Search results for ""featherproof books""

MAKE X collects memorable work published throughout the last ten years by beloved Chicago literary magazine MAKE. Through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews, alongside new visual art portfolios, interviews, and stories from the editors, MAKE X honors a decade of storytelling and literary rabble-rousing in Chicago.

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After three novels, dynamic and masterful young writer Christian TeBordo, has finally collected his best short stories in The Awful Possibilities. A girl among kidney thieves masters the art of forgetting. A motivational speaker skins his best friend to impress his wife. A man outlines the rules and regulations for sadistic child-rearing. A teen in Brooklyn, Iowa, deals with the fallout of his brother's rise to hip hop fame. Populated with the people we've all heard whispering in hallways, mumbling in diners, shouting in the apartment next door, these brilliantly strange set pieces explode the boundaries of short fiction and locate the awe in the awful possibilities we could never have imagined.

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If anything's going to save the characters in Amelia Gray's debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it's a John Mayer concert tee. In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrodinger boxes, and volcano love. June wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard falls in love with a chaise lounge; Betty insists everything except flowers are a symbol of her love for her husband; Andrew talks to his house in times of crisis. Written every morning and night for two months, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) recall Donald Barthelme in their whimsy and subtle yet powerful emotions. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, AM/PM mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original work of fiction.

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In a purgatory at the banks of the Hiwasee River in southeastern Tennessee, two teenagers -- the garrulous John Stone and the young Jenny Evenene -- barrel through an endless night in a Firebird Trans Am. Jenny wakes each morning, the same morning, and chronicles the events of her final day, her memory reaching back into the recesses of mythical time, recollecting cosmogonies, eschatologies, and metamorphoses that mingle with the details of her violent end. As the two heroes drive through the night, drinking cold American beer and listening to the soothing tunes of the country music station, the dramatis personae of the process of decomposition encroach upon them from the darkness beyond the headlights: the turkey vultures that soar above them, baited by decaying corpses, are at once the successors of the sacred buzzard whose talons first massaged the earth into being and the double of the screaming chicken emblazoned on the hood of the Firebird, which is itself at once the illustrious automobile of teenage dreams, vehicle of transmigrating souls, and ancient phoenix, millennial sigil of the sun, of biochemical resurrections, and Heraclitean thunderbolt who steers all things.

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Our narrator is the brooding runt of a political dynasty known as The Family. Always a little tipsy, he is thoughtful but has trouble expressing himself, thanks to his many physical defects as a result of inbreeding. It is fall 1988 and his father, Poppy, is about to be appointed Prez of The Homeland. Desperate to fill air time at the advent of a 24-hour news cycle, even our narrator is suddenly of interest to The Media. The Family is forced to hide him away in one of its secret hideouts, an estate he recalls fondly from his childhood. Moody over a love triangle, our narrator gets lost wandering the mansion's long halls. He cloisters himself deep under the estate and constructs a tomb out of soup cans. Here he gets to work to correct the popular mythology that he is his mother's favorite son. His oldest brother is already tapped to be Prez. And maybe even the next brother after that. Unwittingly our narrator reveals the backstory of how The Family achieved such power, including its role in 11/22/63 and Watergate. And he lets slip some of The Family's big plans for The Homeland ...

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See You In the Morning is a book about three 17-year-olds, Rosie, John, and the narrator, who take care of each other one summer in a small Midwestern town. Rosie is a mystic romantic whose dad earned so much money writing screenplays that she doesn't need an after-school job. John, Rosie's ex, works at the roller rink in a rabbit costume and takes care of his mom when she's tired after a day cutting hair. The narrator works at a bookstore and sometimes focuses so hard on their reading that they see polka dots take over the room. John is the narrator's best and oldest friend, so now the two of them must be in love, right? Because if they aren't, why stay in town? But if they aren't, who else will ever understand? What is love and how does it work? See You In the Morning happens at diners and house shows, in paragraph-shaped poems, and the narrator's angry, tender, colorful voice.

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