In the title poem, Bly addresses the "donkey"—possibly poetry itself—that has carried him through a writing life of more than six decades.from "Talking into the Ear of a Donkey"      "What has happened to the spring,"      I cry, "and our legs that were so joyful      In the bobblings of April?" "Oh, never mind      About all that," the donkey      Says. "Just take hold of my mane, so you      Can lift your lips closer to my hairy ears."

    

    Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 42. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: "Harap Alb" or "Harap-Alb" (Romanian pronunciation: ), known in full as Povestea lui Harap Alb ("The Story of Harap Alb"), is a Romanian-language fairy tale. Based on traditional themes found in Romanian folklore, it was recorded and reworked in 1877 by writer Ion Creang, becoming one of his main contributions to fantasy and Romanian literature. The narrative centers on an eponymous prince traveling into a faraway land whose throne he has inherited, showing him being made into a slave by the treacherous Bald Man and eventually redeeming himself through acts of bravery. The plot introduces intricate symbolism, notably illustrated by the secondary characters. Among these are the helpful and sage old woman Holy Sunday, the tyrannical Red Emperor, and a band of five monstrous characters who provide the prince with serendipitous assistance. An influential work, "Harap Alb" received much attention from Creang's critical posterity, and became the inspiration for contributions in several fields. These include Ion Popescu-Gopo's film De-a fi Harap Alb, a Postmodernist novel by Stelian urlea and a comic book by Sandu Florea, alongside one of Gabriel Liiceanu's theses in the field of political philosophy. The title of the work and name of the protagonist originate with the antiquated Romanian word harap, which, like its more common version arap, originates with the "Arab" and covers the sense of "Black person" (or "Moor"), and alb, meaning "white." The notion of Harap Alb has therefore often been translated as "White Moor" or "White Arab." Both arap and harap are akin to a narrative theme present throughout the Balkans, from Turkey in the s...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=23902144

     Suzanne and Gertrude is a tale of intermittent griefs and wonderments. How do we live, not just with each other, but with memories, with impermanence, with the inevitable melancholy of being?   Suzanne and Gertrude is a spare novel with a profound impact.

    Her eyes could still penetrate the soul, but they were paler in color, maybe because they were covered with the whitish film of cataracts. I remember watching her take her hair from the neat bun she wore and let it down to comb. Her hair was long, but no longer black as coal. It was the color of newly formed storm clouds and fell in a silvery braid to her hips. I watched her comb it out and then she would braid it, wind it back into a bun and pin it low, just above the nape of her neck. Everyone always said that I favored her a lot. Annabelle was my great-grandmother; she was a Full Blood, a Choctaw Indian from Savannah, Georgia. When a child, I thought she was tall, larger than life. My admiration of her as we walked in the yard and I helped her gather eggs and pick flowers, was unsurpassable; but as I grew, I realized that she was a tiny woman. Shrunken from her many years on earth, she stood barely four feet, ten inches tall. In her older years, maybe even her younger ones too, she was never without a jar of Garrett snuff. One summer, when I was about twelve years old, I went to stay with my grandmother Annabelle. And because her house was so small, I slept in her bedroom with her. Each night before we went to sleep, she pulled a leather bound book from underneath her mattress and wrote for a few minutes before she extinguished the bedside lamp. She seemed intent on what she was doing so I did not bother her with questions, but after several nights, curiosity got the better of me and when she finished and placed the book under the mattress, I asked what she was writing in the book. She told me that she was writing her thoughts on the events of the day so that if she wanted she could look back and know exactly what she was thinking and how she felt that particular day. “Is that how you remember all of those stories you tell me, about when you were a child and about your kinfolks back then” I asked. “It is a part of it,” she replied, “but some things you just do not ever forget. They remain with you your entire life.” “Tell me a story, Grandmother,” I begged. “Tell me about when you were a child; a young girl like me.” She began her story that night, by telling me how she met and married my grandfather Jesse. She also told me about leaving her home and family in Savannah to move to Mobile to live near my grandfather’s family. And in that telling, I discovered that my grandmother had led a very interesting life, especially in her earlier years. Her life was filled with heartbreaks, heartaches, great times, and sad times. She attended Mardi Gras Balls and traveled extensively around the South. She was involved with an assortment of ill-fated lovers. Indulged in hoodoo, voodoo, even murder! Hers was a life I found extremely fascinating; a life, I wished I could live. That summer, I decided that when I grew old, I wanted to be just like my grandmother Annabelle. However, today, as I sat staring across the haphazard layer of hills to the west and thought of Annabelle and the olden days of grace and charm. I realized that those days were forever gone. They were days that I myself would never know, except through my grandmother’s eyes and memories. No longer that young inquisitive girl, I am an old woman now. On my own, I have lived a long uneventful life. Only through her stories could I live the life I dreamt of; therefore, I decided to share her story with the world. I am certain she would approve. I hope you all enjoy reading her story, as much as I enjoyed writing it. Her story began April 1865, at the end of the Civil War, as was told to me by my grandmother, Rebecca Annabelle Maples Foster.

    Although his characters continue to revolt against the received instructions of modern American living - refusing to be dunked in what Saul Bellow has called the "marinade of correctness" - their concerns are less for independence than for the maintenance of sanity itself. Emotional estrangement seems both inevitable and worth fighting against to the middle-aged heroine of the O. Henry prizewinner "Trick or Treat"; to the unmistakably American roofer of "Wayne" (who was introduced in "Typical" ); to the deserted husband, father, and non-vet of "Dump"; and to the fantastic heroes in three stories grouped as "All Along the Watchtower.

    The story was collected in his anthology Welcome To The Monkey House. The story centers on a character named Harry Nash, who is an extremely shy & characterless small-town man. However, whenever he takes a part in the local, amateur theater production he becomes the character to an overwhelming extent. Soon Helene Shaw, a recent addition to the town, falls in love with Nash--or with his character in the play.

    A crowded fairground. A simple sequence of numbers that appear over and over again... and a horrible feeling that something is very, very wrong.Nina Vogel is haunted by a recurring nightmarish vision - but what does it mean?In this powerful short story by Jack Harding, step into this nerve-racking, fast-paced fever dream that blurs the lines between the real and the unreal.

    Here Mason writes about love with stunning insight and variety.

    A desperate race. So much at stake. Erick Wynn is about to be a new father. He and his wife, Amy, have prepared for nationwide financial collapse, but they never planned for coordinated EMP and Cyber Attacks to leave them separated, without power, communications or transportation. Erick had just arrived at the airport to head off on a business trip when the lights went out. Now, he must fight his way through the violent streets of Chicago to make it home to his wife and unborn child before the violence reaches them. Could you survive sudden chaos storming through the windy city to get home to your family? Sudden Chaos is a post-apocalyptic EMP survival short story of The Days of Want Series and contains a FREE two-chapter preview of Turbulent, book one in the series.

    Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, the two men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital.Over the course of a day and a night, Walter James and Braiden Chaney talk of memories, of passions, of fate. With great vision, humor, and courage, Brown writes mostly about love in a story about the waste of war.

    But she felt no different – not until she realised she was losing her innocence in a way that none of her friends could possibly imagine. Only a child robbed of her childhood can know too late what it means to be loved too little and loved too much…

    Away in Medical School, Molly believed her life was on track. That was until she returned home for Christmas and learned her life was nothing she had always believed. As this surprising journey unfolds, Molly not only learns how to put aside the pain of her past but she finally learns how to say goodbye.

    It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post Book World said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances -- new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

    Intelligent and brutally direct talk to a reader about our times, Russia, the Russians, and much more.