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Short Stories
Bryn says: If you like Childish Gambino's "This is America," you'll love "Friday Black." Using fantastical elements and fierce humor, these stories confront the painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day. You'll see that the truth is what's most disturbing.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it’s like to be young and black in America.
From the start of this extraordinary debut, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing will grab you, haunt you, enrage and invigorate you. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country.
These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,” Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,” we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceMan” show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.
Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.
Roxanne says: The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eyes inspired a recent major motion picture with a premise that's deliciously fun. Gillian Perholt, a middle aged author, is gifted a genie who grants her three wishes. Her choices are marvelous, and reading the story was like entering a fantastical world, all while grounded in Perholt’s real world intellectual lifestyle. The title story, Medusa's Ankles, is a love-hate fantasy any female ever has had about a beauty salon.
With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.
[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature. --The New York Times Book Review One of the great short story writers of our time--of any time. --The Philadelhpia Inquirer The whole collection is a knock out. Few wriers can match Raymond Carver's entiwining style and language. --The Dallas Morning News
"Ana Castillo is an American treasure. Fearless, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant--she is the writer we need as we navigate the challenges of our ever-changing world."--Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
"Ana Castillo is de primera storyteller."--award-winning author Julia Alvarez
Literary legend Ana Castillo explores the secrets that are kept within households and the women they impact the most in this breakout collection that cements her place as a leading voice in feminist fiction.
The first person in her traditional Mexican American family to graduate from high school, Katia is entering adulthood at a time of turbulent change. Across the nation young people are fighting for civil and women's rights and protesting the Vietnam War and brutal dictatorships in South America. Like so many of her generation, Katia wants to make the world a better place, and is determined to follow her own path.
As she considers moving to California to join La Causa, Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez's movement to improve the working conditions of migrant farmer workers, Katia receives an unexpected gift from her father: a plane ticket to Mexico City. Bring back your mother, he says, tell her, her children need her. And so Katia joins this cause, to get Tina back to Chicago. But it won't be easy. Katia must learn to navigate a liberated version of her mother in a new country where she is now hawking supposedly superior cleaning products, called Donna Clean Well.
Katia is but one of the voices introduced in this dazzling collection of short fiction from revered writer Ana Castillo. Spanning from Chicago to Mexico to New Mexico, the stories in Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home illuminate a chorus of people whose stories will leave you breathless.