host, among others. The stories here are excursions into a unique world that veers between abject desperation and fleeting transcendence. Perhaps no other writer in recent memory could encapsulate in such short spaces the profound and the devastating, the poignant and the hallucinatory, with such an exquisite balance of darkness and light. Jones's fiction reveals again and again the resilience and grace of characters who refuse to succumb. In stories that can at once delight us with their wicked humor and sting us with their affecting pathos, Night Train perfectly captures the essence of this iconic American master, showcasing in a single collection the breadth of power of his inimitable fiction.
Download or read book The Library Book written by Susan Orlean and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
