In stylistic brilliance, he renders their conditions with grace and compassion, and redeems and transports their tragedy with wicked humor.In the much-anthologized "The Birds for Christmas," two hospitalized boys beg a night nurse to let them watch Hitchcock's classic thriller film on television, believing it will relieve their Yuletide loneliness. "Gentleman's Agreement" is a classic father-son story of fear and the violence of love. In "Memorial Day," a bayou boy learns the lessons of living from Death himself, a fortune cookie-eating phantom who claims to be "a people person." From charity ward to outrageous beach bungalow, Richard visits the overlooked corners of America, making them unforgettably visible.Richard has been rightly compared to Faulkner for his language and to Flannery O'Connor for his stark moral vision, but his force and sensibility remain his own. Charity is a powerful reading experience, a true accomplishment in an already stunning literary career.

    Provoking riots at its opening in 1896, Ubu is acclaimed as the touchstone for the Dada and Surrealist movements, the Theatre of the Absurd, and much of the rest of experimental theatre in the 20th century.

    In Saul Bellow’s masterly translation, the title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories in this volume all inhabit the distinctive pre–World War II ghettos of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer’s unforgettable prose.

    A highpoint of the collection is Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety-somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, comedian of smalltown Wales. The book includes an entertaining, informative reflection on Thomas by another Welsh poet and storyteller, Leslie Norris, as well as a brief listing of publication details by Professor Walford Davies, editor of Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Works.After the fair --Tree --True story --Enemies --Dress --Visitors --Vest --Burning baby --Orchards --End of the river --Lemon --Horse's ha --School for witches --Mouse and the woman --Prospect of the sea --Holy six --Prologue to an adventure --Map of love --In the direction of the beginning --Adventure from a work in progress --Portrait of the artist as a young dog: Peaches --Visit to Grandpa's --Patricia, Edith and Arnold --Fight --Extraordinary little cough --Just like little dogs --Where Tawe flows --Who do you wish was with us? --Old Garbo --One warm Saturday --Adventures in the skin trade: Fine beginning --Plenty of furniture --Four lost souls --Quite early one morning --Child's Christmas in Wales --Holiday memory --Crumbs of one man's year --Return journey --Followers --Story --Appendix: early stories: Brember --Jarley's --In the garden --Gaspar, Melchior, Balthsar --List of sources

    Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars, a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, of which Oates says, Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction. From Flannery O'Connor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina, one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

    Written as a result of the author's Greek travels and studies, Cassandra speaks to us in a pressing monologue whose inner focal points are patriarchy and war. In the four accompanying pieces, which take the form of travel reports, journal entries, and a letter, Wolf describes the novel's genesis. Incisive and intelligent, the entire volume represents an urgent call to examine the past in order to insure a future.

    Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

    Combining the freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with lively introductions, this contemporary Shakespeare enables readers to see and read Shakespeare afresh.