"Excitability" collects the best of Diane Williams' bold, often hilarious stories of love, sex, death, and the family.

    It features stories told by Davey Arch, Robert Bushyhead, Edna Chekelelee, Marie Junaluska, Kathi Smith Littlejohn, and Freeman Owle--six Cherokee storytellers who learned their art and their stories from family and community. The tales gathered here include animal stories, creation myths, legends, and ghost stories as well as family tales and stories about such events in Cherokee history as the Trail of Tears. Taken together, they demonstrate that storytelling is a living, vital tradition. As new stories are added and old stories are changed or forgotten, Cherokee storytelling grows and evolves. In an introductory essay, Barbara Duncan writes about the Cherokee storytelling tradition and explains the oral poetics style in which the stories are presented. This format effectively conveys the rhythmic, oral quality of the living storytelling tradition, allowing the reader to hear the voice of the storyteller.

    Weather comes a magical, humorous, and passion-filled odyssey about a beautiful young widow’s search for her missing child—a mission that takes her from a humble Mexican village to the rowdy brothels of Tijuana and a rarely seen side of Los Angeles.Rescued from turmoil by her favorite saint, Esperanza embarks on a journey that tests her faith, teaches her the ways of the world, and transforms her from a fervently religious innocent to an independent, sexual, and passionately devout woman. “Esperanza’s Box of Saints fills our souls with colors and flavors, but more importantly with a sense of genuine, heartfelt candor, born from true faith. With a smile on our face and a pang in our heart, we find renewed hope in Esperanza's quest.” —Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate “The saints in María Amparo Escandón's novel take us on a journey that explores the nature of sin and absolution, the pain of loss, and the resurrection of desire...an enormously compassionate work about a woman who wrestles with her own faith and emerges victorious.” —John Sayles ​“A sweet and entertaining novel by an inventive writer.” —Oscar Hijuelos ​“A highly original, beautifully written, and heartwarming tale.” —Tony Hillerman

    Oprah fell in love with the book when it was first published in 1988, and instantly became determined to deliver this powerful story to film herself. But making the movie was something even more profound than she might have imagined, and JOURNEY TO THE BELOVED is her own emotional account of that experience.With Oprah's heartfelt words and the evocative images of Ken Regan, JOURNEY TO THE BELOVED is an elegant book that will interest fans of Oprah, of Toni Morrison, and of fine filmmaking. Accompanying Oprah's personal journals and thoughts about the Beloved experience is a foreword by Jonathan Demme and a chorus of voices, from Danny Glover, Than die Newton, Kimberly Elise, and Beah Richards. The result is a tribute to a courageous work of art, expressed as only Oprah can express it.

    The months that follow, as he fights his way to a new idea of life, death, and God, are part of his human season. But he also reflects on the years behind him.

    This collection of stories -- much praised upon its hardcover publication in 1992 -- offers the best of Anderson's mature work.Anderson profoundly changed the American short story, transforming it from light, popular entertainment into literature of the highest quality. His art belonged as much to an oral as a written tradition, and, as this collection shows, the best of his stories echo the language and the pace of a man talking to his friends. They explore with penetrating compassion the isolation of the individual and capture the emotional undercurrents hidden beneath ordinary events.

    Although his characters continue to revolt against the received instructions of modern American living - refusing to be dunked in what Saul Bellow has called the "marinade of correctness" - their concerns are less for independence than for the maintenance of sanity itself. Emotional estrangement seems both inevitable and worth fighting against to the middle-aged heroine of the O. Henry prizewinner "Trick or Treat"; to the unmistakably American roofer of "Wayne" (who was introduced in "Typical" ); to the deserted husband, father, and non-vet of "Dump"; and to the fantastic heroes in three stories grouped as "All Along the Watchtower.