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The Bliss of Your Attention
A powerful story collection that celebrates those who strive and fail and strive again. If Joseph Campbell's dictum—"follow your bliss"—has become inspiration and goad, accusation and cliché, then the characters in David Borofka's The Bliss of Your Attention are all the more puzzled by what their futures portend. Their bliss is never clear nor independent of others, for the characters in these stories are ever in search of connection, understanding, and validation. Borofka, whose collection A Longing for Impossible Things was selected by the American Book Fest as the 2021 winner of the American Fiction Award for the Short Story, masterfully charts the spectrum of human emotion and the difficulty of connection in these pages.
A Longing for Impossible Things
"A short-story collection that charts the yearning inherent in imperfect lives, when hopefulness and disappointments abound in equal measure"--
Thank You for Being Concerned and Sensitive
Twelve stories about things falling apart. In Mouthfeel, a marriage falls apart when the wife decides her life has no purpose, while Congressman Spoonbender is on a politician who discovers his life is without meaning.
Lungs Full of Noise
This prize-winning debut of twelve stories explores a femininity that is magical, raw, and grotesque. Aghast at the failings of their bodies, this cast of misfit women and girls sets out to remedy the misdirection of their lives in bold and reckless ways. Figure skaters screw skate blades into the bones of their feet to master elusive jumps. A divorcee steals the severed arm of her ex to reclaim the fragments of a dissolved marriage. Following the advice of a fashion magazine, teenaged girls binge on grapes to dye their skin purple and attract prom dates. And a college freshman wages war on her roommate from Jupiter, who has inadvertently seduced all the boys in their dorm with her exotic hermaphroditic anatomy. But it isn’t just the characters who are in crisis. In Lungs Full of Noise, personal disasters mirror the dissolution of the natural world. Written in lyrical prose with imagination and humor, Tessa Mellas’s collection is an aviary of feathered stories that are rich, emotive, and imbued with the strength to suspend strange new worlds on delicate wings.
River of Lost Voices
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The Man in the Banana Trees
"The stories in Marguerite Sheffer's debut collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, take place in the past, present, and future-from the American Gulf South to orbit around Jupiter. We meet teachers and students, ghosts and aliens. An ice cream consultant in the year 2036 predicts a devastating flavor trend and a disgruntled New England waiter investigates a mysterious tanker crash. Although wildly varied in setting, length, and genre, a thread of the fantastic unites these stories, as characters struggle to understand that thing lurking at the edge of their perception: something sinister, or maybe-miraculous. Sheffer dips into science fiction and fantasy to defamiliarize everyday horrors and confront them with heart and sly humor. Her stories explore complicity, whiteness, the lack of bodily autonomy women face, and what we are willing to destroy-or not-to dream a better world for our children"--
You Never Get It Back
The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms. Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
Work Done Right
My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. . . . Abraham Tovar is a young man who works in a sausage factory and desperately longs to create a history of his own. As Abraham's life becomes absorbed into the blood and spice of pork, his thoughts explore his ancestry, roam the stars, and reflect upon the despairs and strengths of factory workers who live with "the unyielding memory of pig." I pulled into Galdini Sausage at noon. The workers walked out of production and swatted away the flies desperate for pork. Pork gripped the men and was everywhere, in the form of blood, in the form of fat, and in pink meat that stuck to the workers' shoes. Work Done Right is a sequence of narrative poems, told with a lyricist's tenderness and an eye for detail, that address the human condition in unexpected ways. David Dominguez explores Abraham's struggle to maintain personal dignity in harsh circumstances, juxtaposing bleak images of the sausage factory with the hope of finding one's true place in the world. Through his sensuously textured words, he pays tribute to people and place as he takes readers on a mystic journey toward redemption.
Tell Everyone I Said Hi
Contains eighteen short stories by American author Chad Simpson.
The Thin Tear In The Fabric Of Space
The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space gathers stories about coping with grief, trying to love people who have died, and—more broadly—leaving old versions of the self behind, sometimes by choice and sometimes out of necessity. In each of the nine stories, Douglas Trevor’s characters are forced to face uncomfortable realities. For Elena Gavrushnekov in the title story, that means admitting after the death of her beloved that she still longs for contact with other human bodies. For Peter in “Central Square,” it is realizing that, like his deceased father before him, he is drinking himself to death. Unable to confront his incapacitated mother and the memory of the plane crash that kille...
