Short stories

Book SynopsisFrom Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more. On a hot July night, teenage girls sneak out of the house to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they proclaim their adoration for the same man. A woman luxuriates in a fantasy getaway to escape her past. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store, and a laundress's life is consumed by her obsession with a baseball star. After the death of a sister, two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies.Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories -- some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails -- drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days. They recall the intense friendships of teenage girls and the innate bonds between mothers, the first heady rush of desire, and the pure exhilaration of womanhood, all while holding up the wild souls of women so they can catch the light.

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Book SynopsisSpanning a variety of genres—fantasy, science fiction, horror—and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational. This speculative fiction compilation, lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human. Perplexing and absorbing, the stories lift the veil of reality to expose the realms of what lies beyond with creatures that shed their skin and roam the night, vampires in Mexico City that struggle with disenchantment, an apocalypse with giant penguins, legends of magic scorpions, and tales of a ceiba tree surrounded by human skulls.Trade ReviewSilvia Moreno-Garcia's stories are sensitive and haunting portraits of worlds where the impossible and the real live side by side. Hers is a rare and wonderful talent." —Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award–winning author, Osama

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Book Synopsis In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present a collection of John Riddell's work. Riddell's poems and short stories are a remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings. Riddell's oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged with media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. Riddell is best known for his short fiction pieces ""H"" and ""Pope Leo: El Elope,"" a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol. However, his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. Riddell's work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet. With media studies increasingly turning to ""media archaeology"" and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (as typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for further appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars. Trade Review``A timely and compelling presentation of graphical writings whose archaeological media specificity reminds us of the ways literary works engage generatively with the material conditions of their production. Hints of early conceptualism, the writing-under-constraint techniques of OuLiPo, features of concrete poetics, and procedural aesthetics are all in play in/on/across these pages. beaulieu and Emerson have done a real service in bringing John Riddell's work back into view so that it may get the critical recognition and discussion it deserves. Riddell's synthesis of movements and tendencies exemplifies the rich activity of Canadian poetics in the late 20th century while demonstrating a distinctly original sensibility.'' -- Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA, author ofThe Visible Word, Stochastic Poetics, etc. -- 201301``Riddell's experiments remain radical, whereas much similar work from the period seems dated. Writing Surfaces thus recovers Riddell's reputation while reframing his oeuvre in a contemporary context.'' -- Jonathan Ball -- Winnipeg Free Press, March 23, 2013, 201305Table of Contents Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell, edited by derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson Introduction: Media Studies and Writing Surfaces Untitled Pope Leo: El ELoPE: A Tragedy in Four Letters Criss-Cross morox à deux 5 ways placid / special letters we surveys runes a shredded text in take watching coda untitled Traces from Glass Selected Works of John Riddell Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the National Book Award for Fiction[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.Roxane GayIn these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down.Karen RussellIn Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

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Book Synopsis""The King in Yellow", a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's "Trilby". The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign", in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's." - from the Introduction by H.P. Lovecraft.

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Book SynopsisGritty short stories set in the haze of Baton Rouge, Louisiana ""Headlong, funny, sharply observed, the stories of Red Stick Men are a joy to read. Tim Parrish is a splendid writer with a remarkable literary future."" - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Like Mississippi River humidity, the sweat and the factory smoke of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, pervade Tim Parrish's fiction. His characters in these nine working-class stories are by no means good-ole-boy clichés. These are blue-collar, urban southerners, trying to ""do good"" -- or at least to find ways of doing less damage to themselves, their co-workers, and loved ones. They are always on the verge of disasters that emanate from the hard living they endure in the city they call ""Red Stick."" Five of these stories follow a family from the face-to-face racial tensions of the 1960s through the distant CNN blare of the Persian Gulf War. Plotting a family's history -- the ups and downs of a Vietnam vet, a mother with lupus, and a sensitive boy striving to understand his parents and neighbors -- this quintet has the satisfying arc of a novella. Other stories light the panorama of Baton Rouge with a refinery-fire glow. In ""Roustabout"" a New Wave rocker joins an oil platform crew and loses his heart to a woman engineer and a male crewman. In ""Smell of a Car"" a pipe-supply worker tries to aid a gunshot victim and his daughter, only to find his own life is a shambles. In ""After the River"" wayward lovers find meaning in the midst of a catastrophic flood. The absurd complexities of life in industrial south Louisiana propel these stories. Each is connected by Parrish's unique sense of Baton Rouge as an Old South city made exotic and forbidding by its New South problems -- crack houses and handguns, layoffs and grinding wages, pollution and isolation. War, hard times, and a landscape always on the edge of apocalypse from flood and fire haunt the children and working stiffs of his stories. Parrish captures the ironic humor of people who live on oozing ground near a horizon that burns at night. His Louisiana is bizarre and beautiful, tragic and hilarious. As the writer Moira Crone says, ""The whole of the book forms an expressionistic piece with a surrealistic edge. These stories just go all the way."" Tim Parrish has served as a professor and director of creative writing at Southern Connecticut State University since 1994. He has been published in numerous periodicals, including New England Review, Southern Exposure, Louisiana Literature, and Shenandoah. He lived in Baton Rouge for twenty-seven years.

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