A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
709 books about Literary and 52
start with B
709 books about Literary and 52
709 books about Literary
52 start with B start with B
52 start with B start with B
A Bad and Stupid Girl
Jean McGarry
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Siri is a legacy admission, rich and spoiled and destined to flunk out of her freshman year at college. Esther, her roommate, is a scholarship student from humble means, brilliant and driven to succeed.
Brought together by chance, the girls soon become partners in a struggle to find their way in a world where neither Esther’s brains nor Siri’s beauty is enough. Never having been forced to work hard at anything, Siri must rely on Esther to teach her to learn and attend class. But as Siri wakes from her dream world to discover the life of the mind, Esther begins shedding her rational bonds to explore the mysteries of the soul. For both, some of the most devastating lessons in the attainment of worldly knowledge come from love.
Deadpan funny and bittersweet, A Bad and Stupid Girl is above all else a moving portrait of two friends helping each other to uncover the potential splendor of their lives.
Brought together by chance, the girls soon become partners in a struggle to find their way in a world where neither Esther’s brains nor Siri’s beauty is enough. Never having been forced to work hard at anything, Siri must rely on Esther to teach her to learn and attend class. But as Siri wakes from her dream world to discover the life of the mind, Esther begins shedding her rational bonds to explore the mysteries of the soul. For both, some of the most devastating lessons in the attainment of worldly knowledge come from love.
Deadpan funny and bittersweet, A Bad and Stupid Girl is above all else a moving portrait of two friends helping each other to uncover the potential splendor of their lives.
Jean McGarry is the author of six previous books of fiction: Airs of Providence, The Very Rich Hours, The Courage of Girls, Home at Last, Gallagher's Travels, and Dream Date. She is a professor of fiction at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. A Bad and Stupid Girl is her third novel.
“Jean McGarry's novel is a lovely locket of a book, with the picture inside not at all faded. Focused in close-up, succinct and convincing, it's a story about friendship and maturation, and about how our studies, alone, do not define us.”
—Ann Beattie
“Jean McGarry’s A Bad and Stupid Girl is an uncommonly Good and Bright-Indeed Novel, sharply written from start to finish and entertaining as Hell.”
—John Barth
“Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.”
—Harold Bloom
“Jean McGarry's novel is a lovely locket of a book, with the picture inside not at all faded. Focused in close-up, succinct and convincing, it's a story about friendship and maturation, and about how our studies, alone, do not define us.”
—Ann Beattie
“Jean McGarry’s A Bad and Stupid Girl is an uncommonly Good and Bright-Indeed Novel, sharply written from start to finish and entertaining as Hell.”
—John Barth
“Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.”
—Harold Bloom
[more]
The Bad Lands
A Novel
Oakley Hall
University of Chicago Press, 2016
It’s 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territory—a rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling, red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the “Beef Bonanza” is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching a way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire.
An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in.
An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in.
[more]
Bait
David Albahari
Northwestern University Press, 2001
In self-exile in Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and his mother's death, the narrator of Bait is listening to a series of tapes he recorded of his mother years before. As her story is told, he reflects on her life and their relationship, attempting to come to terms with his Jewishness and his own new life in a foreign culture.
[more]
Ballad of Another Time
A Novel
Jose Luis Gonzalez; Translated by Asa Zatz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
“A haunting, almost uncanny tale of love and honor in which the three main characters move through a world of secret passions and silences. . . . [Set in Puerto Rico], scenes of impoverished farmers, madwomen, and men in coffee shops and cafes combine to form a blend of voices and landscapes whose essence can be distilled into three words: tobacco, coffee, and sugar. . . . Asa Zatz must be praised for bringing into his English version the beauty and melody of [González’s] Spanish original.”—Marjorie Agosin, New York Times Book Review
[more]
Ballad of Descent
Martin Vopenka
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Martin and Tomas leave Prague on Christmas Day for "that other country." Although their destination is the mountains, their departure has been initiated by a search for their own identity—people in their country have become alike, losing their individuality and becoming products of a totalitarian regime. The pair become the guests of a high school teacher, but Martin falls in love with the teacher's daughter only to lose her in a police suppression, and the Other Country is revealed as a merciless machine of oppression that throws its people into despair.
[more]
The Barbary Figs
Rashid Boudjedra
Haus Publishing, 2013
Two old friends find themselves side by side on the flight from Algiers to Constantine. Though bound by shared experiences from their youth, they have lived very different lives. The flight will last an hour, during which both their stories will be told, peppered by anecdotes about Algeria's struggle to release itself from the French colonial grip.
[more]
Barren Island
Carol Zoref
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2017
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930’s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World’s Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.
[more]
The Basket Woman
A Book Of Indian Tales
Mary Austin
University of Nevada Press, 1999
Austin's charming and evocative stories dramatize the legacy of conquest upon a land and its native peoples. Although these stories, out of print for almost a century, were first intended as delightful and instructive reading for children, on another level they are an intense examination of the dramatic implications of a legacy of conquest upon the land and its native peoples. In Austin’s tales, cocky young glaciers, contemplative pine trees, resourceful ancient Paiutes, and rabbits too clever for their own good all become companions and teachers to Alan, the young son of homesteaders in early Nevada. The kindly but mysterious Basket Woman, who tells him these tales, is a keeper of her people's traditions. She doesn't simply tell stories: she transports her young friend into a powerful and mythic past, where Alan learns the secrets of the trees and animals and the wisdom of the people who flourished in this "land of little rain" before the arrival of foreigners from the east. A new foreword by Austin scholar and environmental writer Mark Schlenz provide ample context for a multilevel appreciation of one of this remarkable writer's most important works.
[more]
The Basque Hotel
Robert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1993
This novel is the first volume in Laxalt's highly acclaimed Basque-family trilogy. It tells the story of Pete, the son of a Basque immigrant, and his coming of age in Depression-era Carson City. Pete’s immigrant parents run the Basque Hotel, bed and meals, whiskey and wine in Prohibition time for sheepherders and town characters. Pete is indifferent to his heritage except for disquiet about his parents’ ignorance of such American traditions as Christmas trees. Pete, too prone to dreams, undergoes his rites of passage—cruelty and kindness, disillusionment, love and terror, pathos and hilarious adventure, and finally, a cautious understanding of his world.
[more]
Beautiful Women
Giuseppe Antonio Borgese
Northwestern University Press, 2001
The Beckoning World
A Novel
Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, 2022
The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then one day a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream.
But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications.
The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.”
But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications.
The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.”
[more]
Beirut '75
Ghadah Samman
University of Arkansas Press, 1995
Ghada Samman’s first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work prophetically depicting the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The story opens in a taxi in which we meet the five central characters, each seeking something to give life meaning: security, fame, wealth, dignity, recognition, freedom from fear and from tradition-sanctioned, dehumanizing practices. Once they reach the capital city of Beirut, on which they’ve pinned their hopes, they all discover, man and woman alike, that they are victims of forces either partially or completely beyond their control, such as political corruption, class discrimination, economic and sexual exploitation, destruction of the natural environment, and blind allegiance to tradition.
Beirut ’75 addresses struggles of Arab society, particularly the Lebanese, but the message is one of the universal human condition. Thus, in addition to this superb English-language presentation, Samman’s novel has already appeared in German (two editions), French, and Italian versions.
Winner of The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation.
[more]
Benefit Street
A Novel
Adria Bernardi
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination
For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.
Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.
The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination
For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.
Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.
The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
[more]
Berlin Cantata
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2013
A city that has lost one of its limbs and is receiving a miraculous gift, a little bump under the flesh, where the limb is just beginning to grow back. Thus does the American girl in Jeffrey Lewis's remarkable polyphonic novel describe Berlin and the "remnant Jews, secret GDR Jews...Soviet Jews...Jews who'd fled and come back with the victors, Jews who were lost mandarins now, Jews who'd believed in the universality of man and maybe still did" whom she finds at a Day of Atonement gathering in the eastern part of the city in a year soon after the Wall fell. Berlin Cantata deploys thirteen voices to tell a story not only of atonement, but of discovery, loss, identity, intrigue, mystery, insanity, sadomasochism and lies. At its centre is a country house owned successively by Jews, Nazis and Communists. In the country house, the American girl seeks her hidden past. In the girl, a local reporter seeks redemption. In the reporter, a false hero of the past seeks exposure. In the false hero, the American girl seeks a guide. And so it goes, a round of conspiracy and desire. Even as he describes his native city, the false hero describes the characters of Berlin Cantata: "We dined on wreckage. We were not afraid to beg. We continued our long tradition of believing either in nothing or too much."
[more]
Bhopal Dance
A Novel
Jennifer Natalya Fink, Foreword by Mary Caponegro
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
An imaginative, erotic rethinking of Bhopal’s disaster—and perhaps our own
On the night of December 2, in the midst of the Reaganomic era, an explosion at an American-owned factory in Bhopal, India, released untold amounts of toxic gas on uncounted numbers of people, creating a human and environmental disaster of insurmountable proportions. Known as the Bhopal disaster, it once dominated international headlines, and is now barely remembered.
Yet Bhopal remains emblematic of all the many quickly forgotten disasters that followed, and of the permanent state of globalized disaster in which we now dwell. What does it mean when corporations instead of states control not only the means to create environmental disasters, but also the tools to bury them? How does one revolt against these unelected entities? How do our most private desires get shaped by this stateless horror? Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance is an epic and epochal tale of such a horror and its buried consequences.
At the center of the novel is Cordelia, an owlish woman with a ménage of lovers, who leads a revolutionary Canadian political movement catalyzed by the Bhopal disaster, only to end up imprisoned with just a toilet to talk to. Who she hallucinates is her father. Who is her father. Who is the State. Who may be her mother. Or her twin/lover. Cordelia is a remarkable bird in her own right, and ‘owlishness’ is a feathery conceit deployed in both the book’s form and content, a way of exploring queer possibilities for altering the terms of one’s imprisonment. For setting corporatized corporeality alight. Ablaze. Pets and punk rock, dentists and dyslexia, Shakespeare and salsa: they all dance together here.
An imaginative, erotic rethinking of Bhopal’s disaster—and perhaps our own
On the night of December 2, in the midst of the Reaganomic era, an explosion at an American-owned factory in Bhopal, India, released untold amounts of toxic gas on uncounted numbers of people, creating a human and environmental disaster of insurmountable proportions. Known as the Bhopal disaster, it once dominated international headlines, and is now barely remembered.
Yet Bhopal remains emblematic of all the many quickly forgotten disasters that followed, and of the permanent state of globalized disaster in which we now dwell. What does it mean when corporations instead of states control not only the means to create environmental disasters, but also the tools to bury them? How does one revolt against these unelected entities? How do our most private desires get shaped by this stateless horror? Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance is an epic and epochal tale of such a horror and its buried consequences.
At the center of the novel is Cordelia, an owlish woman with a ménage of lovers, who leads a revolutionary Canadian political movement catalyzed by the Bhopal disaster, only to end up imprisoned with just a toilet to talk to. Who she hallucinates is her father. Who is her father. Who is the State. Who may be her mother. Or her twin/lover. Cordelia is a remarkable bird in her own right, and ‘owlishness’ is a feathery conceit deployed in both the book’s form and content, a way of exploring queer possibilities for altering the terms of one’s imprisonment. For setting corporatized corporeality alight. Ablaze. Pets and punk rock, dentists and dyslexia, Shakespeare and salsa: they all dance together here.
[more]
Big City
Marream Krollos
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A fiction of the city as a chorus of voices, an entity that is both one and many
Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.
Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.
[more]
A Big Enough Lie
A Novel
Eric Bennett
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Awaiting a TV talk show appearance, John Townley is quaking with dread. He has published a best-selling memoir about the Iraq War, a page-turner climaxing in atrocity. In a green room beyond the soundstage, he braces himself to confront the charismatic soldier at the violent heart of it. But John has never actually seen the man before—nor served in Iraq, nor the military. Even so, and despite the deception, he knows his fabricated memoir contains stunning truths.
By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Lie pits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett’s novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.
[more]
The Birds of Paradise
A Novel
Paul Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India during World War II, this powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.
A coming of age tale, The Birds of Paradise is the story of a boy and his childhood friendship with the daughter of a British diplomat and the son of the Raja. Scott artfully brings his young narrator’s voice to life with evocative language and an eye for detail, capturing the pangs of childhood and the bittersweet fog of memory with nostalgic yet immediate prose
[more]
Bisbee '17
Robert Houston
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Bisbee, Arizona, queen of the western copper camps, 1917. The protagonists in a bitter strike: the Wobblies (the IWW), the toughest union in the history of the West; and Harry Wheeler, the last of the two-gun sheriffs. In this class-war western, they face each other down in the streets of Bisbee, pitting a general strike against the largest posse ever assembled. Based on a true story, Bisbee '17 vividly re-creates a West of miners and copper magnates, bindlestiffs and scissorbills, army officers, private detectives, and determined revolutionaries. Against this backdrop runs the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, strike organizer from the East, caught between the worlds of her ex-husband—the Bisbee strike leader—and her new lover, an Italian anarchist from New York. As the tumultuous weeks of the strike unfold, she struggles to sort out what she really feels about both of them, and about the West itself.
[more]
The Bitter Smell of Almonds
Arnost Lustig
Northwestern University Press, 2001
For the first time, Arnošt Lustig's short story collections Street of Lost Brothers and Indecent Dreams and his novel Dita Saxova are brought together in an omnibus edition. As with all of Lustig's works, these tales reverberate with themes of loss and contradiction, with the torments of suffering and survival. In The Bitter Smell of Almonds, Lustig asks questions as old and as universal as humankind's search for the meaning of existence; and his characters, often juxtaposed against people or situations they cannot comprehend, attempt to come to terms with the unthinkable and with life itself.
[more]
The Blameless
Ryan Kenedy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Newly divorced, Virginia Bigelow is struggling with pressing financial debt, the frustration of a stalled teaching career, an increasingly isolated and lonely existence, and the challenges of being a single parent to an autistic child. When she learns that Travis Lee Hilliard, the man who murdered her father in the 1980s, has been released from prison, she drops everything and sets out on an ill-conceived journey to confront him in order to mete out the justice she feels he deserves.
Meanwhile, having spent three decades serving a life sentence for murdering the California preacher who rescued him from the streets, Travis thinks of himself as a reformed man. Traveling from Folsom Prison to his new home in the Mojave Desert, a remote location with minimal temptations, he struggles to reconcile his past and embrace his newfound freedom. But there are more challenges to staying on the straight and narrow than he ever could have imagined.
Virginia’s and Travis’s braided narratives slowly tighten as they approach their inevitable collision. Unflinching, compassionate, and gripping, this bold novel evocatively examines the ambiguities wrought by both violence and redemption.
Meanwhile, having spent three decades serving a life sentence for murdering the California preacher who rescued him from the streets, Travis thinks of himself as a reformed man. Traveling from Folsom Prison to his new home in the Mojave Desert, a remote location with minimal temptations, he struggles to reconcile his past and embrace his newfound freedom. But there are more challenges to staying on the straight and narrow than he ever could have imagined.
Virginia’s and Travis’s braided narratives slowly tighten as they approach their inevitable collision. Unflinching, compassionate, and gripping, this bold novel evocatively examines the ambiguities wrought by both violence and redemption.
[more]
Blood Kin
A Novel
Mark Powell
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
Set in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the late summer of 1970, Blood Kin tells the story of the Burden family and the community of outcasts that surrounds them. James Burden is the eldest son in the Burden family. A Korean War veteran and former prisoner-of-war, he struggles with inner demons and drug addiction. He has returned home after almost two decades of absence to find his family members consumed with struggles all their own. His former wife is haunted by her thoughts of an unborn child. His brothers, both Vietnam veterans, are troubled by their experiences there. Roy Burden returned a hero, while Enis Burden saw no combat at all. The younger brothers are also dealing with troubles with love and the hopes of starting their own families. James’s father is himself disturbed by his memories of his own father’s dark deeds and death. And James’s mother is plagued by worry for her husband and sons. The Burdens face their struggles within a community of misfits, including a reluctant sheriff, a runaway thief, a forgotten fire-talker, a religious con man and his actress girlfriend, a local apple baron, and a failed prophet. All of them are living on the fringes of a rural South racing toward a middle-class modernity that has little use for any of them. Blood Kin was awarded the 2005 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, an award named for one of the South’s most celebrated writers. The annual prize, co-sponsored by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the University of Tennessee Press, endeavors to bring to light novels of high literary quality, thereby honoring Peter Taylor’s own practice of assisting writers who care about the craft of fiction.
[more]
Blood Pact and Other Stories
Mario Benedetti
Northwestern University Press, 1997
This collection includes the best of renowned Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti's stories from over 40 years of publishing. In these stories of powerful sudden impact, Benedetti plumbs with deep psychological insight both the dreams and frustrations of the middle-class in a bureaucratic society, as well as the pain and disorientation of political exile.
[more]
The Blossom Festival
(A Novel)
Lawrence Coates
University of Nevada Press, 1999
The Blossom Festival chronicles rural life in the Santa Clara Valley during the decades leading up to World War II. Against the lush backdrop of millions of fruit trees unfold the personal dramas of a fascinating cast of characters. This leisurely read explores the complex relationships between parents and children in the context of a rich California region bent on replacing agriculture with computer chips to become Silicon Valley.
[more]
Blue Jewellery
Katharina Winkler
Seagull Books, 2018
Now in paperback, Katharina Winkler’s heartbreaking saga of a tenacious woman trapped in an abusive marriage.
Blue jewelry is private property. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. It is worn like a bracelet around the wrists, on ribs, legs, arms. Blue jewelry is another name for the marks left on women’s bodies, inflicted by the men around them.
This novel tells the story of Filiz and Yunus. When Filiz meets Yunus, he is young and beautiful, and Filiz is proud that he wants her. Against her father’s wishes, they marry when she is thirteen. Yunus is her entire universe, all encompassing, all powerful. Soon after the wedding, Filiz’s dream of living in the West with her husband, of escaping their small village in Anatolia for freedom and autonomy, comes crashing down around her. Yunus, only a few years older than his bride, turns their marriage into a prison of dependency and violence. Trapped in her mother-in-law’s house, Filiz is subjected to physical and mental abuse, forced to veil herself, and treated as a house slave. When she becomes pregnant, Filiz seems to have reached her breaking point. But she endures. When Yunus moves his young family first to Istanbul and then to Austria, the life he had once promised her seems to be within reach. But there is no escaping the spiral of violence and love, which, to Filiz, have become inseparable.
Katharina Winkler’s powerful story of a marriage dominated by violence gives voice to a tenacious young woman whose will to survive is never broken.
Blue jewelry is private property. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. It is worn like a bracelet around the wrists, on ribs, legs, arms. Blue jewelry is another name for the marks left on women’s bodies, inflicted by the men around them.
This novel tells the story of Filiz and Yunus. When Filiz meets Yunus, he is young and beautiful, and Filiz is proud that he wants her. Against her father’s wishes, they marry when she is thirteen. Yunus is her entire universe, all encompassing, all powerful. Soon after the wedding, Filiz’s dream of living in the West with her husband, of escaping their small village in Anatolia for freedom and autonomy, comes crashing down around her. Yunus, only a few years older than his bride, turns their marriage into a prison of dependency and violence. Trapped in her mother-in-law’s house, Filiz is subjected to physical and mental abuse, forced to veil herself, and treated as a house slave. When she becomes pregnant, Filiz seems to have reached her breaking point. But she endures. When Yunus moves his young family first to Istanbul and then to Austria, the life he had once promised her seems to be within reach. But there is no escaping the spiral of violence and love, which, to Filiz, have become inseparable.
Katharina Winkler’s powerful story of a marriage dominated by violence gives voice to a tenacious young woman whose will to survive is never broken.
[more]
The Boarding-School Girl
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya
Northwestern University Press, 2000
This tale of a young woman's not-so-sentimental education is the story of fifteen-year-old Lolenka, who encounters an exiled radical named Veretitsyn and begins to question her education and life. Under his influence, Lolenka breaks with tradition and embarks upon a new life as a translator and an artist, but a chance meeting with Veretitsyn years later leads to a sobering reappraisal of her mentor's convictions.
[more]
A Bohemian Youth
Josef Hirsal
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Winner, 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Translation
Josef Hiršal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, A Bohemian Youth begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with notes to the note, and ends with a note on the notes to the notes.
More than just a tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary memoir, A Bohemian Youth is a glimpse of the First Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the eyes of a young peasant from the provinces. Abounding in intimate details--the manners of a servant girl, the habits of the town homosexual, the sounds of popular music; the way people eat in wartime—Hiršal's novel is a wrenching and hilarious tale of a young man's emotional and sexual awakening.
Josef Hiršal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, A Bohemian Youth begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with notes to the note, and ends with a note on the notes to the notes.
More than just a tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary memoir, A Bohemian Youth is a glimpse of the First Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the eyes of a young peasant from the provinces. Abounding in intimate details--the manners of a servant girl, the habits of the town homosexual, the sounds of popular music; the way people eat in wartime—Hiršal's novel is a wrenching and hilarious tale of a young man's emotional and sexual awakening.
[more]
The Bonjour Gene
A Novel
J. A. Marzán; Introduction by David Huddle
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
Approaching midlife, after rising to comfortable suburban life, Edgar Bonjour becomes involved with a drug-trafficking Puerto Rican motorcycle gang from his old neighborhood and is brought down by an affair with a woman in the gang. News of his murder leads to introspection among other members of the Puerto Rican Bonjour clan, all descended from three now nameless French brothers remembered only by their surname. Though extended generations of the Bonjours dispersed, some settling in New York, they remain connected by the shared lore of their ancestry, that starting with the three original Bonjour brothers—all rampant adulterers—every descendent Bonjour male carries a reckless, womanizing gene.
Interconnected like the Bonjour family itself, this novel is a tale of unpredictable and unforgettable characters that transports readers to a plane where ethnicity becomes universality.
[more]
The Book of Doubt
Tessa de Loo
Haus Publishing, 2011
Even though he is the son of a Dutch mother, Saeed has a Moroccan first name in memory of the virtuoso oud player his mother fell in love with twenty years ago. When she found out she was pregnant, he ran off and returned to Morocco. Saeed decides to look for his father, in the hope of finding a new identity in a new world. His childhood friend Hassan accompanies him. Back then they shared an imaginary land which they both ruled. Now they only have one starting point: a grocery shop in Fez. From there they follow the trail of the oud player, who leads them from the cedar woods of Ifrane to the red dunes of the desert to the high Atlas, where Kasbahs are locked in a losing battle with decay. Saeed's search sends him deeper into disillusionment and into the arms of Islam, where he tries to find something to hold on to. But there is a disturbing presence. A seemingly fictitious character from their imaginary past infiltrates Saeed's quest. While Saeed desperately tries to get rid of him, different aspects of his life, more and more beyond his control, reach an apotheosis resulting in one final deed affecting man and beast alike.
[more]
The Book of Famous Iowans
A Novel
Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembers the month of June 1957 in his hometown, the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the “resplendently sequined” Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.
But mostly what Will summons up in his intimate remembrance are those few catastrophic days in early June when he was “three months shy of twelve,” more than a decade after his parents have married and returned to the Vaughns’ home place, where Lewis farms his family’s land. For it is during those days that Leanne’s affair with a local man named Bobby Markum becomes known—first to Lewis and then, in a fiercely dramatic public confrontation, to young Will, to his beloved Grandmother Vaughn, and by nightfall to all the citizens of the town. The knowledge of such scandal, in so small a place, sets off a series of highly charged reactions, vivid consequences that surely determine the fates of every member of this unforgettable family.
A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.
But mostly what Will summons up in his intimate remembrance are those few catastrophic days in early June when he was “three months shy of twelve,” more than a decade after his parents have married and returned to the Vaughns’ home place, where Lewis farms his family’s land. For it is during those days that Leanne’s affair with a local man named Bobby Markum becomes known—first to Lewis and then, in a fiercely dramatic public confrontation, to young Will, to his beloved Grandmother Vaughn, and by nightfall to all the citizens of the town. The knowledge of such scandal, in so small a place, sets off a series of highly charged reactions, vivid consequences that surely determine the fates of every member of this unforgettable family.
A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.
[more]
The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann
Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Peter Filkins
Northwestern University Press, 1999
These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.
[more]
The Book of Kane and Margaret
A Novel
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Illustrations by Gautam Rangan
University of Alabama Press, 2020
WINNER OF FC2’S RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
A novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona
Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven’s wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It’s also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes.
In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.
A novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona
Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven’s wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It’s also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes.
In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.
[more]
The Book of the Dead
Orikuchi Shinobu
University of Minnesota Press, 2017
First published in 1939 and extensively revised in 1943, The Book of the Dead, loosely inspired by the tale of Isis and Osiris from ancient Egypt, is a sweeping historical romance that tells a gothic tale of love between a noblewoman and a ghost in eighth-century Japan. Its author, Orikuchi Shinobu, was a well-received novelist, distinguished poet, and an esteemed scholar. He is often considered one of the fathers of Japanese folklore studies, and The Book of the Dead is without a doubt the most important novel of Orikuchi’s career—and it is a book like no other.
Here, for the first time, is the complete English translation of Orikuchi’s masterwork, whose vast influence is evidenced by multiple critical studies dedicated to it and by its many adaptations, which include an animated film and a popular manga. This translation features an introduction by award-winning translator Jeffrey Angles discussing the historical background of the work as well as its major themes: the ancient origins of the Japanese nation, the development of religion in a modernizing society, and the devotion necessary to create a masterpiece. Also included are three chapters from The Mandala of Light by Japanese intellectual historian Andō Reiji, who places the novel and Orikuchi’s thought in the broader intellectual context of early twentieth-century Japan.
The Book of the Dead focuses on the power of faith and religious devotion, and can be read as a parable illustrating the suffering an artist must experience to create great art. Readers will soon discover that a great deal lies hidden beneath the surface of the story; the entire text is a modernist mystery waiting to be decoded.
[more]
the book of webs
Jesse Kohn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023
Word spreads from one recovering self-inflicted eye surgery patient to the next of a mystical book capable of overturning the Burlingtonian empire.
Captivating and devious, the book of webs is constructed out of misremembered fragments, conflicting histories, and secrets whispered in the darkness. The insurgents tell of an enemy so powerful it owns the air, dictates reality, and has even managed to co-opt their thoughts. Their only hope is to conspire with the uprisings of their bodies: slips of the tongue, excretions, tics, bad hair days, and, most importantly, their dreams.
In this darkly comic and inventive debut novel, Jesse Kohn introduces a network of shape-shifters and misfits. A militant priestess broods over orphaned angel eggs. A post-punk band animates a messianic homunculus made of belly button lint. A failed dream journalist goes on a terrible first date to heaven. Each misadventure is a chapter in a book devised to oppose the despotic order of their enemy—the book of webs.
[more]
Border State
Tonu Onnepalu
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Winner of the 1993 Baltic Assembly Prize
An immediate sensation upon its 1993 publication in Europe, already translated into more than a dozen languages, Border State is a brilliantly realized account of a man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own and inhabiting a West in which "all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other." His tale, in which disillusion and murder become inextricably linked, is a compelling exploration of scarcity, longing, and madness.
An immediate sensation upon its 1993 publication in Europe, already translated into more than a dozen languages, Border State is a brilliantly realized account of a man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own and inhabiting a West in which "all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other." His tale, in which disillusion and murder become inextricably linked, is a compelling exploration of scarcity, longing, and madness.
[more]
Boy Meets Girl
Christie Hodgen
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2022
Told in two alternating timelines, this novel follows a friendship over twenty-five years.
Boy Meets Girl is the story of a twenty-five-year friendship between Sammy Browne (young, idealistic, and broke) and Ben Eisenberg (older, jaded, and almost unimaginably rich)—two characters drawn together, and ultimately torn apart, by their differences. This novel tells the story of their relationship over the decades—from youthful flirtation to unrequited love, to long-term friendship that flourishes in middle age, to estrangement and then reunion. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters, toggling back and forth between Ben and Sammy as young people and in middle age, showing everything the characters hoped to become and how things turned out for them. Boy Meets Girl unfolds against the political and social backdrop of the last three decades, with Bill Clinton’s election, the events of September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the Trump era providing context and contrast for the personal stories of the main characters.
Boy Meets Girl is the story of a twenty-five-year friendship between Sammy Browne (young, idealistic, and broke) and Ben Eisenberg (older, jaded, and almost unimaginably rich)—two characters drawn together, and ultimately torn apart, by their differences. This novel tells the story of their relationship over the decades—from youthful flirtation to unrequited love, to long-term friendship that flourishes in middle age, to estrangement and then reunion. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters, toggling back and forth between Ben and Sammy as young people and in middle age, showing everything the characters hoped to become and how things turned out for them. Boy Meets Girl unfolds against the political and social backdrop of the last three decades, with Bill Clinton’s election, the events of September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the Trump era providing context and contrast for the personal stories of the main characters.
[more]
Boys of Love
Ghazi Rabihavi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
During a wedding celebration, Jamil, the sole heir of a rich landowner, meets Naji, who sells hay for a living. The novel follows the boys’ escape from their village in the hopes of finding a place where they can be together freely. Even as their love evolves, their strong connection remains, which helps see them through the upheavals of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War.
In Boys of Love, Ghazi Rabihavi offers both a universal story about the ups and downs of all relationships and a clear-eyed portrait of same-sex desire in Iran, where homosexuality remains punishable by death. Banned in Iran, the novel was initially published in Farsi in the UK, then translated into French and shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger. Rabihavi avoids both lasciviousness and exoticism in depicting a deep love between male characters living through the Iranian Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, this story challenges preconceived notions about marginalized communities in the Middle East.
In Boys of Love, Ghazi Rabihavi offers both a universal story about the ups and downs of all relationships and a clear-eyed portrait of same-sex desire in Iran, where homosexuality remains punishable by death. Banned in Iran, the novel was initially published in Farsi in the UK, then translated into French and shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger. Rabihavi avoids both lasciviousness and exoticism in depicting a deep love between male characters living through the Iranian Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, this story challenges preconceived notions about marginalized communities in the Middle East.
[more]
Branding Books Across the Ages
Strategies and Key Concepts in Literary Branding
Helleke van den Braber
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.
[more]
Bratwurst Haven
Stories
Rachel King
West Virginia University Press, 2022
2023 Colorado Book Award Winner, Literary Fiction
“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff.” —Kirkus Reviews
It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.
Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.
“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff.” —Kirkus Reviews
It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.
Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.
[more]
Bread for the Departed
Bogdan Wojdowski
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Bread for the Departed details the experience of the Jewish community in Warsaw between 1940 and 1942; the final chapters take place during the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jewish community to death camps. Episodic, chaotic as the teeming ghetto itself, the novel records the inexorable breakdown of morals and loyalties that accompanied the physical deterioration of the ghetto population.
[more]
The Bread of Those Early Years
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Bricks Without Straw
A Novel
Albion W. Tourgée
Duke University Press, 2009
A classic of American political fiction first published in 1880, a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, Bricks Without Straw offers an inside view of the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. It is unique among the white-authored literary works of its time in presenting Reconstruction through the eyes of emancipated slaves. As a leading Radical Republican, the author, Albion W. Tourgée, played a key role in drafting a democratized Constitution for North Carolina after the Civil War, and he served as a state superior court judge during Reconstruction. Tourgée worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina’s racial and class politics. He saw the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan firsthand, worked to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought against what he called the “counter-revolution” that destroyed Reconstruction.
Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.
[more]
A Brief Alphabet of Torture
Stories
Vi Khi Nao
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
An unflinching and riveting meditation on the pain that attends every facet of existence—love and sacrifice and intimacy and beauty—a biography of torture.
Like all of Vi Khi Nao’s acclaimed and award-winning work, A Brief Alphabet of Torture bleeds across many modes and genres—poetry, essay, fiction, drama—and itself almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale captures the emotional, physical, psychological, political, and artistic concerns that pervade life like breath and which, even when very beautiful, are filled with pain.
These stories are all facets of Nao’s imagination that define the way she views creation, sexuality, violence, and the role of life in an ontological system that relies heavily on cultural, social, and artistic duress. Some stories like “Winter Rose” and “I Love You Me Neither” rise above the boundaries of pain to places of beauty and grace and love, where pain has no place, but make clear how rare such moments appear in life.
An unflinching and riveting meditation on the pain that attends every facet of existence—love and sacrifice and intimacy and beauty—a biography of torture.
Like all of Vi Khi Nao’s acclaimed and award-winning work, A Brief Alphabet of Torture bleeds across many modes and genres—poetry, essay, fiction, drama—and itself almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale captures the emotional, physical, psychological, political, and artistic concerns that pervade life like breath and which, even when very beautiful, are filled with pain.
These stories are all facets of Nao’s imagination that define the way she views creation, sexuality, violence, and the role of life in an ontological system that relies heavily on cultural, social, and artistic duress. Some stories like “Winter Rose” and “I Love You Me Neither” rise above the boundaries of pain to places of beauty and grace and love, where pain has no place, but make clear how rare such moments appear in life.
[more]
The Brightest Place in the World
A Novel
David Philip Mullins
University of Nevada Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction!
Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.
One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.
Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.
Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.
One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.
Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.
[more]
Bronstein's Children
Jurek Becker
University of Chicago Press, 1999
"East Berlin, 1973: an 18-year-old Jew discovers that his father's friends are holding prisoner a former Nazi concentration camp guard in the family cottage. The three older men have handcuffed the ex-Nazi to the bed and are interrogating and torturing him in an attempt to get him to admit to his war crimes. . . . Becker keenly shows the tension between members of the Holocaust generation and their children, who are unable to understand the complexity of that nightmarish era of human history."—Booklist
"[A] chilly, disquieting novel about historical slippage; about the seemingly inevitable decline of horror into a vague and generic recollection. The East German writer has devised something between story and allegory to evoke the cold generational millennium that separates a father, with his concentration-camp memories, from a son, adrift in a society with no memories whatsoever."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Mr. Becker, writing simply and clearly in an unstrained narrative, speaks with the voice of knowledge, and we do well to listen to him."—Eva Figes, New York Times Book Review
Jurek Becker (1937-1998) is the author of Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, The Boxer, and Amanda Herzlos.
"[A] chilly, disquieting novel about historical slippage; about the seemingly inevitable decline of horror into a vague and generic recollection. The East German writer has devised something between story and allegory to evoke the cold generational millennium that separates a father, with his concentration-camp memories, from a son, adrift in a society with no memories whatsoever."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Mr. Becker, writing simply and clearly in an unstrained narrative, speaks with the voice of knowledge, and we do well to listen to him."—Eva Figes, New York Times Book Review
Jurek Becker (1937-1998) is the author of Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, The Boxer, and Amanda Herzlos.
[more]
Bronx Accent
A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough
Ultan, Lloyd
Rutgers University Press, 2000
For the last three hundred years, and through all its social and economic transformations, The Bronx has been a major literary center that many prominent writers have called home.
Bringing together a variety of past literary figures as well as emerging talents, this comprehensive book captures the Zeitgeist of the neighborhood through the eyes of its writers. Included are selections from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Wolfe, Herman Wouk, Theodore Dreiser, Washington Irving, Clifford Odets, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaim Potok, Kate Simon, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Aleichem.
Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger place the literature of these and other writers in historical context and reproduce one hundred vintage photographs that bring the writings to life. Filtered through the imaginations of authors of different times, ethnic groups, social classes, and literary styles, the borough of The Bronx emerges not only as a shaper of destinies and lives, but as an important literary mecca.
Bringing together a variety of past literary figures as well as emerging talents, this comprehensive book captures the Zeitgeist of the neighborhood through the eyes of its writers. Included are selections from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Wolfe, Herman Wouk, Theodore Dreiser, Washington Irving, Clifford Odets, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaim Potok, Kate Simon, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Aleichem.
Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger place the literature of these and other writers in historical context and reproduce one hundred vintage photographs that bring the writings to life. Filtered through the imaginations of authors of different times, ethnic groups, social classes, and literary styles, the borough of The Bronx emerges not only as a shaper of destinies and lives, but as an important literary mecca.
[more]
Brown River, White Ocean
An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English
Francia, Luis H
Rutgers University Press, 1993
English is often a primary literary language for Filipino writers--not only for those in the Philippines but for those resident in the US; both groups are included in this anthology of 31 stories and 108 poems documenting a tradition that began at the turn-of-the-century. Manila-born poet and writer Francia, an editor at the Village Voice, gathers and validates creative work that has had limited distribution not only here but in Asia. ``In the Philippine context, what is foreign and what is indigenous has always been a tricky and ultimately impossible subject,'' Francia writes in his introduction. ``Filipinos have unconsciously perfected the art of mixing the two up....'' Readers who expect Filipino English to have the unexpected inflections and inventiveness of Indian or Caribbean English will be disappointed: the Filipino writer uses standard American English as a native language, but spices it naturally with words form indigenous and adopted tongues: Tagalog, Spanish, Ilokano, etc. Stories look at unrequited passion (in which the sensual tropical ambiance is at odds with society's rules); village life; the different cultures that have settled in the archipelago--Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Hindu Indian; and the consequences of military, colonial, and economic occupation. Both poems and stories consider the experience of Filipinos--some intellectual, some humble--in the US. Among the more familiar contributors: Carlos Bulosan, Jos‚ Garc¡a Villa, Jessica Hagedorn, and Ninotchka Rosca. While the prose selected here is more consistent in quality than the poetry, the poems seem more wide-ranging; like the fiction writers, the poets consider love, politics, and metaphysics but move as well into experimentation and the modernist realm. A satisfying and worthwhile project.
[more]
The Bruise
Magdalena Zurawski
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Winner of Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction
The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
[more]
Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City
Alicia Yánez Cossío, Translated from the Spanish by Kenneth J. A. Wishnia
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City chronicles a wealthy, eccentric family with an ancient presence in northern Ecuador. Bruna’s past is dominated by ghosts and scandals that linger in the old family home in the mountains. As she pieces together the outrageous adventures of her ancestors and relatives, Bruna emerges from the husk of tradition to achieve a balance between the best of the old and the new. Tracing the complete history of Ecuador from the Conquest through the 1970s, the book is a seriocomic examination of the tensions and conflicts inherent in a world that wavers between its oppressive colonial past and its future as a modern society obsessed with material gain.
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Buddhism for Western Children
Kirstin Allio
University of Iowa Press, 2018
Set on the coast of Maine and in the high desert of New Mexico in the late 1970s through the early 80s, Buddhism for Western Children is a universal and timeless story of a boy who must escape subjugation, tell his story, and reclaim his soul.
In search of community and transcendence, ten-year-old Daniel’s family is swept into the thrall of a potent and manipulative guru. To his followers, Avadhoot Master King Ivanovich is a living god, a charismatic leader who may reveal enlightenment as he mesmerizes, and alchemizes, Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.
Daniel’s family plunges into a world with different rules and rhythms—and with no apparent exit. They join other devotees in shunning the outside world, and fall under the absolutist authority of the guru and his lieutenants. Daniel bears witness to the relentless competition for the guru’s favor, even as he begins to recognize the perversion of his spirituality. Soon, Daniel himself is chosen to play a role. As tensions simmer and roil, darkness intrudes. Devotees overstep, placing even the children in jeopardy. Daniel struggles with conflicting desires to resist and to belong, until finally he must decide who to save and who to abandon.
With spiraling, spellbinding language, Allio reveals a cast of vivid, often darkly funny characters, and propels us toward a shocking climax where Daniel’s story cracks open like a kaleidoscope, revealing the costs of submitting to a tyrant and the shimmering resilience of the human spirit.
In search of community and transcendence, ten-year-old Daniel’s family is swept into the thrall of a potent and manipulative guru. To his followers, Avadhoot Master King Ivanovich is a living god, a charismatic leader who may reveal enlightenment as he mesmerizes, and alchemizes, Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.
Daniel’s family plunges into a world with different rules and rhythms—and with no apparent exit. They join other devotees in shunning the outside world, and fall under the absolutist authority of the guru and his lieutenants. Daniel bears witness to the relentless competition for the guru’s favor, even as he begins to recognize the perversion of his spirituality. Soon, Daniel himself is chosen to play a role. As tensions simmer and roil, darkness intrudes. Devotees overstep, placing even the children in jeopardy. Daniel struggles with conflicting desires to resist and to belong, until finally he must decide who to save and who to abandon.
With spiraling, spellbinding language, Allio reveals a cast of vivid, often darkly funny characters, and propels us toward a shocking climax where Daniel’s story cracks open like a kaleidoscope, revealing the costs of submitting to a tyrant and the shimmering resilience of the human spirit.
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But Crime Does Punish
Ján Johanides
Karolinum Press, 2022
A haunting novel of post-Soviet Slovakia, centering on an enigmatic one-sided conversation.
“So, as you see, I am familiar with the case. However, we can’t discuss it unless you learn more about some other court cases, so that you can compare your father’s trial with other, more baffling cases, and see it in the context of the madness that reigned at the time.”
Ján Johanides’ riveting Slovak novel immediately thrusts you into the midst of a bewildering second-person dialogue, bestowing the reader with the role of a silent partner in a one-sided conversation with a mysterious archivist. As the story unfurls piece by piece, it becomes clear that the archivist, who can’t seem to stay on topic, has both a tragic history and the key to unlocking your family’s darkest secret, a secret that may or may not involve the Czechoslovak secret police, American and Soviet intelligence, Israeli politics, and a tire full of dollars.
Set after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, But Crimes Do Punish is awash with paranoia, revealing how the madness of the Communist era continues to bleed into the instability of the present. Written in 1995, this haunting novel—the first work of Slovak fiction published by Karolinum Press—evokes the spirit of John le Carré and the style of Carlos Fuentes while illuminating issues that still plague post-Communist Europe.
“So, as you see, I am familiar with the case. However, we can’t discuss it unless you learn more about some other court cases, so that you can compare your father’s trial with other, more baffling cases, and see it in the context of the madness that reigned at the time.”
Ján Johanides’ riveting Slovak novel immediately thrusts you into the midst of a bewildering second-person dialogue, bestowing the reader with the role of a silent partner in a one-sided conversation with a mysterious archivist. As the story unfurls piece by piece, it becomes clear that the archivist, who can’t seem to stay on topic, has both a tragic history and the key to unlocking your family’s darkest secret, a secret that may or may not involve the Czechoslovak secret police, American and Soviet intelligence, Israeli politics, and a tire full of dollars.
Set after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, But Crimes Do Punish is awash with paranoia, revealing how the madness of the Communist era continues to bleed into the instability of the present. Written in 1995, this haunting novel—the first work of Slovak fiction published by Karolinum Press—evokes the spirit of John le Carré and the style of Carlos Fuentes while illuminating issues that still plague post-Communist Europe.
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By the Time You Read This
Stories
Yannick Murphy
University of Alabama Press, 2021
WINNER OF FC2’s CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
A gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation
The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.
A gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation
The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.
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