Must she really drink eight glasses of water a day to stay hydrated? Does the word "rape" apply to what happened to her? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? Does the colleague who keeps offering to make her tea know something? And why can't she stop scratching?Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a fearless and defiantly playful look at how our minds function in-- and survive--the darkest moments.

    Everytime, he looked at me, it broke my heart a little bit more.Everytime he went away, I wrote.When he came back, I lived again.And in the end it fell apart.

    The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The diary was falling apart--water-stained and illegible in places--but magnetic to Scanlan nonetheless.After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next fifteen years she played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the composition that became Aug 9--Fog (she chose the title from a note that was tucked into the diary). "Sure grand out," the diarist writes. "That puzzle a humdinger," she says, followed by, "A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th." An entire state of mourning reveals itself in "2 canned hams." The result of Scanlan's collaging is an utterly compelling, deeply moving meditation on life and death.In Aug 9--Fog, Scanlan's spare, minimalist approach has a maximal emotional effect, remaining with the reader long after the book ends. It is an unclassifiable work from a visionary young writer and artist--a singular portrait of a life revealed by revision and restraint.

    You’re thirteen now. I was eight when I got married. You’ll never look this beautiful ever again.”“I will Ammi, when I wear a school uniform.”If you like thrillers, this micro tale is for you-I always assumed that my neighbour’s daughter knew the word ‘Eight’ only until my dog went missing and she said ‘Nine’.And if you like six-word stories, this tale is for you-Woke up in hospital. Failed again.In fact, there are 100 such small tales that will have a big impact on you.So what are you waiting for? Scroll to the top of this page, buy the book and start reading today.Rafaa's micro tales are absolute gems. The journey is short but its impact is everlasting. This one deserves to be read by all.Sanhita BaruahAuthor of ‘The Art of Grieving’ and ‘The Art of Letting Go’Are you interested in unconventional storytelling? How about a story where the beginning, middle and the end are on the same page? A narrative that makes you frown on page 1, nod in agreement on page 2 and chuckle on page 3?How about reading short fiction then? I highly recommend Small is Big by Rafaa Dalvi. The long and short of fiction in endearing small portions!Rickie KhoslaAuthor of ‘The Imperative Subterfuge’ and ‘Pretty Vile Girl’The book has something for everyone. It has humor – a few of slap stick variety, playing on puns, it has punch where you get a most unexpected twist, it has philosophy, it has romance and it has horror – stories that chill your spine.T.F. CarthickAuthor of ‘Carthick’s Unfairy Tales’ and ‘More Unfairy Tales’About the Author:Rafaa Dalvi tries to escape from the mundane with words and contemplates about befriending the voices in his head. He dreams about changing the world, one smile at a time.Already published numerous times, his stories can be read in the anthologies – Curtain Call (editor), Kaleidoscope, Myriad Tales, and many more. He has also written three volumes of ‘Small is Big’, which is a collection of 100 micro tales. He’s the recipient of Indian Bloggers League Booker Prize 2013.

    --from Coma The novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat has been called the last great avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century, and the near-cult status of his work--because of its extreme linguistic innovation and its provocative violence--has made him one of the most influential of French writers today. He has been hailed as the true literary heir to Lautr?amont and Arthur Rimbaud, and his "inhuman" works have been mentioned in the same breath as those by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.Winner of the 2006 prix D?cembre, Coma is the deeply moving, vivid portrayal of the artistic and spiritual crisis that wracked Guyotat in the 1980s when he reached the physical limits of his search for a new language, entered a mental clinic, and fell into a coma brought on by self-imposed starvation. A poetic, cruelly lucid account, Coma links Guyotat's illness and loss of subjectivity to a broader concern for the slow, progressive regeneration of humanity. Written in what the author himself has called a "normalized writing," this book visits a lifetime of moments that have in common the force of amazement, brilliance, and a flash of life. Grounded in experiences from the author's childhood and his family's role in the French Resistance, Coma is a tale of initiation that provides an invaluable key to interpreting Guyotat's work, past and future.

    His love affair with punk comes full circle as he learns to hate it and then learns to love it again. The pieces in this book take us from his Southern roots, his brief stay in St. Louis, and his journey to California on a quest for punk bliss. Sinister finds himself in Oakland, where he gets exactly what he wanted, but it may just kill him. From recounts of specific shows to metaphorical dreams of Abraham Lincoln to the tragic stories of circus elephants, All Blacked Out & Nowhere to Go mixes tragedy and comedy into a book that's louder and faster than any book of its kind.

    In its first American edition, this poetry is presented in Spanish and Enlgish, so that readers of both languages may listed to Zurita's voice.Anteparadise can be read as a creative response, an act of resistance by a young artist to the violence and suffering during and after the 1973 coup that toppled the democratically elected Allende government. Zurita thus follows the example of several Latin American pets such as the Peruvian César Vallejo and Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, sharing their passion and urgency, but his voice is unique.

    His fear of commitment doesn’t allow him to settle in one place until he loses everything.Whether it’s lost love, finding yourself or seeking companionship in lonely places ― this is for you.Delivered with witty metaphors, Malanda allows for his readers to embark on a journey with him. Every page is a layer of truth as he fights to understand himself and his counterparts redefining what it is to be a man in a ‘stoic-male’ society.

    

    These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This thorough documentation of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.

    The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

    The narrator, a young woman, has fled to the forest to pursue her artwork in isolation. While there, she falls in love with a married man she meets at a country dance. The man is violent, their affair even more so. As she struggles to free herself, she questions the difference between desire and obsession—and the brutal nature of intimacy. Packaged with illustrations by famed English artist Rufus Newell and inventive, white-on-black text treatments by award-winning designer Jonathan Yamakami, Northwood is a work of art as well as a literary marvel.

    From Ann Siang Road in Singapore to Matnog in Sorsogon, from Amsterdam to Tokyo to Hawaii, they explore love, loss, life, and loneliness in this collection, hoping to finally find their place in this world.

    . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles SimicFans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.From “The Dart and the Drill”:I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.