Anthologies featuring bestselling authors alongside rising stars. Short story collections from some of our beloved authors with Roald Dahl, Raymond Carver and Anita Desai among the better known
Anthologies & Short Stories
Exile Editions To Dance the Beginning of the World: Stories
Book SynopsisErudite and funny, nostalgic and fanciful, these stories unlock the secret longings and unlooked-for victories that make up everyday life. Whether he finds himself in the stands at Yankee Stadium on Bat Day, or, as in "Aunt Daisy's Secret Sauce for Hamburgers," caught off guard by the myriad ways in which a recipe and its misspellings are a window into the woman who wrote it years before, or gently exploring how loss and love get intertwined for a "Bee Girl," Hayward writes with a sure sense of his characters and the complex, imperfect worlds they inhabit.Talent and passionate complexity have created an elegant and unforgettable collection of stories that are assured in depictions of characters and distinctive in voice.Trade Review“The genius of Steven Hayward…is to take the daily slipshod passage of trivial-to-traumatic events, present it as pure storytelling and distill from it the essence of what it means to live, through times both terrible and transcendent… It’s been years since I’ve seen this much fresh talent and wisdom.” —The Globe and Mail
£17.06
Exile Editions Last Words: Stories
Book SynopsisHugh Graham captures the passage of years, the progression of accumulation and recurrence, the present as dammed up history. Without warning, a world on the road to epiphany. And that world, threatened with disaster. Figures emerge, often from twilight. Children who do not fear death, travelers doomed to inertia, concupiscent women, bloody-minded intellectuals, haunted drunks, decaying diplomats, and Death as the man in the attic room. In the end, the gaze of a child become a man. Eleven stories of clarity and dark empathy.Trade ReviewGraham excels at writing about the common circumstances of individuals in clear, truthful ways. His prose is like a deep wound wrapped in the gauze that is our shared and common predicament." —Austin Clarke, winner of the Giller, Commonwealth, Trillium and Writers’ Trust prizes"A truly decisive and impressive collection of stories that breaks away from the contemporary formulas of story writing." —Leon Rooke, author and winner of the Governor General’s Award
£16.16
Exile Editions CVC5
Book SynopsisFrom writer, artist and philanthropist, Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication. “I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper’s brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world. Though I, and those who loved Carter, still hear his voice in our heads and in our hearts, my son’s voice was silenced long ago. I hope this prize helps other writers find their voice, and helps them touch others’ lives with the mystery and magic of the written word.” This volume presents the 14 shortlisted writers: Nicholas Ruddock, Leon Rooke, Hugh Graham, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Bruce Meyer, Priscila Uppal, Veronica Gaylie, Christine Miscione, Lisa Foad, Maggie Dwyer, Josip Novakovich, Bart Campbell, Lisa Pike and Linda Rogers.
£16.16
Exile Editions Fragments of Place: A World Where Human Folly
Book SynopsisThe goal is not to stay alive, but to stay human. —George Orwell, 1984 These stories draw us into the intimacy of what makes us human. Some are marked by war, social instability, totalitarianism, while others are peaceful and reassuring, but each emphasizes that great social movements call out for improvements to the common good, for true democracy without violence and with justice, for all citizens, including those yet to be born. Aude felt the protection of our Earth was urgent and vital, and certainly as is true today, before any future can be radiant, there is an enormous amount of work to do. Fragments of Place asks all of us to be aware of the new pages of global history as they are written, as we explore our ongoing human dilemmas.
£14.36
Exile Editions CVC: Book Six
Book SynopsisFrom writer, artist and philanthropist, Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication. "I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper's brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world.
£16.16
Exile Editions All the Lonely People: Collected Stories
Book SynopsisCallaghan's writing is wide ranging but often takes on the perspective of a marginalized individual's view of the human experience. These tales are told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, Holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the "ordinary"—all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that "happiness is overrated." The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humour, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty.
£25.46
Exile Editions Cracker Jacks for Misfits
Book SynopsisCracker Jacks for Misfits is the Millenial story of four people who find themselves caught in the crosshairs of modern-day chaos as they discover independence, strength, and the power to love.In a series of interconnected short stories, Christine Ottoni tells the tale of a highly sensitive caregiver, Naomi, and her relationship with her reclusive, artistic mother, Joanne.From a whirlwind romance with a manic bartender named Marce, to an intense friendship with an ineffectual alcoholic named Jake, Naomi's search for intimacy and home is marked by urban claustrophobia and loneliness. The characters of Cracker Jacks for Misfits are hungry for human connection. They look for it online, in the unfamiliar bedrooms of Toronto, and in hushed conversations with strangers. Their stories are real – so real that we can all identify with their struggle. A portrait of millennial discontent and overconnectedness, Cracker Jacks for Misfits is about the moment when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. These stories are about the strange, intimate worlds we share with others, in dive bars, on road trips, and on the curb outside house parties. Ottoni presents a distinctive look at the struggle of a generation, and asks if we can every truly realise ourselves through our ability or inability to break free.This work of contemporary insight illuminates what is at the core of today's society: how important it is to understand and respect the sensibilities, goodness, strengths and frailties of those who we call friends, family, and the other. Cracker Jacks for Misfits is a moving and engaging narrative of a young person who finds their independence, strength, and power to love.
£16.16
Exile Editions Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair
Book SynopsisWise and humorous stories that explore people’s extraordinary lives in suburbia’s little wild spaces. Routinely maligned as a bastion of boredom and conformity, the suburb is examined in a different light in Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair. At the heart of these fourteen short stories is refusal of the monotonous and the struggle for individuality in a place so relentlessly homogenous. In his third short story collection, Mark Paterson introduces the town of Montclair, a fictional suburb in the North Shore of Montreal, where he celebrates characters who, out of restlessness, out of nothing, make their lives on the outskirts of the big city a little bit – or a lot – out of the ordinary. With Paterson’s trademark humour and emotion, Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair explores suburbia’s little wild spaces: the places hidden away in overgrown fields behind commercial buildings, beneath concrete schoolyard staircases, and in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.
£16.16
Exile Editions The Chronicles of Kitchike: Taking a Hard Fall
Book SynopsisIn his first collection of stories, The Chronicles of Kitchike: Taking a Hard Fall, Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui takes us on a journey into the heart of a very colourful Indigenous community where traditions, dreams, deprivation and, yes, corruption exist side by side.With image-laden language, he plunges us into the daily life of ordinary men and women facing political, economic, and mythical forces beyond their control. With wry humour and a touch of the fantastic, the author depicts the sometimes tense relationships in Southern Quebec's communities, allowing a snapshot of our multicultural society to be seen between the lines The Chronicles of Kitchike transports us to a unique universe, to a world that is not only comical but also gentle and replete with legend, home to a panoply of characters we're not likely to soon forget!
£17.95
Ronsdale Press Your Body Was Made For This
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£16.14
Ronsdale Press Inside the House Inside
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£15.42
Graywolf Press Celebrities in Disgrace: A Novella and Stories
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£12.60
Graywolf Press Potential Weapons: A Novella and Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press,U.S. Damned If I Do
Book SynopsisAn exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel Erasure. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories
Book Synopsis"Compelling and complex . . . Strange and wonderful." The New York Times Book Review, in praise of McIlvoy''s previous fictionI am going to write about the state of New Mexico and put in some maps and stuff from the encyclopedia. My theme is the Don Juan Onate trail and the Jornada Del Muerto. But I might write some other important things which as it turns out my stepmother got angry about and said she wouldn''t type this until my Dad said "Dammit now it is history" and told her maybe there weren''t commas in those days."The Complete History of New Mexico" is no ordinary research paper, and this is no ordinary collection of short stories. Eleven-year-old Chum''s "history" unfolds over three distinctive and increasingly disturbing sections. He writes that "Coronado explored around and found Santa Fe in 1610"; that "William Becknell was tracking wagons over everyplace in 1821"; and that every day his best friend, Daniel, is afraid to go home.Kevin McIlvoy intersperses the title novella with equally distinctive stories set in New Mexico. Laura, a plain, overweight nurse, encounters a terrified young man on his way to the Vietnam War and takes matters into her own hands. Zach spends time with his "white-trash" relatives and finds love''s terrible and true face. The Complete History of New Mexico is a stunningly original collection that will further McIlvoy''s growing reputation.
£13.50
Graywolf Press Refresh, Refresh
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£13.50
Graywolf Press The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Ghosts of Wyoming: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Mattaponi Queen: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press No Animals We Could Name: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Four New Messages
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£15.30
Graywolf Press Spectacle
Book SynopsisAn inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love* A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets.In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew."Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." -Publishers Weekly
£13.60
Graywolf Press Love Is Power, or Something Like That: Stories
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£13.50
Graywolf Press Byzantium: Stories
Book SynopsisWinner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, an imaginative debut that ranges from Havana to Berlin* A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year * One of Publishers Weekly''s "Best Summer Books"*Ancient cities and fallen empires come to life in this masterful collection. In the Byzantine court, a noble with a crippled hand is called upon to ensure that a holy man poses no threat to the throne. On an island in Lake Michigan, a religious community crumbles after an ardent convert digs a little too deep. And the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke rises to fame and falls from favor in two stories that recount his origins in Havana and the height of his success in Kaiser Wilhelm''s Germany. Ben Stroud''s historical reimaginings twist together with contemporary stories to reveal startling truths about human nature across the centuries. In his able hands, Byzantium makes us believe that these are accounts we haven''t heard yet. As the chronicler of Burke''s exploits muses, "After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any less true?"
£13.50
Graywolf Press There Are Little Kingdoms
Book SynopsisFrom the author of City of Bohane, a debut collection that "could easily have been titled These Are Little Masterpieces''" (The Irish Times)This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hill walkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identityand a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life''s absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year in The Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.
£14.45
Graywolf Press Karate Chop: Stories
Book SynopsisThe first book in English by an acclaimed Danish writer: "beautiful, faceted, haunting stories . . . [from] a rising star" (Junot Díaz)Karate Chop, Dorthe Nors''s acclaimed story collection, is the debut book in the collaboration between Graywolf Press and A Public Space. These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.
£13.50
Graywolf Press Dark Lies the Island: Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press See You in Paradise: Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories
Book SynopsisThe heartwarming debut that brought Per Petterson, the author of the highly acclaimed Out Stealing Horses, to prominenceYoung Arvid Jansen lives on the outskirts of Oslo. It's the early sixties; his father works in a shoe factory and his Danish mother works as a cleaner. Arvid has nightmares about crocodiles and still wets his bed at night, but slowly he begins to understand the world around him. Vivid images accompany each new event: A photo of his mother as a young woman makes him cry as he realizes how time passes, and the black car that comes to collect his father on the day Arvid's grandfather dies reminds him of the passing of his bullfinch. And then, one morning, his teacher tells his class to pray because a nuclear war is looming. Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, Per Petterson's debut, in which he introduces Arvid Jansen to the world, is a delicate portrait of childhood in all its complexity, wonder, and confusion that will delight fans of Out Stealing Horses and new readers alike.
£12.60
Graywolf Press Swallowed by the Cold: Stories
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£14.40
Graywolf Press Wait Till You See Me Dance: Stories
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£999.99
Graywolf Press Fen: Stories
Book SynopsisA singular debut that marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent (Kevin Barry)Daisy Johnson's Fen, set in the fenlands of England, transmutes the flat, uncanny landscape into a rich, brooding atmosphere. From that territory grow stories that blend folklore and restless invention to turn out something entirely new. Amid the marshy paths of the fens, a teenager might starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl and grow jealous of her friend. A boy might return from the dead in the guise of a fox. Out beyond the confines of realism, the familiar instincts of sex and hunger blend with the shifting, unpredictable wild as the line between human and animal is effaced by myth and metamorphosis. With a fresh and utterly contemporary voice, Johnson lays bare these stories of women testing the limits of their power to create a startling work of fiction.
£14.40
Graywolf Press A Lucky Man: Stories
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£20.80
Graywolf Press A Lucky Man: Stories
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTIONIn the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J?Ouvert can?t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.Jamel Brinkley?s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class?where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
£14.40
North Atlantic Books,U.S. Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of
Book SynopsisDiscover tales of murderous hive minds, possessed bulldozers, crash-landed aliens in this collection of classic science fiction short stories—from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning master of the genre. Killdozer! is the third volume of a series of the complete short stories from Theodore Sturgeon’s career. It contains a few of his best and most famous short stories, including “Medusa”, “Killdozer!”, and “Mewhu''s Jet”. The series editor Paul Williams has dug into the background of each story, and come up with a lot of interesting lore about Sturgeon. Especially of interest in this volume is the alternative original ending to “Mewhu''s Jet.”
£27.20
North Atlantic Books,U.S. A Saucer of Loneliness: Volume VII: The Complete
Book SynopsisKurt Vonnegut cites Theodore Sturgeon as the inspiration for his character Kilgore Trout. This volume includes 12 stories from 1953, considered Sturgeon''s golden era. Among them are such favorites as the title story, 'The Silken-Swift,' 'A Way of Thinking,' 'The Dark Room,' 'The Clinic,' and 'The World Well Lost,' a story very ahead of its time in advocating gay rights.
£28.80
North Atlantic Books,U.S. Bright Segment: Volume VIII: The Complete Stories
Book SynopsisSci-fi master Theodore Sturgeon wrote stories with power and freshness, and in telling them created a broader understanding of humanity—a legacy for readers and writers to mine for generations. Along with the title story, the collection includes stories written between 1953 and 1955, Sturgeon''s greatest period, with such favorites as 'Bulkhead,' 'The Golden Helix,' and 'To Here and the Easel.'
£27.20
North Atlantic Books,U.S. The Man Who Lost the Sea: Volume X: The Complete
Book SynopsisBy the winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Awards, this latest volume finds Theodore Sturgeon in fine form as he gains recognition for the first time as a literary short story writer. Written between 1957 and 1960, when Sturgeon and his family lived in both America and Grenada, finally settling in Woodstock, New York, these stories reflect his increasing preference for psychology over ray guns. Stories such as 'The Man Who Told Lies,' 'A Touch of Strange,' and 'It Opens the Sky' show influences as diverse as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Always in touch with the zeitgeist, Sturgeon takes on the Russian Sputnik launches of 1957 with 'The Man Who Lost the Sea,' switching the scene to Mars and injecting his trademark mordancy and vivid wordplay into the proceedings. These mature stories also don''t stint on the scares, as 'The Graveyard Reader'—one of Boris Karloff''s favorite stories—shows. Acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem''s foreword neatly summarizes Sturgeon''s considerable achievement here.
£27.20
University of Arkansas Press Simpkinsville and Vicinity: Arkansas Stories of
Book SynopsisFor nearly thirty years, from the first story by Ruth McEnery Stuart published in the New Princeton Magazine in 1888 until her death in 1917, readers throughout the United States knew her stories of life in Simpkinsville, an imaginary village in southwest Arkansas. Besides their importance in the history of local-color fiction, Stuart’s stories of Simpkinsville evoke that connection between past and present that many Americans are continually seeking. They assert the values of rural family life and closeness to the land.Stuart portrays characters and incidents with delicious humor that overrides the sentimental tone dominant in most local-color writing. Her stories and sketches celebrate the minor triumphs, joys, and tragedies of country and small town life with the same intimacy and charm she displayed on lecture platforms throughout the country.The ten stories collected here are chosen from the best of Stuart’s work and prefaced by Ethel C. Simpson in a wise and revealing introduction that is at the same time a scholarly discussion and an amiable welcome to Simpkinsville. This reissue of a classic in Arkansas storytelling will be met with enthusiasm by historians, folklorists, and general readers alike. In Stuart’s depiction of the plain folk of Arkansas, she both entertains and instructs as she gently mocks the foibles of human nature and the attitudes and tastes of the rural South in the Gilded Age.
£999.99
Paragon House Publishers Minyan: Ten Interwoven Stories
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£17.05
University of Massachusetts Press The Clouds in Memphis: Stories and Novellas
Book SynopsisThis collection charts both the recesses of the human heart and the resiliency of the human spirit. In three novellas and two short stories, the author traces the arcs of emotion and the action that can follow on the heels of calamity.Table of ContentsThe clouds in Memphis; The last great dream of my father; Consent; And that's the name of that tune; War babies.
£999.99
University of Massachusetts Press All Things are Labor: Stories
Book SynopsisThe enigmatic stories in this haunting collection deal with individuals striving to live outside the dominant American culture - people who do not want to be incorporated, appropriated, or consumed. Their battles are waged on interior and external landscapes, pitting clarity against confusion, faith against fear, the marginalized against the powerful, the passive against the aggressive. In one story, a Mennonite mother leaves her alcoholic husband and moves with her three children into an abandoned house and back to a life of faith, though a new faith, one of her own making. In another story, a teenager living in the darkness of a failing rust-belt city holds before her the only light she sees, her child, to guide the way as she moves across the border and beyond. A young artist in New York City pursues a simple life, a passive life, the yielding life of a Mennonite, even as she immerses herself in the gritty urban culture of the East Village. Another woman, given a short time to live, sets up ant farms on her stoop in Alphabet City and is determined to discover how worlds are made by watching the ants and only the ants. A Vietnam veteran finds meaning as a dishwasher at the Catholic Worker, where he circles on his stump of a leg, aware that the thing that is missing, that cannot be seen, is most present. Many of these stories experiment with the form of writing itself. They reflect the vision of an artist who remains separate - in the world, but not of the world - and whose goal is not to dazzle or entertain, but simply, humbly to be present for each word.Trade ReviewFrom Ohio to Arkansas to a gritty New York City neighborhood, from the ritualistic feet cleansing of the Mennonites to the trials and ultimately the triumphs of single motherhood, Arnoldi's exquisite stories are a journey through time, space, spirit, and the artistic imagination. This is art at its highest calling: personal, political, and daring to reach for the universal. In a resonate language that demands we pay attention, Arnoldi's prose pulses, whispers, then roars, singing the lives of the unsung. These stories are about class and the American dream torn open; about the spirit of writing itself and how it is language that can save us, giving voice to the silence and silenced. Katherine Arnoldi is a major talent, and All Things Are Labor is a poignant, powerful, important collection. - Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of Climbing the God Tree: A Novel in Stories
£999.99
University of Massachusetts Press Then We Saw the Flames: Stories
Book SynopsisIn this freewheeling debut collection, Daniel A. Hoyt takes us from the swamps of Florida to the streets of Dresden, to the skies above America, to the tourist hotels of Acapulco, to the southwest corner of Nebraska. Along the way, we encounter a remarkable group of characters all struggling to find their footing in an unsettling world. Sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, sometimes absurd, these stories reveal people teetering on the dangerous edge of their lives. In ""Amar,"" a Turkish restaurant owner deals with skinheads and the specter of violence that haunts his family. In ""Boy, Sea, Boy"", a shipwrecked sailor receives a surreal visitor, a version of himself as a child. In ""The Collection"", a father and son squander a trove of bizarre and fanciful objects. And in ""The Kids,"" a suburban couple grasp for meaning after discovering children eating from their trash. In each of these stories, characters find themselves challenged by the political, cultural, and spiritual forces that define their lives. With a clear eye and a steady hand, Hoyt explores a fragile balance: the flames - fueled by love, loss, hope, and family - shed new light on us. Sometimes we feel warmth, and sometimes we simply burn.Trade ReviewSharp, daring, and shot with moments of rare beauty, these stories grab you by the collar and refuse to let you go. Daniel Hoyt tears away the layers of our shared human experience to reveal the raw emotional truth at the core, and at the same time he uncovers the searing loneliness and desire that bind us together. This is a fearless and unforgettable book. - Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater ""A wonderful book that brings together thirteen stories that are odd bedfellows - now realist, now magical, now minimalist, now not. To read them is to wander untethered through Daniel Hoyt's highly developed imagination and to come away sometimes stunned, often thrilled, always amused, constantly surprised, and, from time to time, comforted. In a way, reading this collection is like changing channels on a very peculiar TV: the programs look different each from the next, but soon you realize that someone is controlling all of the programming, there are common threads running through every show."" - Frederick Barthelme, author of Elroy Nights and Bob the Gambler
£999.99
University of Massachusetts Press The Agriculture Hall of Fame: Stories
Book SynopsisThese powerful stories limn the complexities and dilemmas of life in Kansas, a state at "the center of the center of America," as a billboard in one story announces. Andrew Malan Milward explores the less visible aspects of the Kansas experience-where its agrarian past comes into conflict with the harsh present reality of drugs, fundamentalism, and corporatism, relegating its agrarian identity to museums and amusement parks. Presented in a triptych, the stories in Milward's debut collection range across a varied terrain, from tumbledown rural barns to modern urban hospitals, revealing the secrets contained therein.Trade ReviewThe 10 gorgeous stories that make up this Juniper Prize-winning debut collection from Milward, a Kansas native and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, offer unique glimpses into Midwestern calamities and the folks who find themselves affected by them. In Milward's world, there's nary a sunny sky in sight, with characters who are "all reversed in some ways, our lives shading backwards like the shadows on the moon." But this gloominess is greatly buoyed by the author's poetic prose and a pitch-perfect eye for detail, resulting in one tender, tragic portrait after another. STARRED REVIEW" - Publishers Weekly"The ten stories in Andrew Malan Milward's The Agriculture Hall of Fame are set in "the center of America": Kansas. And they are all, in their own unique ways, wild, hopeful, and devastating. So much is communicated in so little--a story that barely makes three pages packs a gut punch or two along the way." - ForeWord"Two sons struggle to understand their Vietnam Vet father. A mother rejects her meth-addicted son. A farmer's life becomes tied—fatally—to his barn. A brother and sister speak with heartbreaking humor about everything but the cancer killing her. These beautiful stories, ranging the cities and towns of Kansas from Ulysses to El Dorado, are as intimate and compassionate as they are unflinching. Andrew Malan Milward has made of the Sunflower State a doorway into the American soul." - Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man"Andrew Malan Milward is an exceptionally gifted and mature storyteller, attentive to the intricacies of character and place. There's no showing off here, no macho posturing, no coy evasion, no attention-demanding voice or ploy. This debut collection is wise, patient, vivid, and deep. One gets the impression that these stories were written slowly and with great care. Further, one gets the refreshing impression that the author sincerely needed to write them." - Chris Bachelder, Juniper Prize contest judge and author of Abbott Awaits: A Novel"The Kansas of The Agriculture Hall of Fame is brokedown, hardluck country. Andrew Malan Milward's precarious, paralyzed people are lost in place, and know it, alternately circling and fleeing the center of the center of America. As one says, 'Out here, everybody's crazy with looking for something.' Wry and sad, this is a fine debut collection." - Stewart O'Nan, author of The Odds"Andrew Malan Milward is a subtle writer with an unsparing eye and a heart as vast as a prairie. The ten stories in his first book, The Agriculture Hall of Fame, are graceful evocations of loss—of fathers and first loves, of lakes and sisters, of the rusting midwestern heartland one sees from a bus window as it pulls away. An evocative debut from a writer to cheer for." - Lauren Groff, author of Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories and Arcadia"Milward's characters are so colorfully drawn, so carefully and deliberately described, that there appears always to be hope; a second chance is just around the corner, there is some glorious redemption just beyond the pages we are given." - The Rumpus.com"I'm clearly biased about the 'place' of these stories, but the stories stand up. They're not just good Kansas stories; they're good stories period. I can't wait to see what Milward does next." - TheStoryIsTheCurse.blogspot.com"With The Agriculture Hall of Fame, Milward often embraces the archetypes of Midwestern life while at the same time refusing to be defined by them, and in the end, the collection feels Midwestern, yet at the same time, it feels like an incredibly strong group of stories, no matter where they happen to take place." - Word/Sound
£999.99
Sourcebooks Red Clay Blue Cadillac Stories of Twelve Southern
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£13.50
Penguin Putnam Inc Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
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£15.30
Penguin Putnam Inc Pastoralia
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£15.30
The University of Alabama Press Regenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category
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£999.99
