Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos


Kim Addonizio - 2002
    In this volume, stories from writers including Sylvia Plath and Ray Bradbury capture the tattoo experience.

Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience


Shaun Usher - 2013
    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

The Silence of the Loons: Thirteen Tales of Mystery by Minnesota's Premier Crime Writers


M.D. Lake - 2005
    Featured writers include Ellen Hart, Judith Guest, William Kent Krueger and Carl Brookins. This is a must-have for mystery buffs.

New Daughters of Africa


Margaret BusbyBernardine Evaristo - 2019
    It celebrates a unifying heritage and illustrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood and the strong links that endure from generation to generation as well as the common obstacles that female writers of colour continue to face as they negotiate issues of race, gender and class.A glorious portrayal of the richness, magnitude and range of the singular and combined accomplishments of these women, New Daughters of Africa also testifies to a wealth of genres: autobiography, memoirs, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humour, politics, journalism, essays and speeches.It showcases key figures and popular contemporaries, as well as overlooked historical authors and today’s new and emerging writers. Amongst the 200 contributors are: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Patience Agbabi, Sefi Atta, Ayesha Harruna Attah, Malorie Blackman, Tanella Boni, Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo, Aminatta Forna, Danielle Legros Georges, Bonnie Greer, Andrea Levy, Imbolo Mbue, Yewande Omotoso, Nawal El Saadawi, Taiye Selasi, Warsan Shire, Zadie Smith and Andrea Stuart.A unique and seminal anthology, New Daughters of Africa represents the global sweep, diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of Black women writers whose voices, despite on going discussions, remain under-represented and underrated.

Music for Wartime: Stories


Rebecca Makkai - 2015
    Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart. A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction. These transporting, deeply moving stories—some inspired by her own family history—amply demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form. “Richly imagined.” —Chicago Tribune   “Impressive.” —O, The Oprah Magazine   “Engrossing.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune   “Inventive.” —W Magazine

1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution


Boris Dralyuk - 2016
    This dazzling panorama of thought, language and form includes work by authors who are already well known to the English-speaking world (Bulgakov, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky), as well as others, whose work we have the pleasure of encountering here for the very first time in English. Edited by Boris Dralyuk, the acclaimed translator of Isaac Babel'sRed Cavalry(also published by Pushkin Press), 1917includes works by some of the best Russian writers - some already famous in the English-speaking world, some published here for the very first time. It is an anthology for everyone: those who are coming to Russian literature for the first time, those who are already experienced students of it, and those who simply want to know how it felt to live through this extreme period in history. POETRY: Marina Tsvetaeva, 'You stepped from a stately cathedral ', 'Night. - Northeaster. - Roar of soldiers. - Roar of waves.' Zinaida Gippius, 'Now', 'What have we done to it?', '14 December 1917' Osip Mandelstam, 'In public and behind closed doors' Osip Mandelstam, 'Let's praise, O brothers, liberty's dim light' Anna Akhmatova, 'When the nation, suicidal' Boris Pasternak, 'Spring Rain' Mikhail Kuzmin, 'Russian Revolution' Sergey Esenin, 'Wake me tomorrow at break of day' Mikhail Gerasimov, 'I forged my iron flowers' Vladimir Kirillov, 'We' Aleksey Kraysky, 'Decrees' Andrey Bely, 'Russia' Alexander Blok, 'The Twelve' Titsian Tabidze, 'Petersburg' Pavlo Tychyna, 'Golden Humming' Vladimir Mayakovsky, 'Revolution: A Poem-Chronicle', 'To Russia', 'Our March' PROSE Alexander Kuprin, 'Sashka and Yashka' Valentin Kataev, 'The Drum' Aleksandr Serafimovich, 'How He Died' Dovid Bergelson, 'Pictures of the Revolution' Teffi, 'A Few Words About Lenin', 'The Guillotine' Vasily Rozanov, from 'Apocalypse of Our Time' Aleksey Remizov, 'The Lay of the Ruin of Rus'' Yefim Zozulya, 'The Dictator: A Story of Ak and Humanity' Yevgeny Zamyatin, 'The Dragon' Aleksandr Grin, 'Uprising' Mikhail Prishvin, 'Blue Banner' Mikhail Zoshchenko, 'A Wonderful Audacity' Mikhail Bulgakov, 'Future Prospects'"

[Don't] Call Me Crazy


Kelly JensenStephanie Kuehn - 2018
    Because there’s no single definition of crazy, there’s no single experience that embodies it, and the word itself means different things—wild? extreme? disturbed? passionate?—to different people. (Don’t) Call Me Crazy is a conversation starter and guide to better understanding how our mental health affects us every day. Thirty-three writers, athletes, and artists offer essays, lists, comics, and illustrations that explore their personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and do not talk about mental health, help for better understanding how every person’s brain is wired differently, and what, exactly, might make someone crazy. If you’ve ever struggled with your mental health, or know someone who has, come on in, turn the pages, and let’s get talking.

True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine


Lee Gutkind - 2014
    This collection of 20 gripping, beautifully-written nonfiction narratives is as diverse as the genre Creative Nonfiction magazine has helped popularize. Contributions by Phillip Lopate, Brenda Miller, Carolyn Forche, Toi Derricotte, Lauren Slater and others draw inspiration from everything from healthcare to history, and from monarch butterflies to motherhood. Their stories shed light on how we live.

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed


John Irving - 1993
    To open this spirited collection, Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years ending with a homage to Charles Dickens. This irresistible collection cannot fail to delight and charm.The first collection of short pieces--two of them previously unpublished--by the author of The World According to Garp includes memoirs, six short stories, and essays on Charles Dickens and Gu+a5nter Grass. Reprint. Tour.This gem, a delightful collection of shorter works, both fiction and nonfiction, written by one of the country's finest--and funniest--writers, includes a living portrait of Irving's grandmother, a new, never-before-published essay, six scintillating short stories--including the O. Henry Award-winning "Interior Space"--and two essays on Irving's favorite 19th-century novelist, Charles Dickens. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed is John Irving at the top of his form.

Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters


Flannery O'Connor - 1988
    By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man."In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"--these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

Perfect Recall


Ann Beattie - 2000
    It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post Book World said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances -- new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

Walking Wounded


William McIlvanney - 1989
    The walking wounded. These are the stories of ordinary people.