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Short Stories

Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Hardwick, Elizabeth
$18.95
Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time.

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here--none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick's work--make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism, encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner's Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, and from the pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick's passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.

Games and Rituals

Games and Rituals

Heiny, Katherine
$18.00
The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us glittering stories of love--friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts--in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.

"Superb... Pointed, satirical, emotionally ruthless."
--The Times

The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender: In "Bridesmaid, Revisited," Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In "Twist and Shout," Erica's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea . . . But would North Korea help South Korea move?")

Katherine Heiny, one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, running late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, has delivered a collection of glorious humour and immense kindness.

Hemingway Stories

Hemingway Stories

Hemingway, Ernest
$17.00
A new collection showcasing the best of Ernest Hemingway's short stories including his well-known classics, as featured in the magnificent three-part, six-hour PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick--introduced by award-winning author Tobias Wolff.Ernest Hemingway, a literary icon and considered one of the greatest American writers of all time, is the subject of a major documentary by award-winning filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. This intimate portrait of Hemingway--who brilliantly captured the complexities of the human condition in spare and profound prose, and whose work remains deeply influential in literature and culture--interweaves a close study of biographical events with excerpts from his work. The Hemingway Stories features Hemingway's most significant short stories in chronological order, so viewers of the film as well as fans old and new can follow the trajectory of his impressive life and career. Hemingway's beloved classics, such as "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "Up in Michigan," "Indian Camp," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," are accompanied by fresh insights from renowned writers around the world--Mario Vargas Llosa, Edna O'Brien, Abraham Verghese, Tim O'Brien, and Mary Karr. Tobias Wolff's introduction adds a new perspective to Hemingway's work, and Wolff has selected additional stories that demonstrate Hemingway's talent and range. The power of the Ernest Hemingway's revolutionary style is perhaps most striking in his short stories, and here readers can encounter the tales that created the legend: stories of men and women in love and in war and on the hunt, stories of a lost generation born into a fractured time. This collection is a perfect introduction for a new generation of Hemingway readers and a vital volume for any fan.
Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Jen, Gish
$17.00
The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Resisters takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is a unique book that only Jen could write--a story collection accruing the power of a novel as it proceeds--a work that Cynthia Ozick has called "an art beyond art. It is life itself."

Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to "poor Mr. Nixon" in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change.

Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans "like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes"; and Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their "number-one daughter" in New York.

With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon captures an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. A book only Gish Jen could write, it furnishes yet more proof of her eminent place among American storytellers.

Butter

Butter

Jones, Gayl
$16.95
A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares

"Gayl Jones's work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched."
--Imani Perry, author of, Looking for Lorraine and Breathe

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, "Butter" and "Sophia," this collection features Jones's legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyper-realist to the mystical, in intricate multi-part stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.

Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas, about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial society.

White Rat

White Rat

Jones, Gayl
$17.95
The acclaimed author's first collection of stories, reissued to coincide with the paperback publication of her second and latest, Butter

"Gayl Jones's work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched."--Imani Perry

Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This collection of short fiction was her third book, originally edited and published by Toni Morrison in 1977, and is reissued now alongside her second collection, Butter, in paperback for the first time.

The collection contains 12 provocative tales that explore the emotional and mental terrain of a diverse cast of characters, from the innocent to the insane. In each, Jones displays her unflinching ability to dive into the most treacherous of psyches and circumstances: the title story examines the identity and relationship conundrums of a Black man who can pass for white, earning him the name "White Rat" as an infant; "The Women" follows a girl whose mother brings a line of female lovers to live in their home; "Jevata" details 18-year-old Freddy's relationship with the 50-year-old title character; "The Coke Factory" tracks the thoughts of a mentally-handicapped adolescent abandoned by his mother; and "Asylum" focuses on a woman having a nervous breakdown, trying to protect her dignity and her private parts as she enters an institution.

In uncompromising prose, and dialect that veers from northern, educated tongues to down-home southern colloquialisms, Jones illuminates lives that society ignores, moving them to center stage.

Antarctica

Antarctica

Keegan, Claire
$18.00

A new edition of the now iconic fiction writer Claire Keegan's debut story collection featuring a fresh cover to tie in with her current bestselling trio: the Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, Foster, and So Late in the Day

"These stories are diamonds." --Esquire

First published in 1999 and proclaimed "an impressive debut" by William Trevor, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan, whose short fiction has since captured readers worldwide and established her as "among the form's most masterful practitioners" (New York Times). Now with a revised titular story, this iridescent first collection of stories draws readers into a world of obsession and betrayal in Keegan's singular, commanding and award-winning prose.

In "Antarctica," a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. In "Love in the Tall Grass," Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In "Passport Soup," Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his young daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.

The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world's best short story writers.

End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

Kennedy, Louise
$18.00
Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times)

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by poverty--material, emotional, sexual--but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt.

A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother's worst fears about her husband's entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Plumbing the depths of intimacy, violence, and redemption, these stories are "dazzling, heartbreaking . . . keen to share the lessons of a lifetime" (Guardian).

End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

Kennedy, Louise
$28.00
Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times)

In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by poverty--material, emotional, sexual--but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt.

A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother's worst fears about her husband's entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Plumbing the depths of intimacy, violence, and redemption, these stories are "dazzling, heartbreaking . . . keen to share the lessons of a lifetime" (Guardian).

Interpreter of Maladies

Interpreter of Maladies

Lahiri, Jhumpa
$18.99

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD WINNER.

With a new foreword by Domenico Starnone, this stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations.

With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide.

A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.