Download or read book Waiting for Mr Kim and Other Stories written by Carol Roh Spaulding and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of linked stories follows four generations of the Songs, a Korean American family, beginning in 1924 just prior to the Immigration Act and extending to near the end of the century. Linked stories, or stories that form a story cycle, are a common book-length form seen in Asian American literature that accommodates multiple perspectives across generations and locations. Through this story cycle, patterns emerge as cultural identity and individuality, often in tension with one another, shape choices and outcomes. With these stories, Carol Roh Spaulding charts shifting definitions of “Americanness” across time through the arc of a family narrative. She also explores desire and belonging as articulated, in turns, by the mother, father, granddaughter, great-grandson, and even a ghost child who died after a tragic accident. But these linked stories center on the life experiences of Gracie Song. They follow her from girlhood to young motherhood, through her children’s teenage years, and finally to her elderly solitude, when to her great astonishment she finds romance with a younger man and reconciliation with an estranged daughter—both unexpected gifts of later life.
Download or read book Waiting for Mr Kim and Other Stories written by Carol Roh Spaulding and published by Flannery O'Connor Award for Sh. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of linked stories follows four generations of the Songs, a Korean American family, beginning in 1924 just prior to the Immigration Act and extending to near the end of the century. The stories chart the shifting definitions of Americanness, desire and belonging articulated, in turns, by the mother, father, grand-daughter, great-grandson, and even a ghost child who died after a tragic accident. But they center on the experience of Gracie Song, following her from girlhood to young motherhood, through her children's teenage years and finally to her elderly solitude, when to her great astonishment she finds romance with a younger man and reconciliation with an estranged daughter, both unexpected gifts of late"--
Download or read book Once Removed written by Colette Sartor and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women in the linked short story collection Once Removed carry the burdens imposed in the name of intimacy--the secrets kept, the lies told, the disputes initiated--as well as the joy that can still manage to triumph. A singer with a damaged voice and an assumed identity befriends a silent, troubled child; an infertile law professor covets a tenant's daughterly affection; a new mother tries to shield her infant from her estranged mother's surprise Easter visit; an aging shopkeeper hides her husband's decline and a decades-old lie to keep her best friends from moving away. With depth and an acute sense of the fragility of intimate connection, Colette Sartor creates stories of women that resonate with emotional complexity. Some of these women possess the fierce natures and long, vengeful memories of expert grudge holders. Others avoid conflict at every turn, or so they tell themselves. For all of them, grief lies at the core of love.
Download or read book Please Come Back To Me written by Jessica Treadway and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please Come Back To Me is another remarkable collection by an author the New York Times has called “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth.” In “The Nurse and the Black Lagoon” a woman tries to understand why her teenage son has been accused of a disturbing crime. In “Testimony” an adult daughter visiting her father does everything she can to keep herself from remembering what she believes she cannot bear. A man returns to his hometown in “Dear Nicole” to face the realization that he married the wrong woman out of misplaced guilt. “Oregon” portrays the internal struggle of a woman who, having years ago betrayed a secret entrusted to her by her best friend, is tempted to repeat the mistake with the same friend’s daughter. And in the collection’s novella, “Please Come Back To Me,” a young widow seeks faith and comfort—in both natural and supernatural realms—after her husband’s death leaves her alone to care for their infant son. On the surface, Jessica Treadway’s stories offer realistic portrayals of people in situations that make them question their roles as family members, their ability to do the right thing, and even their sanity. But Treadway’s psychic landscapes are tinged with a sense of the surreal, inviting readers to recognize—as her characters do—that very little is actually as it seems.
Download or read book If We Were Electric written by Patrick Earl Ryan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If We Were Electric’s twelve stories celebrate New Orleans in all of its beautiful peculiarities: macabre and magical, muddy and exquisite, sensual and spiritual. The stunning debut collection finds its characters in moments of desire and despair, often stuck on the verge of a great metamorphosis, but burdened by some unreasonable love. These are stories about missed opportunities, about people on the outside who don’t fit in, about the consequences of not mustering enough courage to overcome the binds. In “Feux Follet,” an old man’s grief attracts supernatural lights in the dark Louisiana swamps. An exploding transformer’s raw, unnerving energy in the title story matches the strange, ferocious temper of an unlucky hustler. “Blackout” sets the profound numbness of a young man physically abused by his mentally unstable partner beside the meaningful beauty of an unexpected moment of joy with someone else. The teenage narrator in “Before Las Blancas” is so overwhelmed by his sexuality that he abandons everything and everyone he’s known to live in a happy illusion . . . in Mexico. And “Where It Takes Us” is a poignant, understated snapshot of a gay man who accompanies his straight, HIV-positive brother to the race track to bond again.
Download or read book Nervous Dancer written by Carol Lee Lorenzo and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction."
Download or read book Bad Kansas written by Becky Mandelbaum and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kansas boys -- The golden state -- A million and one Marthas -- Go on, eat your heart out -- The house on Alabama Street -- Night of indulgences -- Stupid girls -- Thousand-dollar decoy -- First love -- Queen of England -- Bald bear -- Acknowledgment
Download or read book Japa and Other Stories written by Iheoma Nwachukwu and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2024-09 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These eight brutally beautiful stories are struck full of fragmented dreams, with highly developed thieves, misadventurers, and displaced characters all heaving through a human struggle to anchor themselves in a new home or sometimes a new reality. This book is about young Nigerian immigrants who bilocate, trek through the desert, become temporary Mormons, sneak through Russia, and yearn for new life in strange new territories that force them to confront what it means to search for a connection far from home. Japa and Other Stories came out of a struggle Iheoma Nwachukwu faced when trying to orient himself in the United States of 2017 to 2021, when attitudes toward immigrants suddenly shifted. The Japa characters explored in this book are immigrants who have no plans to return to their home country—for voluntary reasons—although they retain a strong connection to home.
Download or read book The Quarry written by Harvey Grossinger and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of this collection of five short stories and the title novella is the powerful interconnection between parents and children, nostalgia and memory, and the collective emotional intimacies and transactions that configure human behavior. Incisive and witty meditations on the disruptions and difficulties of family life, the stories in The Quarry focus on the precariously balanced world of anxious and awkward sons and painfully failed or failing fathers. The title novella sifts through the irreparable moral and psychological confusion brought about by the Holocaust, following two families as they struggle to reconcile themselves to personal disorder and private grief—with no illusory platitudes about the redemptive power of suffering. With unerring compassion for conveying emotional revelations and a keen sensitivity to the frailty and malleability of the human spirit, The Quarry lures the reader into confronting the most hidden and disquieting parts of the buried self.
Download or read book The Edge of Marriage written by Hester Kaplan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kaplan, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, writes potent short stories in which she puts seemingly solid marriages to the test, pushing them to their breaking point by force of sorrow and tragedy. Disease and accidents often drive couples to the brink of separation and her characters find themselves in emotional free fall.
Download or read book Faulty Predictions written by Karin Lin-Greenberg and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking place in locales as diverse as small-town Ohio, the mountains of western North Carolina, and the plains of Kansas, Lin-Greenberg's stories provide insight into the human condition over a cross section of age and culture. Although the characters are often faced with challenges, the stories capture moments of optimism and hope.
Download or read book Super America written by Anne Panning and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In settings as different as Honolulu, Hawaii, small-town Minnesota, and Taxco, Mexico, these nine stories and a novella show blue-collar characters struggling to achieve the American Dream--and sometimes alienating friends and family as they try to upgrade their working-class pedigree. Anne Panning's people, despite their mixed record of success, make us root for them on their sometimes heartbreaking journeys of entrepreneurship, love, and loss. In “Tidal Wave Wedding” a tsunami in Honolulu yields surprising results for a couple on their honeymoon. In “All-U-Can-Eat,” a woman tries to stave off the investment of her inheritance into a restaurant specializing in frog legs. In the novella, “Freeze,” a teenage son's future is forever complicated after a “life altering” accident confines his father to a wheelchair and accelerates the disintegration of his parents' marriage. An eerie clinical replay of another accident--this one on a bicycle in Hawaii--is at the center of “What Happened,” and in the title story a college theater major gets caught up in his father's exotic pets scheme. Panning's stories show an acute awareness of place, and--whether it be a seventeenth-century former-monastery in Mexico, a suburban housing development in Minnesota, or a hard-luck laundromat on the Oregon coast--each setting often tells us something about the characters who occupy them. Sometimes sad and often funny, Super America takes risks with our notions about the American Dream through characters caught between their working-class roots and grandiose visions.
Download or read book Winter Money written by Andy Plattner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten stories in Winter Money are set in rural Kentucky and West Virginia, in dim horse racing and river towns. The men in Andy Plattner’s stories are tough and uncertain, the women independent and disappointed, but they are strong-willed and high-spirited, always believing there’s a better life, just over the horizon, after the next race. The title story depicts the life of a jockey agent who has seen some bad breaks but knows in his heart he can turn things around if he can just get some “winter money” to make a fresh start in Florida. In “Chandelier,” a bankrupt horse breeder risks everything again in an attempt to save a friend’s farm. “Eldorado” is the story of a young horse groom convinced an old car will be good luck for him, even though it could break down over the next hill. Life at a race track is as desperately unpredictable as the next race, but the people bound to this life live only when they are taking chances. The lies they tell themselves and others run with reality to create new truths. The men and women of Winter Money live in motel rooms that rent by the week, where strangers can change the course of lives. Love and compassion come from unexpected sources, and, as a result, dreams and desired are nurtured and sometimes, against the odds, sustained.
Download or read book The Waiting written by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim and published by Drawn & Quarterly. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was an adult when her mother revealed a family secret: she was separated from her sister during the Korean War. It’s not an uncommon story—the peninsula was split down the 38th parallel, dividing one country into two. As many fled violence in the north, not everyone was able to make it south. Her mother’s story inspired Gendry-Kim to begin interviewing her and other Koreans separated by the war; that research fueled a deeply resonant graphic novel. The Waiting is the fictional story of Gwija, told by her novelist daughter Jina. When Gwija was 17 years old, after hearing that the Japanese were seizing unmarried girls, her family married her in a hurry to a man she didn't know. Japan fell, Korea gained its independence, and the couple started a family. But peace didn’t come. The young family—now four—fled south. On the road, while breastfeeding and changing her daughter, Gwija was separated from her husband and son. Then 70 years passed. Seventy years of waiting. Gwija is now an elderly woman and Jina can’t stop thinking about the promise she made to help find her brother. Expertly translated from Korean by award-winning Janet Hong, The Waiting is the devastating followup to Gendry-Kim’s Grass, which won the Krause Essay Prize, the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Harvey Award, and appeared on best of the year lists from the New York Times, The Guardian, Library Journal, and more.
Download or read book At Risk written by Amina Gautier and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gautier writes with exhilarating insight and confidence about the lives of teenagers . . . at risk from themselves, their families and their friends.”—Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author In Amina Gautier’s Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don’t, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier’s stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as “at-risk,” yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences. Gautier’s focus is on quiet daily moments, even in extraordinary lives; her characters do not stand as emblems of a subculture but live and breathe as people. In “The Ease of Living,” the young teen Jason is sent down south to spend the summer with his grandfather after witnessing the double murder of his two best friends, and he is not happy about it. In “Pan Is Dead,” two half-siblings watch as the heroin-addicted father of the older one works his way back into their mother’s life; in “Dance for Me,” a girl on scholarship at a posh Manhattan school teaches white girls to dance in the bathroom in order to be invited to a party. As teenagers in complicated circumstances, each of Gautier’s characters is pushed in many directions. To succeed may entail unforgiveable compromises, and to follow their desires may lead to catastrophe. Yet within these stories they exist and can be seen as they are, in the moment of choosing. “Despite its title, this is not a debut composed of rapid shocks and dangers, but a quieter accumulation of heartbreaking pressures.”—Foreword Reviews
Download or read book The Suicide Club written by Toni Graham and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The people in these eight interlaced stories are ?bound together by the worst sort of grief,? the kind that can devour you after someone close takes his or her own life. Even so, Toni Graham reveals a piercingly funny cast, short on patience with themselves and the incongruous pieties of daily life in the Heartland.
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: Presents a collection of short stories which feature young black women who discover their identities and emotions through relationships with men.
