Book picks similar to
McSweeney's #44 by Dave Eggers
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The Times Are Never So Bad
Andre Dubus - 1983
. . may be the most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written."--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book ReviewStories of men and women attempting to live together, to tell the truth as they see it (or don't see it), and to survive the crises, and sometimes the violence, of domestic life. Now included in Andre Dubus's
Collected Short Stories & Novellas
) this original edition includes A Father's Story, as well as the novella The Pretty Girl. Upon its publication in 1991, Tobias Wolff wrote, "'It is a world of secrets, ' says the narrator of A Father's Story. Andre Dubus's fine new collection is made of those secrets, observed with an art that is luminous with honesty and generosity. Dubus is interested in essential things--in the shadowy powers that circle our lives and the slender resources of faith and love with which we try to keep them at bay."
13 Nightmares
Dennis McDonald - 2009
Thirteen tales of original terror penned in the dead of the night with only the glow of a computer for light. The collection of short stories runs the gamut of horror. Within its bloody pages you will find a slasher clown, a blood red church, a little girl locked in a closet, a haunted sex doll, etc. 13 Nightmares is a fine collection of terror for the short story lover, but be warned. Some of these stores are not for the faint of heart. Do you dare enter a world where the supernatural, the macabre, and the horrific collide?
Complete Shorter Fiction
Oscar Wilde - 1894
W.H.;" and the parables Wilde referred to as "Poems in Prose," including "The Artist," "The House of Judgment," and "The Teacher of Wisdom."
Don't Cry
Mary Gaitskill - 2009
Each story is charged with her powerful, original language and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body — or the intelligent body with the craving mind — that is characteristic of Gaitskill's fiction. Her settings are a surprising mix of real and surreal: in the urban fairy tale "Mirror Ball" a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand, while in the stunning "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" the fallout of the Iraq War becomes painfully immediate for a group of characters who collide by chance on a train going up the Hudson River.As spirited and intense as the now-classic Bad Behavior, Don't Cry shows us how our social conscience has evolved while basic truths — "the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house," as one character puts it — remain unchanged.
Essays of E.B. White
E.B. White - 1936
White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are incomparable; this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.
Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future
Ed FinnBrenda Cooper - 2014
A remarkable anthology uniting twenty of today's leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries, among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson, to contribute works of "techno-optimism" that challenge us to dream boldly and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world.Contents: Foreword (Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future) • essay by Lawrence M. Krauss Preface: Innovation Starvation (Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future) • essay by Neal Stephenson Introduction: A Blueprint for Better Dreams • essay by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn Atmosphaera Incognita (2013) / novelette by Neal Stephenson Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl (2014) / novelette by Kathleen Ann Goonan By the Time We Get to Arizona (2014) / novelette by Madeline Ashby The Man Who Sold the Moon (2014) / novella by Cory Doctorow Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA (2014) / novelette by Lee Konstantinou Degrees of Freedom (2014) / novelette by Karl Schroeder Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy (2014) / short story by Annalee Newitz A Hotel in Antarctica (2014) / novelette by Geoffrey A. Landis Periapsis (2014) / novelette by James L. Cambias The Man Who Sold the Stars (2013) / novelette by Gregory Benford Entanglement (2014) / novella by Vandana Singh Elephant Angels (2014) / novelette by Brenda Cooper Covenant (2014) / short story by Elizabeth Bear Quantum Telepathy (2014) / novelette by Rudy Rucker Transition Generation (2014) / short story by David Brin The Day It All Ended (2014) / short story by Charlie Jane Anders Tall Tower (2014) / novelette by Bruce Sterling Science and Science Fiction: An Interview with Paul Davies • interview of Paul Davies (1946-) • interview by uncredited.
Some Fun
Antonya Nelson - 2006
With her newest collection, Nelson once again proves herself worthy of her stellar reputation, delivering seven taut, striking stories and a brilliant novella, all exploring the tensions of troubled family relations.Nelson is an extraordinary chronicler of the fraught relationships between parents and children and husbands and wives. With her particular understanding of the threats and vulnerabilities of wild adolescence, as well as the complicated, persistent love that often lies dormant beneath the drama of rebellion, she illuminates the hidden corners of her characters' lives.The shy, shoplifting sixteen-year-old protagonist in the title novella is trying to understand how to become an adult while going through a year of family disaster. We watch as she dabbles in the same adult behaviors that so repulse her about her parents (binge drinking, sex) while maintaining so much of her adolescent insecurity and confusion. "Dick" is a moving story about a mother who, having lost her daughter to the vicissitudes of adolescence, has a compulsion to protect her innocent, preadolescent son from the aggressive and encroaching post-9/11 adult world. The homeless teen at the heart of "Eminent Domain" is a pampered Houston rich girl who has, for her own reasons, taken to the streets.Radiating an emotional intensity that unifies the entire collection, each of Nelson's stories both captivates and unnerves. As her characters run the gauntlet of often bewildering family tensions and trauma, she alternates hope and despair, resentment and love, in perfectly recognizable proportions.Weaving wonderful observation with quick wit and striking insight, "Some Fun" is a timely and provocative inventory of the state of family in America -- and proof of why Nelson is one of the most important writers at work today.
Granta 148: Summer Fiction (The Magazine of New Writing)
Sigrid Rausing - 2019
A Vocation and a Voice: Stories
Kate Chopin - 1991
Included here are "The Story of an Hour," a shocking reversal of the most profound event of her childhood; "An Egyptian Cigarette," the story of a drug trip; and the title story, about a sweet-voiced boy soprano who learns about adult life.Emil Toth, biographer of Kate Chopin as well as editor of her diaries and letters, discusses the author's style and the inspiration for her stories and provides insight into Chopin's controversial career in this long-awaited classic.--back coverA vocation and a voice ; Elizabeth Stock's one story ; Two portraits ; An idle fellow ; A mental suggestion ; An egyptian cigarette ; The white eagle ;The story of an hour ; Two summers and two souls ; The night came slowly ; Juanita ; The unexpected ; Her letters ; The kiss ; Suzette ; The falling in love of Fedora ; The recocery ; The blind man ;An easter day conversation ; Lilacs ; Ti demon ; The godmother
Once There Was a War
John Steinbeck - 1958
In his dispatches he focuses on the human-scale effect of the war, portraying everyone from the guys in a bomber crew to Bob Hope on his USO tour and even fighting alongside soldiers behind enemy lines. Taken together, these writings create an indelible portrait of life in wartime.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018
John Joseph AdamsJaymee Goh - 2018
There is an openness to experiment and pushing boundaries, combined with the classic desire to read about space ships and dragons, future technology and ancient magic, and the places where they intersect. Contemporary science fiction and fantasy looks to accomplish the same goal as ever—to illuminate what it means to be human. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor N. K. Jemisin, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 explores the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Jemisin bringing her lyrical, endlessly curious point of view to the series’ latest edition.Rivers Run Free / Charles Payseur --Destroy the City With Me Tonight / Kate Alice Marshall --You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych / Kathleen Kayembe --Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities / Lettie Prell --Loneliness is in Your Blood / Cadwell Turnbull --The Hermit of Houston / Samuel R. Delany --The Last Cheng Beng Gift / Jaymee Goh --Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn / A. Merc Rustad --The Resident / Carmen Maria Machado --The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant / Rachael K. Jones --Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast / Gwendolyn Clare --Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue / Charlie Jane Anders --Church of Birds / Micah Dean Hicks --ZeroS / Peter Watts --Carnival Nine / Caroline M. Yoachim --The Wretched and the Beautiful / E. Lily Yu --The Orange Tree / Maria Dahvana Headley --Cannibal Acts / Maureen McHugh --Black Powder / Maria Dahvana Headley --Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance / Tobias S. Buckell
A Million Heavens
John Brandon - 2012
Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter—strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the boy is a novelty, to others a religion. Just beyond this ragtag circle roams a disconsolate wolf on his nightly rounds, protecting and threatening, learning too much. And above them all, a would-be angel sits captive in a holding cell of the afterlife, finishing the work he began on earth, writing the songs that could free him. This unlikely assortment—a small-town mayor, a vengeful guitarist, all the unseen desert lives—unites to weave a persistently hopeful story of improbable communion.
Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure
Craig Lancaster - 2011
A traveling salesman consigned to a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate stripped of everything but his pride. A teenage runaway. Mismatched lovers. In his debut collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Craig Lancaster returns to the terrain of his Montana home and takes on the notion of separation in its many forms - from comfort zones, from ideas, from people, from security, from fears. These ten stories delve into small towns and big cities, into love and despair, into what drives us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every pag
Stories: An Audio Collection
Garrison Keillor - 1993
It is this rare and marvelous sense of truth—of laughter, joy, and compassion and situations—that makes Keillor such a brilliant and beloved storyteller.The collection includes: Your Book Saved My Life, Mister, End of the Trail, Meeting Famous People, Family Honeymoon Al Denny, Basketball, After A Fall, The Babe, We Are Still Married, Drowning, Attitude, Letter From Ruth Luger to Joanne Leinenkranz, Nu Er Der Youl Igen, The Chuck Show of Television.
The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies - 1979
last year, this updated collection contains the best of Robertson Davies' newspaper and magazine articles written over the past 50 years. "Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. . . ".--Publishers Weekly.