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
The University of Alabama Press The Ace of Lightning: Stories
Book SynopsisStephen-Paul Martin’s The Ace of Lightning is a series of interconnected stories focused on a turning point in Western history: the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria which triggered World War I, and the mysterious circumstances that led Gavrilo Princip to shoot and kill the heir apparent to one of Europe’s most powerful empires.Far from being a conventional work of historical fiction, Martin’s collection asks readers to think about what truly constitutes history. What would the past look like if history was written under the influence of Mad Magazine and The Twilight Zone? What happens when the assassination in Sarajevo becomes “the assassination in Sarajevo,” when Gavrilo Princip becomes “Gavrilo Princip,” when the past and the present shape a textual future that looks suspiciously like a past that never was and a present that never is?Trade ReviewStephen-Paul Martin is a longtime, masterful postmodern storyteller, whose characters’ meditations often blend together with his narrators’ essay-like ruminations in unexpected, comic, recursive, explosive, and subtle ways. Delineating a sinister, deeply absurd world which has both annihilated the capacity for laughter and repeatedly, urgently demands it, The Ace of Lightning takes us inside historical necessity, where time is fluid and Martin’s comic imagination runs wonderfully rampant."" - Mel Freilicher, author of The Encyclopedia of Rebels and The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives
£15.26
The University of Alabama Press Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman: Stories
Book SynopsisWinner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction PrizeA darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor. In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”Trade ReviewAimee Parkison is a shrewd, fiery, wildly poetic, politically astute writer of fiction. With Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Parkison gifts us with deeply imagined, and often fantastic landscapes, straight from the heart of her unique imagination, but these are always, in part, sharp commentaries on the world we have to inhabit in our daily lives. Parkison’s satirical embrace, and always beautiful language, leaves you more awake to the world and unsettled in all the right ways."" - Jane McCafferty, author of One Heart and First You Try Everything
£12.95
The University of Alabama Press Sex for the Millennium: Extreme Tales
Book Synopsis
£999.99
The University of Alabama Press Dictionary of Modern Anguish
Book SynopsisThis volume of short stories includes a selection of reviews of unwritten novels, prefaces to fraudulent books, narratives of dictionary entries, and one interminable sentence written in a style intended to disorientate.
£999.99
The University of Alabama Press The Possibility of Music
Book SynopsisThe Possibility of Music is an imaginative reconstruction of America in the early 21st century. What would our post-9/11 society look like if it were viewed through a series of funhouse mirrors? Each of Stephen-Paul Martin's stories is a response to this question, a prose exploration that redefines what it means to write fiction in a world in which the Sistine Chapel has become the Mall of America. Nightmarish at times, playfully amusing at others, Martin's prose is relentlessly inventive and challenging, relocating the experimental tradition of Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Marquez in a contemporary context in which intelligent communication has become both impossible and increasingly necessary. ""I'd always told myself that if I ever wrote my own music,"" the narrator of one story says, ""every composition would become its own distinct struggle with aesthetic questions that emerged as the process unfolded."" In good part, that's what animates ""The Possibility of Music"", a book in which John Coltrane's ""A Love Supreme"" moves through characters and stories like a soundtrack.Trade ReviewMartin spins his arresting tales, tales full of surprises and yet reassuringly 'normal.' The Possibility of Music is a joy to read. - Marjorie Perloff ""Martin has, for many years, brilliantly wrestled with the problems posed by his own chosen material/experience. Entering his witty contemporary monologues, the reader unravels the great questions: does a person anticipate his or her own actions, as one word in a sentence anticipates the next? Or is an event an explosion of contingencies that arrive fully integrated? 'I didn't expect to become a composer,' he begins one story and this one statement articulates the magnificent and entertaining wrestling match he performs with time and art in each of his beautifully crafted stories."" - Fanny Howe
£999.99
The University of Alabama Press Kissssss: A Miscellany
Book SynopsisThis is a profound and delightful book of short stories. This collection - derived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibility - contains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth. At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of forms - genres, anti-genres, fantasies, games - while highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary life: Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.Trade ReviewSteve Katz comes off the loping forward rush of his latest masterful novel, Antonello's Lion, with a collection of short pieces: acerbic, innovative, humorous, and above all, perversely engaging. - Rudy Wurlitzer ""Steve Katz's comic genius is subversive. Readers beware. You may die laughing."" - Walter Abish ""Steve Katz is an American treasure: a delirious imagination in a major stylist. His 2006 novel Antonello's Lion, is an epic comic lament. Reading these stories you can imagine Flann O'Brien crossed with Nathanael West. No one has chronicled the impact of the women's movement more vividly and with less bias. No one has performed more loving surgery on the international art scene."" - Wendy Walker ""In my opinion, Steve Katz is the greatest living novelist in English, and the one most likely to keep our hearts and minds in good working order, to keep us truly human in a world where brainless tech-loving Moorlocks hog the sunshine, and thoughtful, life-loving Eloi have been driven underground."" - William Bamberger
£999.99
Station Hill Press,U.S. BRILLIANT SILENCE
Book SynopsisA legendary storyteller and writer who has charmed New York audiences for decades, Holst first evolved his oeuvre in the 1950s-60s milieu of Greenwich Village, influenced as much by sophisticated poets/writers (e.g. Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges) as by fairy tales/tall-tales which his writings superficially resemble. Each of his sentences, paragraphs, and very, very short stories is a complete and independent act of narrative that delivers the very essence of narrative fiction. In spite of their brevity, these are works of great variety and complexity, displaying a fine intelligence and an inexhaustible capacity for verbal surprise. Holst breaks the very frame of what a story is and what language can do.
£13.25
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Gotham Writers' Workshop Fiction Gallery:
Book Synopsis
£17.00
Counterpoint The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Seven Stories Press,U.S. Las Historias Prohibidas de Marta Veneranda:
Book SynopsisThe Forbidden Stories is the author''s inspired response to a statement made by a Cuban politician regarding the conflicted attitude towards homosexuality in Cuba. Rivera-Valdés creates the character of Marta Veneranda, a graduate student working on a thesis which aims to graph clinically the discrepancy between an individual’s sense of shame and society’s attitude toward the incidents that inspire self-censorship in a person. But the orderly study becomes unruly as the subjects interviewed reveal their hidden stories.In "Little Poisons,", the nameless narrator is heavily influenced by pop psychologist Patricia Evans. Through her copious reading, she manages to gain some distance from her co-dependent relationship with her husband. Sharing with Marta the minutiae of her liberation, she recounts: "As the days and months went by, I began feeling proud of myself, strong, free from his subjugation and my neurosis, even when his romance with the young woman began and he told me about it. In the fifteen years of marriage he would tell me everything, even about his sexual escapades— if he couldn''t share them with me, who would he share them with? Besides, that way no one could come running to me spreading rumors. In the end, he couldn''t live without me: his wife, friend, lover, and mother. Can you believe that I listened to these stories and even felt proud of the trust he had in me?"Beneath the humor and the deceptively simple surface of The Forbidden Stories is a deadly-serious look at the co-mingling of Anglo and Latino cultures, and an exposé of the comforts and discomforts of that cohabitation.
£13.46
Autonomedia Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Brandeis University Press Promised Lands
Book SynopsisThis vibrant anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American fiction writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume. With the kind of depth and imagination that only fiction allows, they offer striking variations on the multivalent theme of the Promised Land and how it continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews. This anthology provides a rich reading experience and a unique window onto Jewish American life and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A scholarly introduction by Derek Rubin provides literary context, discusses the organization of the volume, and illuminates expected and unexpected connections among the stories. Promised Lands features 23 stories by Elisa Albert, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Janice Eidus, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Lauren Grodstein, Aaron Hamburger, Dara Horn, Rachel Kadish, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Joan Leegant, Yael Goldstein Love, Rivka Lovett, Tova Mirvis, Lev Raphael, Nessa Rapoport, Jonathan Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Joey Rubin, Edward Schwarzschild, Steve Stern, Lara Vapnyar, Adam Wilson, and Jonathan Wilson.
£999.99
University of Scranton Press,U.S. The Grappling Hook: And Other Stories from the
Book SynopsisWar magnifies human emotions and passions: anger becomes rage, guilt becomes desperation, and resentment becomes hatred. In "The Grappling Hook", U.S. Army veteran F. X. Moughan writes of these emotions from the perspective of someone who has been there. With ten poignant short stories rich with humor and irony, disdain for hypocrisy, and admiration for leadership, Moughan tells the inside story of the conflict lurking beneath the war's surface: the human dramas of the soldiers fighting it. From group efforts to neutralize a roadside bomb to the harassment of a female soldier, from mental illness to middle-aged recruits, Moughan illuminates a hidden world of tragedy, anxiety, and everyday heroism.
£999.99
Pelican Publishing Co Lipstick Like Lindsay's and Other Christmas
Book Synopsis
£14.39
The New York Review of Books, Inc Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories
Book Synopsis
£19.96
The New York Review of Books, Inc Paris Stories
Book Synopsis
£17.39
The New York Review of Books, Inc Soul: And Other Stories
Book Synopsis
£15.86
The New York Review of Books, Inc My Fantoms
Book SynopsisRomantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…”Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Book Synopsis
£16.96
The New York Review of Books, Inc The Wedding of Zein
Book Synopsis
£14.36
The New York Review of Books, Inc You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories
Book Synopsis
£17.95
The New York Review of Books, Inc Thus Were Their Faces
Book SynopsisAn NYRB Classics OriginalThus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer “better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.” Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.
£14.24
The New York Review of Books, Inc Bright Magic: Stories
Book SynopsisAlfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too. Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.
£14.36
The New York Review of Books, Inc Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of
Book Synopsis
£14.41
Other Press LLC We're Flying: Stories
Book SynopsisFollowing the publication of the widely acclaimed novel Seven Years comes a trove of stories from the Swiss master Peter Stamm. They all possess the traits that have built Stamm’s reputation: the directness of the prose, the deceptive surface simplicity of the narratives, and deep psychological insight into the existential dilemmas of contemporary life. Stamm does not waste a word, nor does he spare the reader’s feelings. These stories are a superb introduction to his work and a gift for all those who have come to regard his fiction as a precise rendering of the contemporary human psyche.
£14.36
Select Books Inc Half a Reason to Die
Book Synopsis
£12.99
Soft Skull Press The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Book Synopsis
£14.39
Soft Skull Press Where the Wild Ladies Are
Book SynopsisIn this delightfully uncanny collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales (The New York Times Book Review), humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.With Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.
£14.41
Penguin Putnam Inc In Persuasion Nation
Book Synopsis
£11.88
Penguin Putnam Inc This Is How You Lose Her
Book Synopsis
£21.56
Penguin Putnam Inc This Is How You Lose Her Deluxe Edition
Book Synopsis
£30.00
Penguin Putnam Inc Lovers on All Saints' Day: Stories
Book Synopsis
£14.40
Penguin Putnam Inc Florida
Book Synopsis
£21.60
Penguin Putnam Inc Devotion: A Rat Story
£9.45
The Library of America John O'Hara: Stories (LOA #282)
Book SynopsisWriting with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, and the small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, John O’Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, “to record the way people talked and thought and felt . . . with complete honesty.” Praised by contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wrote about sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of its time. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than any other writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of short story featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear and skillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as Raymond Carver. Bringing together sixty stories written over four decades—the largest, most comprehensive collection of O’Hara’s stories ever published—former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting new perspective on one of American literature’s master storytellers.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
£30.00
The Library of America Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories 1938-1992
Book Synopsis
£67.44
The Library of America Peter Taylor: Complete Stories 1960-1992: The
Book SynopsisFor the first time, the complete stories of an American Chekhov, a master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century South
£35.99
The Library of America Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories
Book SynopsisA landmark of literary recovery: the first major edition of 19th-century America's greatest woman writer.
£32.29
The Library of America Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other
Book SynopsisLibrary of America launches its long-awaited Hemingway edition with a landmark collection of writings from his breakthrough years, in newly edited, authoritative texts.With a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway travelled to Paris in 1921. There, he ame into contact with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and other expatriate writers and artists integral to his rapid development as a writer. This volume brings together work from the extraordinary period of 1918 to 1926, in which Hemingway's famous prose style became fully formed. It includes his work for the Toronto Star and Hearst's International News Service, the indelible stories of In Our Time (1925), The Torrents of Spring (1925), and his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises (1926).Edited by Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon, this volume features newly edited, corrected texts of In Our Time, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, fixing errors and restoring Hemingway’s original punctuation. It presents the 1924 edition of in our time issued by Three Mountains Press as a modernist masterpiece in its own right, apart from the subsequent versions published by Boni & Liveright and Scribners. It includes the story “Up in Michigan,” one of only a few stories dating from the period before 1923 that was not lost in Hemingway’s suitcase in the Gare de Lyon and that was originally intended as the opening story of In Our Time, and the hard-to-find, previously uncollected story “A Divine Gesture.” Also here are a selection of Hemingway’s letters from the period, which cast light on his breakthrough years and at the extraordinary international modernist moment of which he was a crucial part.
£31.50
The Library of America The Collected Breece D'J Pancake: Stories,
Book SynopsisA definitive edition of the haunted and haunting stories of the legendary West Virginia writer, with rare unfinished stories and fragments and revealing lettersBreece D'J Pancake published only a handful of stories before he took his own life in 1979, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Those stories and a small number of others found among his papers after his death comprise the remarkable posthumous collection The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983), recognized at the time as an American Dubliners (Jayne Anne Phillips) and a collection by a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's (Joyce Carol Oates). Kurt Vonnegut called him merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. Today his diverse admirers include Margaret Atwood, Andre Dubus III, Tom Waits, and Lorde.The Collected Breece D'J Pancake brings together the original landmark book, several story drafts and fragments, and a selection of Pancake's letters to offer an unprecedented picture of his life and art. Among the unfinished stories are fragments from Pancake's two planned novels. The letters document his relationship with writers such as Peter Taylor, John Casey, James Alan McPherson, and Mary Lee Settle, and offer a picture of his collaborative relationship with his mother, who sent him newspaper clippings and helped him research his stories. Pancake's stories are the only stories written in just this way, Jayne Anne Phillips writes in her introduction, from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others. At once beautiful and relentlessly bleak, the stories concern miners, truckers, farmers, waitresses, and others facing constricted economic and life prospects. In one way or another, his characters are stuck, hoping for a change in fortune they can neither relinquish nor quite bring themselves to believe in, the land and the past making equally strong claims on their darkening present.
£19.96
The Library of America Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings
Book SynopsisFor the first time, the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form, plus her fascinating portrait of the mother one of the world''s most infamous assassinsThis volume collects for the first time the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form, a writer acclaimed for her acute psychological insight, exacting eye for detail, and mordant sensibility. Set in New England, Colorado, New York, and Europe, Jean Stafford’s stories intimately examine the lives of women and men beset by restlessness, dislocation, and isolation. “The Interior Castle” takes us inside an accident victim’s physical and mental pain; “A Country Love Story” chillingly depicts marital estrangement and mental breakdown amidst the solitude of a Maine winter; “Bad Characters” is the exuberant story of a young girl led into mischief by an incorrigible friend; and “An Influx of Poets” is a haunting story of a marriage wrecked by literary ambition and egotism. The volume also includes A Mother in History, Stafford’s controversial journalistic profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and three revealing literary essays.
£33.25
The Library of America O. Henry: 101 Stories (LOA #345)
Book SynopsisThe ultimate O. Henry: an annotated edition of classic tales by America''s master storytellerTexas troubadour, convicted embezzler, and adopted New Yorker William Sidney Porter?better known as O. Henry?was one of the world?s great storytellers. A master of cunning plots and a gifted humorist, he is best known today for his beloved tale ?The Gift of the Magi.? But O. Henry?s palette of moods and methods was as expansive as his exuberant imagination.This Library of America volume offers a fresh look at the full range of his literary genius. Here are 101 stories, including such favorites as ?The Ransom of Red Chief,? ?The Last of the Troubadours,? and ?The Cop and the Anthem,? alongside lesser-known and previously uncollected stories, including three early tales published here for the first time. With full annotation and a newly researched chronology of Porter?s life and career, this is a definitive edition for modern readers of a major American writer.
£28.00
The Library of America Ray Bradbury: The Illustrated Man, The October
Book Synopsis
£26.40
The Library of America Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1970s
Book SynopsisThe late novels and stories of America’s greatest myth-maker and chronicler of the Jewish American experience“Is Malamud an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations.” —Cynthia Ozick“[A] short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.” —Flannery O’ConnorThe long-awaited third and final volume of Library of America’s edition of Bernard Malamud’s writings brings together three novels and thirteen stories of the 1970s and 80s that reaffirm his place in the American pantheon. The Tenants (1971) chronicles the growing tensions between two male writers—one Jewish, the other Black—who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house. Dubin’s Lives (1976) is a fascinating portrait of a middle-aged biographer who becomes involved with a woman half his age while researching a life of D.H. Lawrence—an affair that unsettles things in expected and unexpected ways. God’s Grace (1982) is a wildly inventive, darkly humorous postapocalyptic novel whose cast includes the lone human survivor of the Day of Devastation, a group of talking chimps, and other (speechless) primates—who try to establish a New Covenant with God. The stories in this volume confirm Malamud as a master storyteller, from the Kafkaesque unbridled fantasy of “Talking Horse” to the final “fictive biographies” of “In Kew Gardens,” about Virginia Woolf, and “Alma Redeemed,” about the Austrian composer Alma Mahler. Rounding out the volume are “Long Work, Short Life,” Malamud’s hard-to-find “casual memoir” about his writing life, and the previously unpublished “A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” a poignant sketch of Malamud’s own childhood. This deluxe edition includes a chronology of Malamud''s life and career and detailed notes by Malamud biographer Philip Davis.
£42.75
University of Alaska Press The City Beneath the Snow: Stories
Book Synopsis
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi New Orleans Sketches
Book SynopsisIn 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer.The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ""the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.""In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called ""Faulkner's best-informed critic,"" illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.""For the reader of Faulkner,"" Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, ""the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights."" ""We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,"" states the Book Exchange (London). ""The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times.""
£22.46
University of New Orleans Press Death by Pastrami
Book Synopsis
£15.26
University of New Orleans Press The Hubris of an Empty Hand
Book Synopsis
£17.06
