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Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2007. This extraordinary first collection of short stories covers the landscape of dysfunctional childhood, urban angst, and human disconnection with a wit and insight that keep you riveted to the page. The characters here have rich and imaginative interior lives, but grave difficulty relating to the outside world. The beginning story, "Ducklings," introduces the over-weight and over-enthusiastic Marjorie, the last twelve-year-old you would want babysitting your toddler. In "Wanted" we meet Eleanor, a single girl living in Chicago who may or may not be dating a serial killer. "Another Cancer Story" is an unsentimental account of two sisters whose beloved mother just won't seem to die, and "The Last Dead Boyfriend" gives us a recovering addict who keeps encountering her recently deceased boyfriend, an unpleasant man she wished she'd broken up with before he died. Always funny, often dark, and wholly satisfying, these stories explore the longing for connection among characters who are frequently stricken with anxiety. Each story is rendered in a way that is surreal, vivid, and entirely convincing.
Biography of the author of Stuart Little.
“All the heavy hitters, from Michael Connelly in Los Angeles to Joyce Carol Oates in suburban New Jersey . . . an important anthology.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Features Dennis Lehane’s story “Animal Rescue,” the inspiration for the movie The Drop starring Tom Hardy. Launched with the summer 2004 award-winning bestseller Brooklyn Noir, the groundbreaking Akashic Noir series now includes over sixty volumes and counting. The stories in USA Noir “represent the best of the U.S.-based anthologies, and the list of contributors include virtually anyone who’s made the best-seller list with a work of crime fiction in the last decade . . . a must-have antholog...
“A collection enhanced by an unerring sense of place, with no clinkers . . . that will please the most discriminating lovers of the dark side.” —Kirkus Reviews From its posh Main Line to its blue-collar enclaves, Philadelphia is a city of contrasts. History has shown that brotherly love and murderous intentions can exist, if not side-by-side, then at least on the same block. Its this dichotomy that gives local writers their inspiration in this gritty collection of stories from Meredith Anthony, Diane Ayres, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Keith Gilman, Cary Holladay, Solomon Jones, Gerald Kolpan, Aimee LaBrie, Halimah Marcus, Carlin Romano, Asali Solomon, Laura Spagnoli, Duane Swierczynski, Dennis Tafoya, and Jim Zervanos. “It took long enough for Akashic’s noir series to get to Philly. Now that it has, compiled under the shadowy auspices of Inquirer literary critic/West Philly native Carlin Romano, the fun begins.” —Philadelphia City Paper “One of the US’s oldest, and darkest cities has a collection of its own . . . Overall, this collection was excellent, but left me wanting more.” —MostlyFiction Book Reviews
Provides a biography of author Stephen King along with critical views of his work.
Geoff Schmidt's debut collection Out of Time is a meditation on meaning and mortality, and the ways that story and the imagined life can sustain us. In these stories time is running out for the people, yet the power of language, the human ability to tell, to imagine and invent, is a redemptive force.
Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2010. The title, A Bright Soothing Noise, refers to the sound that fire makes, promising not only warmth and light but also violence and destruction. Brown's greatest hero is Frank O'Connor, and like O'Connor's his stories uncover the final bleakness of a national life but in the same moment glow with its promise of love and life and belonging. Brown's Americans will try almost anything to connect. They tend to drink too much, to drive too fast, are a little too violent in their passions and even a little too religious. Too often they believe, they trust--and then again they don't, depending not so much on what's getting proffered a...
This collection of stories gathered from 100 different creative writing workshops, covers such subjects as mid-life career changes, extraterrestrials and marital fidelity.
'Will burrow under your skin and live forever in your darkest dreams' Bust Joyce Carol Oates assembles a spectacular cast to explore, subvert and reinvent one of horror's most visceral of subgenres. Focusing on distortions of the human body, the fifteen short stories of A Darker Shade will delight, disgust and shock you. From the metaphysical horror of a snail trapped in body of a young office worker, to a women cursed to dance endlessly, her body ravaged and torn, these are stories that confront the inextricable link between physical and mental terror. Featuring brand-new stories by: Margaret Atwood, Raven Leilani, Lisa Tuttle, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Aimee Bender, Cassandra Khaw, Lisa Lim, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret and Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma.
The much-anticipated reissue of a novel that is one of Joyce Carol Oates’s personal favorites among her oeuvre; featuring a new afterword by Oates IN THE HEART OF A LANGUID JULY, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD JOHN REDDY HEART drives a traffic-stopping, salmon-colored Cadillac into the quiet upstate town of Willowsville, New York. His mother, Dahlia Heart, a blackjack dealer, has brought her family east from Las Vegas to claim the rambling mansion left to her by a wealthy suitor. But it is John Reddy—already growing into a heartbreaking hybrid of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley—who will claim the town itself. It is John Reddy who will arouse the desire of Willowsville’s teenage girls a...