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 Pushcart Prize 2022 XLVI written by Bill Henderson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 46th annual edition of the most celebrated literary series in America. Over 60 brilliant stories, poems and essays from ?dozens of small presses, ?as selected from 900 presses worldwide by ?more than ?200 distinguished staff contributing editors. Series Honors: The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Pushcart its 2020 recognition for “Distinguished Service to the Arts.” The National Book Critics Circle cited Bill Henderson for its Ivan Sandrof “Lifetime Achievement” award in 2006. In 2005 Poets &Writers / Barnes and Noble noted Pushcart for their Writers For Writers prize. And in 1978 Publishers Weekly’s Carey-Thomas Award went to the Pushcart Prize. Reviews of last year’s edition: Booklist - “Resplendent…A perennial must have.” Publishers Weekly - “A trove of fine writing.” Kirkus - ”Strong and wide ranging." Library Journal (starred) - "Fascinating ….A must have for all collections."
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 Ill Will written by Dan Chaon and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. Includes an exclusive conversation between Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • NPR • The New York Times • Los Angeles Times • The Washington Post • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly “We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie? A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning. Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses his patient's suggestions that a serial killer is at work as paranoid thinking, but as the two embark on an amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way. From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place. “In his haunting, strikingly original new novel, [Dan] Chaon takes formidable risks, dismantling his timeline like a film editor.”—The New York Times Book Review “The scariest novel of the year . . . ingenious . . . Chaon’s novel walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.”—The Washington Post
Download or read book Pushcart Prize XLV written by Bill Henderson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 45th edition of the most celebrated literary series in America. Pushcart Prize XLV is continuing evidence that much of today’s vibrant writing appears only in small journals and book presses.The series has been selected for Publishers Weekly Carey Thomas Award, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof citation, and the Poets and Writers/Barnes and Noble “Writers For Writers” award among others.Here are 70 authors from more than 50 presses as selected from the nominations of 220 distinguished Contributing Editors and 800 participating presses.Recent reviews include: “Essential.” Library Journal“Must reading” Kirkus Reviews“Distinguished.” New York Times Book Review
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 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 Send Me Work written by Katherine Karlin and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of 2011 Balcones Fiction Prize The stories in Katherine Karlin's debut collection encompass an unusually broad range of experience - refinery workers mourn a colleague's death; a struggling young woman in post-Katrina New Orleans persuades a welder to teach her his trade; an idealistic aerobics instructor decamps for Nicaragua to pick coffee. In each of these stories, Karlin offers rare insight into the place of work in the lives of women, her narrators keenly observant and attuned the humor arising from the gap between life as they imagine it and as it's really lived. But even more remarkable is the fullness with which she renders characters who, once we meet them, make us wonder how they've escaped the notice of other writers.
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 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 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 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 381 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 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 Staff Picks written by George Singleton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-06 with total page 274 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 Reflections on Afterlife written by John J. Kula and published by LifeRich Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity has always wished for something beyond this lifesomething greater and uplifting beyond mere mortal existence. This feeling of longing is often seen as a religiously inspired conviction, and many people see their place in the afterlife as something divinely ordained. John J. Kula examines the myths as well as the far-fetched notions surrounding the afterlife in this expansive study that combines philosophy, science, religion and faith. He explores areas such as: science and religion and how they overlap; modern-day myths about the afterlife; psychic phenomena, channeling, and out-of-body experiences; and heaven, purgatory, limbo, and hell. By clearing away the misgivings and confusion that surround the notion of afterlife, youll realize that it is not like any place on earth. That is part of its incredible mystery. Take a positive, contemporary view of the afterlife, and look to the theological teachings of today to demystify ancient mythology with Reflections on Afterlife.
Download or read book Inheritors written by Asako Serizawa and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. Decades into the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war as the world shimmers on the brink of an even more pervasive violence. Grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war, Inheritors offers an intricate tapestry of stories illuminating the complex ways in which we live, interpret, and pass on our tangled histories.
