It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obregón Revolution. This casebook on "Flowering Judas" addresses Porter's ambivalence surrounding her roles as woman and artist and also attests to the profound influence of Mexico upon her work. Readers of this early tale will not be surprised to learn that although Porter was a practicing feminist in her life and her work, she actually eschewed the feminist label.Virginia Spencer Carr brings her own sharply focused biographer's eye to the introduction, further illuminating the story and the superb critical essays that it provokes. The casebook includes the authoritative text of the story itself, Porter's own statement regarding the genesis of this highly acclaimed work, an important interview, a collection of significant essays on "Flowering Judas" and the historical, cultural, and personal milieu from which the tale evolved, a bibliography, and a chronology of Porter's life and work.

    The selections are arranged not by date of compostion, but in biographical order, such that reading this volume greatly enriches one's understanding of Bishop's life--and thus her poetry as well. "Bishop's admirers will want to consult her Collected Prose for the light it sheds on her poetry," as David Lehman wrote in Newsweek. "They will discover, however, that it is more than just a handsome companion volume to [her] Complete Poems. . . . Bishop's clean, limpid prose makes her stories and memoirs a delight to read. . . . One regrets only that this volume cannot be added to in years to come."

    Widely ranging in time and place, these subversive tales -- by Grace Paley, Bessie Head, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Jolley, Djuna Barnes, Colette, Angela Carter, Jamaica Kincaid, Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles and many more -- all have one thing in common: to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to the rightful position as models for all women, everywhere. Leonora Carrington's debutante swaps places with a hyena who exchanges the cage for the ball -- and goes dressed to kill. Christina Stead's seedy seducer is eventually wrecked by the utterly conventional bride. Some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.

    Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

    ContentsDummyDistanceThe LieSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe FlingPastoralMineFurious Seasons

    The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. In the bitingly witty poems and stories collected here, along with her articles and reviews, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. But beneath the sharp perceptions and acidic humour, much of her work poignantly expresses the deep vulnerability of a troubled, self-destructive woman who, in the words of philosopher Irwin Edman, was 'a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack'.Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was born in West End, New Jersey, and grew up in New York. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue, and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, whose members included George S. Kaufman and Harpo Marx. Her collections of poems included Enough Rope (1926) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936), and her collections of stories included Here Lies (1939); in addition, she collaborated on and wrote screenplays including the Oscar-winning A Star is Born (1937), and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942).If you enjoyed The Collected Dorothy Parker, you might like Truman Capote's The Complete Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'She managed to express her real feelings in stanzas which snap and glitter like a Chanel handbag'Peter Ackroyd, The Times

    We are drawn, too, into a world of sharply observed characters: a comedy writer whose wife is dying, a couple who still get Christmas cards from a man they assisted twenty-five years before, an aging woman cutting the grass.

    If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."-- Sylvia Plath, from "Notebooks, February 1956"Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. "Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

    (Nancy Pearl)

    All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society—a society in transition but a transition that does not come fast enough to help them. Appachana manages to capture the pervasive humor, poignancy, and self-delusion of the lives of the people she observes, but she does so without seeming to pass judgments on them. She focuses on unexpected moments, as if catching her characters off guard, lovingly exposing the fragile surfaces of respectability and convention that are so much a part of every society, but particularly strong in India, with its caste system, gender privileges, and omnipresent bureaucracies.All life seems to be prescribed; these characters bravely or cautiously confront the rules and regulations or finally give in to them resignedly—any small triumphs they achieve are never clear-cut. One of the most unusual aspects of many of the stories is the way in which they are informed by but never ruled by the author's feminism. She never lectures her readers but lets us see for ourselves: a bride caught in a hopeless marriage where she has given up all rights to any life of her own, a hapless college student who is confined to campus for minor infractions just at the time when she had an appointment for an abortion, a young girl who keeps the dark secret of her sister's rape, a woman executive and a digruntled male clerk both trapped in the intricate bureaucracy of their business firm and the roles they must play to survive there. By turns warm, gullible, arrogant and bigoted, all of these characters live their lives amid contradictions and double standards, superstitions and impossible dreams. Appachana's vision is unique, her writing superb. Readers will thank her for allowing them to enter territory that is at once distant and exotic but also familiar and recognizable.

    The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield's fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the macabre and ominous 'A Married Man's Story'. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls 'a debt of love' to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant insight. Disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield's disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism. This new edition increases the selection from 27 to 33 stories and prints them in the order in which they first appeared, in the definitive texts established by Anthony Alpers.

    The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of 'Monte Verità' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject's life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three's a crowd . . .

    Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the echt Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources, and the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

    It follows the adolescent plans and dreams of Li as she struggles for independence against the traditional values of her family home, marriage and the lure of the city and all it can offer.