Download or read book The BBC National Short Story Award 2015 written by Hilary Mantel and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘I often ask myself what makes a story work,’ wrote the great American author, Flannery O’Connor. ‘I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character... which is both totally right and totally unexpected... one that is both in character and beyond character.’ The five stories shortlisted for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award with Book Trust all feature people making just such gestures, acting in ways that reach beyond themselves: a woman takes refuge from a disastrous relationship by caring for a morbidly obese man; parents of a missing girl desperately resort to the services of a woman whose talents they barely credit; a middle-class resident of a leafy corner of Windsor finds herself caught at a crossroads in history; a young man attempts to impress his girlfriend’s unconventional parents – to excruciating, comic effect; and a young woman attempts to stitch together her own approach to life in the face of love. In each case we see an individual endeavouring to stand up, to make a difference, to be part of something bigger. Now in its tenth year, the BBC National Short Story Award has witnessed a decade of revival for the form, and the stories on this list show just what fine fettle it’s in. The shortlist was selected by crime-writer Ian Rankin, novelist Tash Aw, previous winner Sarah Hall, BBC Books Editor Di Speirs, and former BBC correspondent and journalist Allan Little, who chaired the panel and introduces this collection.
Download or read book The BBC National Short Story Award 2017 written by Cynan Jones and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust 2017 all feature characters that are disconnected, willingly or unwillingly, from those around them: a mysterious out-of-towner is shunned by her new colleagues; a grieving husband retreats into his old compulsion for hoarding; a promising academic risks his career for a casual liaison with a younger man. And whether we follow the characters’ need to be alone – like the fisherman drifting dangerously far from shore – or trace it back to its root – like the daughter burying her violent father – what we find there is always unexpected. Jenni Fagan, Benjamin Markovits and Helen Oyeyemi, three of Granta’s recent ‘20 under 40’, are joined by critic and novelist, Will Eaves and Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize winner, Cynan Jones on the 2017 shortlist. This year’s shortlist was selected by authors Eimear McBride, Jon McGregor and Sunjeev Sahota, as well as BBC Radio’s Di Speirs and acclaimed novelist Joanna Trollope who chaired the panel and introduces the collection.
Download or read book The BBC National Short Story Award 2016 written by KJ Orr and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The BBC National Short Story Award 2021 written by Lucy Caldwell and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of teenage boys take turns assessing each other’s changing bodies before a Friday night disco… A grieving woman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a fellow traveller on a night train to Kiev… An unusually well-informed naturalist is eyed with suspicion by his comrades on a forest exhibition with a higher purpose… The stories shortlisted for the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University take place in liminal spaces – their characters find themselves in transit, travelling along flight paths, train lines and roads, or in moments where new opportunities or directions suddenly seem possible. From the reflections of a new mother flying home after a funeral, to an ailing son’s reluctance to return to the village of his childhood, these stories celebrate small kindnesses in times of turbulence, and demonstrate a connection between one another that we might sometimes take for granted. The BBC NSSA is one of the most prestigious prizes for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. James Runcie is joined on the judging panel by a group of acclaimed writers and critics including: Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Fiona Mozley; award winning writer, poet and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, Derek Owusu; multi-award winning Irish novelist and short story writer, Donal Ryan; and returning judge, Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio.
Download or read book The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher written by Hilary Mantel and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling collection, from the Man Booker prize-winner for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, that has been called "scintillating" (New York Times Books Review), "breathtaking" (NPR), "exquisite" (The Chicago Tribune) and "otherworldly" (Washington Post). "A new Hilary Mantel book is an Event with a ‘capital ‘E.'"—NPR "A book of her short stories is like a little sweet treat."—USA Today (4 stars) "[Mantel is at] the top of her game."—Salon "Genius."—The Seattle Times One of the most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary stories In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Stories of dislocation and family fracture, of whimsical infidelities and sudden deaths with sinister causes, brilliantly unsettle the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story written by Ann-Marie Einhaus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides an accessible overview of short fiction by writers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and other international sites. A collection of international experts examine the development of the short story in a variety of contexts from the early nineteenth century to the present. They consider how dramatic changes in the publishing landscape during this period - such as the rise of the fiction magazine and the emergence of new opportunities in online and electronic publishing - influenced the form, covering subgenres from detective fiction to flash fiction. Drawing on a wealth of critical scholarship to place the short story in the English literary tradition, this volume will be an invaluable guide for students of the short story in English.
Download or read book Children s Writers Artists Yearbook 2017 written by Bloomsbury Publishing and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Frances Hardinge The annual, bestselling guide to all aspects of the media and how to write and illustrate for children and young adults. Acknowledged by the media industries and authors as the essential guide to how to get published. The 70+ articles are updated and added to each year. Together they provide invaluable guidance on subjects such as series fiction, writing historical or funny books, preparing an illustration portfolio, managing your finances, interpreting publishers' contracts, self-publishing your work. NEW articles for the 2017 edition included on: - Wanting to be a writer by Simon Mason - Finding new readers and markets by Tom Palmer - News and trends in children's publishing 2015-16 by Caroline Horn - Series fiction: writing as a part of a team by Lucy Courtenay - Creating a children's comic by Tom Fickling All of the 2,000 listings of who to contact across the media have been reviewed and updated. The essential guide for any writer for children.
Download or read book Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung written by Mao Tse-Tung and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung' is a volume of selected statements taken from the speeches and writings by Mao Mao Tse-Tung, published from 1964 to 1976. It was often printed in small editions that could be easily carried and that were bound in bright red covers, which led to its western moniker of the 'Little Red Book'. It is one of the most printed books in history, and will be of considerable value to those with an interest in Mao Tse-Tung and in the history of the Communist Party of China. The chapters of this book include: 'The Communist Party', 'Classes and Class Struggle', 'Socialism and Communism', 'The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among The People', 'War and Peace', 'Imperialism and All Reactionaries ad Paper Tigers', 'Dare to Struggle and Dare to Win', et cetera. We are republishing this antiquarian volume now complete with a new prefatory biography of Mao Tse-Tung.
Download or read book Room written by Emma Donoghue and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-07 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor's garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma's games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.
Download or read book The BBC National Short Story Award 2015 with Book Trust written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Download or read book Open Water written by Caleb Azumah Nelson and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION “Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.”—Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.
Download or read book T Veg written by Smriti Prasadam-Halls and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reginald s a T. Rex just as fierce and ferocious as the rest: he s got a mighty roar, gnashing teeth, and all the speed a dino could need. But when it comes to mealtime, Reg would rather chow down on broccoli, beans, and greens than the juicy steaks his paleo pals prefer. When Reginald realizes how different he is from the others, he hopes to find a place to fit in among the herbivores. He excitedly strikes out in search of a new herd, only to scare away the other dinosaurs as he charges to greet them. But when a falling boulder threatens the safety of Reg s old T. Rex clan, he ll show everyone what only a strong, vegetarian Tyrannosaurs rex can do. A celebration of vegetarianism, T. Veg is a rollicking laugh-out-loud tale about being unapologetically yourself. "
Download or read book Moss Witch written by Sara Maitland and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘It seems probable that there are no more moss witches; the times are cast against them. But you can never be certain. In that sense they are like their mosses; they vanish from sites they are known to have flourished in, they are even declared extinct – and then they are there again, there or somewhere else, small, delicate but triumphant, alive. Moss Witches, like mosses, do not compete; they retreat….’ Each story in Sara Maitland’s new collection enacts a daring kind of alchemy, fusing together raw elements of scientific theory with ancient myth, folkloric archetype and contemporary storytelling. As the laboratory smoke settles, we are treated to a new strain of narrative: a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, the atavistic and the futuristic. We’re also introduced to a weird and wonderful cast of characters: identical twins who fight bitterly day and night for purely quantum mechanical reasons; an expert on bird migration awaiting the homecoming of her lover on the windswept shores of the Hebrides. All the more remarkable is that each of these stories sprang from a conversation with a scientist and grew directly out of cutting-edge research. As befits their hybrid nature, each is also accompanied by an afterword, specially written by the consulting scientist to introduce us to the wonder behind the weirdness. Featuring: SCIENTISTS: Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, Dr. Rob Appleby, Dr. Melissa Baxter, Dr. Jamie Davies, Prof. Robin Dunbar, Dr. Charles Fernyhough, Prof. Robert Furness, Dr. Linda Kirstein, Gemma Lewis, Prof. Tim O’Brien, Dr. Neil Roberts, Dr. Jennifer Rowntree, Dr. Tara Shears, Prof. Ian Stewart.
Download or read book Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle written by Patrick Gill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.
Download or read book Jake s Bones written by Jake McGowan-Lowe and published by Ticktock Books, Limited. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jake McGowan-Lowe is a boy with a very unusual hobby. Since the age of 7, he has been photographing and blogging about his incredible finds and now has a worldwide following, including 100,000 visitors from the US and Canada. Follow Jake as he explores the animal world through this new 64-page book. He takes you on a world wide journey of his own collection, and introduces you to other amazing animals from the four corners of the globe. Find out what a cow's tooth, a rabbit's rib and a duck's quack look like and much, much more besides.
Download or read book Swimming Lessons written by Claire Fuller and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Oprah Editor's Pick and NPR Best Book of the Year From the author of the award-winning and word-of-mouth sensation Our Endless Numbered Days comes an exhilarating literary mystery that will keep readers guessing until the final page. Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Scandalous and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a passionate and troubled marriage.
