I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader


Zora Neale Hurston - 1979
    This unique anthology, with fourteen superb examples of her fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, rightfully establishes her as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the next generation of black writers. The original commentary by Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington, two African-American writers in the forefront of the Hurston revival, provide illuminating insights into Hurston—the writer, and the person—as well as into American social and cultural history.

I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project


Paul Auster - 2001
    One hundred and eighty voices - male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country - talk intimately to the reader. Combining great humor and pathos this remarkable selection of stories from the thousands submitted to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project gives the reader a glimpse of America's soul in all its diversity.

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.

The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss


Jonathan LethemGeoffrey O'Brien - 2000
    Dick, who tells the story of a man trapped on a spaceship of the somnolent, unable to sleep and slowly losing his mind; Shirley Jackson, who takes us on a nightmarish trip across town with a young secretary; and Oliver Sacks, who presents us with an aging hippie who possesses no memory of anything that has taken place since the early seventies.What Lethem has done is nothing less than define a new genre of literature-the amnesia story-and in the process he invites us to sit down, pick up the book, and begin to forget.Also including: John Franklin Bardin, Donald Barthelme, Thomas M. Disch, Karn Joy Fowler, David Grand, Anna Kavan, Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien, Edmund White, and many others.Includes:Dream science by Thomas PalmerThe night fave up by Julio CortazarOther people by Martin AmisNightmare by Shirley JacksonMemories of amnesia by Lawrence ShainbergWarm by Robert SheckleySoul walker by Brian FawcettCowboys don't cry by L.J. DavisThe second coming by Walker PercyFunes, his memory by Jorge Luis BorgesThe black curtain by Cornell WoolrichThe third policeman by Flann O'BrienFive fucks by Jonathan LethemForgetting Elena by Edmund WhiteSarah Canary by Karen Joy FowlerThe last hippie by Oliver SacksNotes toward a history of the seventies by Geoffrey O'BrienTicket to ride by Dennis PotterThe fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian uprising, Hitler's invasion of Poland, and the realm of raging winds by Haruki MurakamiGeoffrey Sonnabend's obliscence: theories of forgetting and the problem of matter-an encapsulation by Valentine WorthI hope I shall arrive soon by Philip K. DickThe zebra struck by Anna KavanThe squirrel cage by Thomas M. DischLouse by David GrandGame by Donald BarthelmeThe affirmation by Christopher Priest by Kleinzeit by Russell HobanDays between stations by Steve EricsonThat in Aleppo once by Vladimir NabokovCarnation, lily, lily, rose by Kelly Link

Aphorisms on Love and Hate


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1878
    Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater'This volume contains a selection of Nietzsche's brilliant and challenging aphorisms, examining the pleasures of revenge, the falsity of pity, and the incompatibility of marriage with the philosophical life.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Nietzsche's works available in Penguin Classics are A Nietzsche Reader, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Human, All Too Human, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Birth of Tragedy, The Portable Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ.

The Collected Dorothy Parker


Dorothy Parker - 1944
    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

The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature: The Collected Writings of Neal Pollack


Neal Pollack - 2000
    He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award (twice), and the Premio Simon Bolivar for contributions to the people's struggle in Latin America. In 1985, Pollack's writing was declared "beyond our meager standards" by the Swedish AcademyWith the publication of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, the definitive collection of his work in English, a new generation of readers is set to discover nothing less than the ultimate meaning of human existence on earth. This astonishing work of fictitious nonfiction, the funniest and most creatively styled postmodernist confection of its time, has been universally praised as the best book ever written except for maybe Don Quixote and The Shipping News. The Anthology -- now expanded, updated, and thoroughly repaginated -- answers, once and for all, the question that has plagued American society in general, and literary critics in particular, since Neal Pollack was born: "Who is Neal Pollack?" At last, we know.

Novels in Three Lines


Félix Fénéon - 1906
    This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

Collected Stories


Gabriel García Márquez - 1983
    Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.

The Insufferable Gaucho


Roberto Bolaño - 2003
    Unpredictable, daring, and highly controlled, yet somehow haywire, a Bolano story might concern an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolano's stories have been applauded as "bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated" (Publishers Weekly) and"complex and provocative" (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new." Two fascinating essays are also included.

One More for the People


Martha Grover - 2011
    Playful, wry, and conversational, One More for the People chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As these idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she’s diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal disease (whose 81 symptoms include dramatic changes to her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), One More for the People becomes something unexpected: a survival guide. In the spirit of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Grover transforms her own misfortune into a tale as unsettling as it is entertaining.

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories


Sherman Alexie - 2012
    His wide-ranging, acclaimed stories from the last two decades, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances, have established him as a star in modern literature. A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases all his talents in his newest collection, Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” "The Toughest Indian in the World,” and "War Dances.” Alexie’s new stories are fresh and quintessential—about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, the reservation, marriage, and all species of contemporary American warriors.An indispensable collection of new and classic stories, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Sherman Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.

Oranges & Peanuts for Sale


Eliot Weinberger - 2009
    They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.

Stalking the Nightmare


Harlan Ellison - 1982
    (1957)The 3 Most Important Things in Life (Scenes from the Real World #1) (1978) • essayVisionary (1959) / Harlan Ellison and Joe L. HensleyDjinn, No Chaser (1982)Invasion Footnote (1957)Saturn, November 11th (Scenes from the Real World #2) (1981) • essayNight of Black Glass (1981)Final Trophy (1957)!!!The!!Teddy!Crazy!!Show!!! (1968)The Cheese Stands Alone (1982)Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto (Scenes from the Real World #3) (1974) • essayTranscending Destiny (1957)The Hour That Stretches (1982)The Day I Died (1973) • essayTracking Level (1956)Tiny Ally (1957)The Goddess in the Ice (1967)Gopher in the Gilly (Scenes from the Real World #4) (1982) • essay

Collected Folk Tales


Alan Garner - 2011
    Essential reading for young and old alike.Among the stories collected here are:• Kate Crackernuts• Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree• Yallery Brown