A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY117 start with G start with G
Together with the late Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate, stands at the pinnacle of Latin American literature. His work, in the words of Julio Ortega, "contains its own 'deconstructive' force—a literary power capable of reshaping natural order and rhetorical tradition in order to 'carnivalize' the Borges' library and allow us to hear the voices—and the laughter—of a culture, that of Latin America." This reshaping force invites us to read the works of García Márquez in a new way, one that bypasses the traditional, inadequate approaches through Latin American politics, history, and "magical realism."
In Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction, noted scholars Julio Ortega, Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, Michael Palencia-Roth, Aníbal González, and Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo offer English-speaking readers a new approach to García Márquez's work. Their poststructuralist readings focus on the peculiar sign-system, formal configuration, intradiscursivity, and unfolding representation in the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in several of the author's short stories. Also included as an appendix is a translation of García Márquez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America."
In Paul Stoller's work of fiction framed by African storytelling, David is the 52-year-old co-owner of Gallery Bundu, an African art shop in New York City. As a young man in the late 1960s, he joined the Peace Corps to avoid the draft. Assigned to teach English in Niger, he was eager to seek out adventure, and he found it—from drugged-out American expatriates and mamba-filled forests to seductive African women. In the course of his stay in Niger, David meets and falls in love with Zeinabou, a strikingly beautiful woman who professes her love to him, though David believes that he is not the only man she dates. Two weeks before his anticipated return to the United States, Zeinabou informs David that she is pregnant with what she believes is his child. Not knowing how to react, David flees Niger and returns to America ridden with guilt. The hastiness of David's decision will shadow his every move for the rest of his life and will lead him to eventually return to Niger and try to make amends.
Beautifully written and deeply felt, Gallery Bundu is a cautionary tale about the impulses of youth and the unyielding grip of regret. Stoller's vivid language and style allow readers, through David's recollections, to touch, taste, and smell the sensations of West Africa—the tasty aroma of a traditional African fish stew, the spectacle of witches, and the humorous and often frightening experiences of traveling in the bush. A lyrical novel of decisions and destiny, Gallery Bundu is rich in character and detail, bringing anthropology to a new literary height.
Starting with a cattle-rustling scheme involving his father, Willy embarks on a life of crime early, eventually landing in a Laredo jail for shooting a man. During his incarceration he meets Sonny Archer, an itinerant gambler, who teaches Willy how to be a cardsharp. Upon his release, Willy roams the country, honing his new talent and getting into more trouble. During his time in New Orleans, Willy even winds up in a confrontation with an Italian crime ring.
While all these adventures mold Willy into a clever card player and a masterful fortune-hunter, his grand ambition to be a professional gambler is thwarted when the influenza epidemic strikes. Willy is forced to return home to his family’s Texas ranch, where he faces the most challenging test of his young life and begins to prove that he is far more than simply an apprentice.
A man walks out of a bar and is later found dead at the wheel of his car. On the basis of a few overheard remarks and his own observations, the narrator of this novel imagines the story of this stranger, or rather two alternative stories based on two identities the narrator has invented for him, one under the name of Enderlin, the other under the name Gantenbein.
Gaps is a more overtly political novel than either In-House Weddings or Vita Nuova. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent repression of artistic freedom figure prominently. Hrabal is placed on the "liquidated writers" list, and copies of his novel Poupata (Buds) are disposed of at the paper salvage where he once worked. Hrabal's decision to tell his autobiography in his wife Eliska's voice highlights their very close relationship and lovingly details her deep influence on his work. Every movement, sound, fragrance, and color is detailed, creating a collage of Bohumil and Eliska's life together, an unforgettable picture that reveals the author's innermost attitudes to life, love, and the pursuit of his own art.
California’s Santa Clara Valley was once home to a vigorous wine industry. The Garden of the World is the tale of a pioneer winemaking family headed by Paul Tourneau, a fiercely ambitious vintner determined to make the finest wines in California. His plans are disrupted by a phylloxera epidemic at the beginning of the twentieth century, the trials of national Prohibition, and the bitter alienation of his older son. Played out against the vividly depicted seasonal rhythms of vineyard life, this is a moving saga of betrayal, loss, and the harsh consequences of unbreakable ambition.
A uniquely intimate, unflinching testimony of the experience of a young, African American gay man in the AIDS emergency, Gary in Your Pocket includes an introduction by Don Belton that describes Fisher’s achievement in the context of other work by Black gay men such as Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, and a biographical afterword by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Set in Texas, The Gay Place consists of three interlocking novels, each with a different protagonist—a member of the state legislature, the state's junior senator, and the governor's press secretary. The governor himself, Arthur Fenstemaker, a master politician, infinitely canny and seductive, remains the dominant figure throughout.
Billy Lee Brammer—who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff—gives us here "the excitement of a political carnival: the sideshows, the freaks, and the ghoulish comedy atmosphere" (Saturday Review).
Originally published in 1961, The Gay Place is at once a cult classic and a major American novel.
An investigation into Wharton’s extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction
Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton’s male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton’s imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them.
Edith Wharton’s contradictory views of women and men—her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine—reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve an alternative to the dualism.
Fedorko’s work is unique in its careful consideration of Wharton’s sixteen Gothic works, which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.
In a world on the brink of totalitarian rule, one man rises from the shadows to ignite a revolution and becomes the unlikely leader of a war of resistance that will shake the very foundations of power. General Firebrand, an unsocial and recovered alcoholic, considered a pariah by society, rises up against the country’s fascist regime. In this guerrilla war, Firebrand garners support from the unlikeliest allies. Beasts and birds of the jungle join the struggle. Spirits of historical figures from past wars and fictional characters with supernatural abilities lend their strength to the cause. As a devastating secret is revealed that moves Firebrand to the core, the battle for liberation takes on new dimensions, exposing the fragility of rationality and the weight of historical wrongs committed in the name of a supposedly humane ideology.
With zany, irreverent prose and a breakneck pace, General Firebrand and His Red Atlas is an explosive debut novel that challenges conventional wisdom and explores the complexities of courage, doubt, and the pursuit of justice in a world dominated by fear.
Kara Bell spent her youth plotting escape from Witch’s Falls, Arkansas. Relentless focus and the spurning of all emotional attachment led to the doctoral program in philosophy at Columbia University. But Kara’s careful plans are upended by cancer, and suddenly she is home again, where she finds herself subject to her mother’s suffocating care, her brother’s puzzling love life, the local doctor’s meddling, and the strong gravitational pull of her old friend and obsession, Christy Lee. Will Kara find health and sanity? Will she learn what really happened to her father? Can she escape Witch’s Falls a second time, or will she succumb to the slow poison of local kindness and Snickers Salad?
In Genius, Thomas Rayfiel finds both poignancy and dark humor in deathly illness, family secrets, organized religion, parenting, abortion, gossip, senility, and the mysterious rhythms of small-town life.
Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds. Attuned to both the pleasure and the profession of producing genre fiction, the authors investigate contemporary developments in the field—the rise of Amazon, self-publishing platforms, transmedia storytelling, and growing global publishing conglomerates—and show how these interact with older practices, from fan conventions to writers’ groups.
Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, fan studies, and studies of the book and publishing cultures, Genre Worlds considers how contemporary genre fiction is produced and circulated on a global scale. Its authors propose an innovative theoretical framework that unfolds genre fiction’s most compelling characteristics: its connected social, industrial, and textual practices. As they demonstrate, genre fiction books are not merely texts; they are also nodes of social and industrial activity involving the production, dissemination, and reception of the texts.
An abusive father and a broken home forces a teenage Winnie to seek the safety of a neighboring bay and a pair of unlikely father figures. Years later her mother goes missing, and Winnie returns to the hunting and fishing lodge she grew up in to find the world she knew gone. Her once-powerful father disfigured by a bear attack. Her childhood hero revealed as merely human. And her mother’s story rewritten by a stray note.
As Winnie uses the help of friends to sort out the details of her mother’s final exodus, she finds herself pulled into a murky swirl of family secrets and devastating revelations. As the search heads higher into the mountains, Winnie must learn to depend on her own strength in order to reach the one she loves.
Alan Mintz has discovered a new sub-genre of fiction: the novel of vocation. In the nineteenth century, he maintains, work ceased to be merely what one did for a living or out of a sense of duty and became a vehicle for self-definition and self-realization. The change was prepared for by the growth of professions and the increase in middle-class career opportunities. He shows how George Eliot, in particular, linked these new social possibilities to the older Puritan doctrine of calling or vocation, achieving in her late novels a fictional structure that could encompass the conflicting energies of the age. In the idea of vocation she found a way to explore how far it is possible to be ambitious both for oneself and for a large cause, and a way to probe the contradictions between ambitious, self-defining work and the older institutions of family, community, and religion.
The book is solidly grounded in cultural and historical reality. Although Mintz concentrates on George Eliot and especially Middlemarch, he also examines the conceptions of self and work in Victorian biographies and autobiographies and the emergence in late-nineteenth-century fiction of the idea of the vocation of art.
Lily, King's best known novel, was originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1855. In this work, King skewers the rituals of courtship that propel its wealthy young heroine toward marriage and a melodramatic death. Gerald Gray's Wife, King's last novel, plays out the ironies of a plain woman who survives—but barely—the revelations that destroy her seemingly perfect marriage and acquired beauty. In both novels, women's jealousies and men's deceptions are the forces that propel King's often satirical pen. Largely lacking the moral instruction so common among nineteenth-century domestic novelists, King's novels are differentiated by their critical perspective on women's position, their exploration of themes of failure and frustration, and their focus on the drawing room and ballroom rather than the kitchen and nursery.
Although the characters in Pourciau’s stories change face, story to story they all inhabit a world dominated by interior voices revealing fragmented selves. They find difficulty making their inner worlds, with their competing narratives and emotions, fit into the world surrounding them. As they confront everyday predicaments and encounters, they are oftentimes averse to expressing their thoughts, thereby leading themselves deeper into a conflicted interior landscape.
Creative nonfiction, fiction, dramatic dialogue, and poetry combine with full-color photographs to convey the essential reality of the famous battlefield as a place both terrible and beautiful. The living and the dead contained here include Confederates and Yankees, soldiers and civilians, male and female, young and old. Visitors to the battlefield after 1863, both well known and obscure, provide the voices of the living. They include a female admiral in the U.S. Navy and a man from rural Virginia who visits the battlefield as a way of working through the death of his son in Iraq. The ghostly voices of the dead include actual participants in the battle, like a fiery colonel and a girl in Confederate uniform, as well as their representatives, such as a grieving widow who has come to seek her husband.
Utilizing light as a central motif and fourscore and seven voices to evoke how Gettysburg continues to draw visitors and resound throughout history, alternately wounding and stitching the lives it touches, Gramm’s words and Heisey’s photographs meld for a historical experience unlike any other. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead offers a panoramic view wherein the battle and battlefield of Gettysburg are seen through the eyes of those who lived through it and died on it as well as those who have sought meaning at the site ever since.
Ghady and Rawan is a heartfelt and timely novel by the award-winning author Fatima Sharafeddine (The Servant, Cappuccino) and Samar Mahfouz Barraj. The novel follows the close-knit friendship of two Lebanese teenagers, Ghady, who lives with his family in Belgium, and Rawan, who lives in Lebanon. Ghady’s family travels every summer to Beirut, where Ghady gets to spend all his time with Rawan and their other friends, enjoying their freedom from school. During the rest of the year, he and Rawan keep in touch by email. Through this correspondence, we learn about the daily ups and downs of their lives in Brussels and Beirut, including Ghady’s homesickness and his struggles with racism at school, as well as Rawan’s changing relationship to her family. The novel offers a glimpse into the lives of Lebanese adolescents while exploring a range of topics relevant to young people everywhere: bullying, parental conflicts, racism, belonging and identity, and peer pressure. Through the connection between the two main characters, Sharafeddine and Mahfouz Barraj show how the love and support of a good friend can help you through difficulties as well as sweeten life’s triumphs and good times.
The stories examine the relationship between inmates and their families, their friends, their Christian former neighbors, the German soldiers, and, ultimately, the world of hopelessness and desperation that surrounded them. In using his creative powers to transform the suffering and death of his people into stories that preserve their memory, Spiegel succeeds in affirming the humanity and dignity the Germans were so intent on destroying.
Originally published as Malchut geto (Malkhes geto) in Yiddish.
A teen’s life is complicated. Add an overworked dad, a distraught mom.
Enter an old man from the wrong side of the tracks.
He knows things. He’s there when you need him.
This happens to someone; it’s not a maybe thing. People get hurt. People die. There’s a dad who loves his kid but works all the time. When he doesn’t work, he drinks. When he drinks he’s out of control.
There’s a mom. She knows dad is overworked, a good man carrying too much responsibility.
The kid turns to the handy man to learn a man’s skills. In the old man from the wrong side of the tracks, the kid finds unusual skills and terrible—but true—lessons. He finds that his own safety comes at a cost to his unfortunate friend. He finds growing up comes at a cost to himself. This is the story of such a kid, told by himself after he has lived much of his life, come to terms with his parents’ weaknesses, and learned that seemingly insignificant people carry more pain than he can imagine, though he has already seen plenty.
The vast Texas borderland is a place divided, a land of legends and lies, sanctification and sinfulness, history and amnesia, haunted by the ghosts of the oppressed and the forgotten, who still stir beneath the parched fields and shimmering blacktops. It is a realm filled with scorpion eaters and mescal drinkers, cowboys and Indians, Anglos and Chicanos, spirit horses and beat-up pickups, brujos and putas, aching passion and seething rage, apparitions of the Virgin and bodies in the Rio Grande.
In his first collection of short fiction, award-winning poet, editor, and anthologist Ray Gonzalez powerfully evokes both the mystery and the reality of the El Paso border country where he came to manhood.
Here, in a riverbed filled with junked cars and old bones, a young boy is given a dark vision of a fiery future. Under the stones of the Alamo, amid the gift shops and tour buses, the wraiths of fallen soldiers cry out to be remembered. By an ancient burial site at the bottom of a hidden canyon, two lovers come face to face with their own dreams and fears.
In these stories, Ray Gonzalez is a literary alchemist, blending contemporary culture with ancient tradition to give a new voice to the peoples of the border.
This historical novel is the third and final book in American poet and fiction writer Janet Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series, based on legal case studies compiled in the nineteenth century. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Lewis returns to her beloved France, the setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre, her best-known novel and the first in the series. As Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth relates in a new introduction, Monsieur Scarron shifts the reader into the center of Paris in 1694, during the turbulent reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. The junction of this time and place gives Monsieur Scarron an intriguing political element not apparent in either The Wife of Martin Guerre or The Trial of Sören Qvist.
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron begins in a small bookbinder’s shop on a modest Paris street, but inexorably expands to encompass a tumultuous affair, growing social unrest, and the conflicts between a legal system based on oppressive order and a society about to undergo harsh changes. With its domestic drama set against a larger political and historical backdrop, Monsieur Scarron is considered by some critics and readers to be the most intricately layered and fully realized book of Lewis’s long career. Originally published in 1959, Monsieur Scarron has remained in print almost continuously ever since.
The great love of your life is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from communicating with you—or luring you to join him in the afterlife. To remain safe in this world, you accept the help of a professional medium who develops his own emotional agenda.
The Ghost Trio that emerges takes us to pre- and post-World War II Prague where a poignant and chilling love triangle finds its resolution. There we meet great Czech creators of the past including Leoš Janácek and Karel Capek. Inspired by the ghost stories of Henry James and Daphne du Maurier, Clyde Derrick introduces three characters whose passions defy time and the accepted boundaries between the dead and the living. The author, who has lived in and visited purportedly haunted sites in advance of writing this novella, contends that this story and its characters found him. Meanwhile, his portrayal of two Pragues—one poised to fall to Hitler’s army, the other muted by Communist oppression—offers us insights into the past and reminds us to stay vigilant against dangerous politics. The Ghost Trio is a spiritual excursion in which we ponder the limitations and hazards of romantic love as well as the possibility of other lives in other times.
The Ghost Trio is the winner of the 2020 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook / Novelette Contest, chosen by Molly Gloss.
“A wondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain. . . . That’s it, I thought. That’s exactly what it’s like to live in New York.” —New York Times Book Review
Ghosts of New York is a novel in which the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended. It interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend entangled in a set of relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory. And undergirding it all is a song, which appears, disappears, and then resurfaces.
Ghosts of New York explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings—a bar, a night market, a recording studio—that alternate between familiar and unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of the art, film, and music scenes in New York and Austin (described as “a rare talent” by the New York Times and “a powerful literary voice” by Jeffrey Eugenides), this novel will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that sustain and challenge them.
An eerie coming-of-age story of a young girl’s quest for her absent mother across the frozen terrain of Lake Superior
One December evening, when 13-year-old Marta crosses the frozen Lake Superior and reaches the home she shares with her father, she finds a woman standing at their door. As Marta approaches, she realizes the woman, who looks like a tropical bird caught in the snow, is her mother who’d abruptly left them six years before. Marta hopes this is a turning point, that her mother will stay this time—despite hating this town, this island, and their creaky, towering Victorian house. But not everyone in town is thrilled with her mother’s arrival, least of all her dad.
Almost as soon as she arrives, however, Marta’s mother abruptly vanishes again, nowhere to be found, leaving Marta with more questions than answers. Her father denies her mother was ever there and Marta is left with the mystery of her mother’s homecoming. She begins to wonder if he is lying, or if there is a deeper secret being kept from her by the entire tight-knit community. As Marta delves into her mother's sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance, she seeks answers, visiting places that were significant to her mother and questioning people she knew. Desperate for answers that will shed light on the mystery, this quest leads her to uncover a web of secrets that threaten to unravel everything she thought she knew about her family and herself.
Gichigami is an eerie coming-of-age novel, weaving between Marta and the person desperately trying to keep Marta and her mother apart. This poignant exploration of the lives of women and girls of the Midwest shines a light on the struggles of absent mothers, runaway daughters, and those who yearn for more than life has offered them. With rich prose and vivid imagery, Lindsey Steffes spins a tale of loss, longing, and betrayal set against the backdrop of the harsh yet beautiful landscape of Lake Superior.
The narrator’s mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled “eccentric” or “Italian,” her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the family treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary homemaker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener.
This sparse novel draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. Her bequest is as much a material one as it is an emotional one, and, the author surmises as she glances at her own daughters, a genetic one.
These ten magical stories are primarily set in Pittsburgh-area river towns, where Italian American women and girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable.
A skeptical journalist scopes out the bar where the town mayor, in seemingly perfect health, is drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. A woman donates her dead mother’s clothes to a thrift shop but learns that their destiny is not what she expected. A ten-year-old girl wrestles with the facts of life as she watches her neighbor struggle to get pregnant while her teenage sister finds it all too easy. A high school girl hallucinates in a steamy hospital laundry room and discovers she can see her coworkers’ futures. A developer’s wrecking ball is no match for the legend of Giovanna’s green thumb in the title story “Giovanna’s 86 Circles.”
Quirky and profound, Corso’s magical leaps uncover the everyday poetry of these women’s lives.
Finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award
Selected for “Best Short Stories of 2005” in Montserrat Review
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
Sons of Italy National Book Club Selection
Girl Zoo is an enthralling and sometimes unsettling collection of short stories that examines how women in society are confined by the limitations and expectations of pop culture, politics, advertising, fashion, myth, and romance. In each story, a woman or girl is literally confined or held captive, and we can only watch as they are transformed into objects of terror and desire, plotting their escape from their cultural cages.
Taken as a whole, this experimental speculative fiction invites parallels to social justice movements focused on sexuality and gender, as well as cautionary tales for our precarious political movement. Parkison and Guess offer no solutions to their characters’ captivity. Instead, they challenge their audience to read against the grain of conventional feminist dystopian narratives by inviting them inside the “Girl Zoo” itself.
Take a step inside the zoo and see for yourself. We dare you. Behind the bars, a world of wonder awaits.
Giving their word is what poets do; it is their stock-in-trade, their daily bread. In the hands of the most accomplished, a poet's words are transformed into a kind of window: looking inward toward the territory of memory, dream, personal mythology and opening out onto the landscape of the shared world where life and work are rooted. For each poet there is an intricate relationship between these two realms and poetry's third domain, the language that bridges both experiences and becomes the body of the poem. Giving Their Word shows us that the poet's fidelity to that relationship sustains his or her development over time, urges the writing toward new levels of discovery, and bestows on readers that most prized of commodities: a feeling of the authentic.
For poets, students of poetry, and that far-flung community of readers for whom the contemporary poem still provides a journey worth taking, this book will present a host of pleasures. Giving Their Word enlarges the frame through which we view the poet's text and yields significant insights into the craft and character of each of these writers.
In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Péter Esterházy tells the story of a professional traveler, commissioned--like Marco Polo by Kublai Khan--to undertake a voyage of discovery and prepare a travelogue. Communicating the details of his journey through terse and surreal telegrams, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the ethereal past and the precarious present of a disappearing world.
As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901–1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York’s artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn’t finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.
In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott’s long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott’s private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.
It’s 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth—or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation.
But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality.
Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It’s about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts.
Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching, meaning it can be used as an oracle.
In July 1923, Kafka is convalescing by the Baltic Sea when he meets Diamant and they fall in love. He is forty years old and dying of tuberculosis; she is twenty-five and seems to him the essence of life. After a tentative first meeting, the indecisive Kafka moves with Diamant to Berlin, a city in the throes of political upheaval, rising anti-Semitism, and the turmoil of Weimar-era hyperinflation. As his tuberculosis advances, they are forced to leave the city for the Kierling Sanatorium near Vienna, a move that threatens the paradise they have created.
The first of Kumpfmüller’s novels to appear in English after his acclaimed The Adventures of a Bed Salesman, The Glory of Life is a meticulously researched and poignant portrait of one of the most enduring authors in world literature. Beautifully crafted, this book is an evocative rumination on the power of love and friendship.
Visionary and ambitious, Richard Millet's stunning novel explores whether Pythre and his family, whether any person, can overcome one’s fate and circumstance, to transcend a persistent darkness that pulls one into silence. The translation is no less ambitious than the novel itself. It captures this forgotten world in Millet's musical prose; it contrasts the strange patois of the villagers against "proper" French. Filled with finely observed characters and a breathtaking power of description, The Glory of the Pythres is a unique, powerful work of art.
In Glory, Italian modernist Giuseppe Berto’s final novel, Judas finally tells his side of the story. From his perspective, Jesus is the betrayer, a would-be political activist and social reformer who fails to live up to his promises. And by fulfilling his predestined role in the drama of Christ’s death and resurrection, Judas himself is partly responsible for humanity’s salvation, enabling them to be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. As the novel probes into the psychological motivations behind his rejection of Jesus’ authority, Judas emerges as a compelling conflicted character, a man who seeks to have agency even when he knows his actions are being scripted by a higher power. Through Judas’s searing tortured monologues, this late masterpiece from one of Italy’s greatest writers investigates deep questions about the nature of faith, rebellion, fate, and free will.
In Boulder, a man calls into a radio program with an altered tale of his brother’s murder—and faces the consequences when the story goes viral. In Tampa, a woman attends a convention of people believing themselves to be targets of clandestine government agencies. In Houston, a family with many secrets attempts to escape an oncoming tropical storm. In an East Coast college town, a professor has a charged run-in with a young woman from the radical right. And in Iowa, a cult suicide spurs the lone survivor to create a “glossary” in an effort to come to terms with his experience.
Simultaneously gritty and lyrical, grounded and visionary, Glossary for the End of Days gives us characters grappling with how to push on through dark days and dark times. This arresting, relevant collection tunes into and seeks to illuminate shared anxieties about the present—and future—of our world.
About the Shakur Series:
The Shakur Series features Black deaf characters who use American Sign Language, offering a unique and inclusive reading experience for children. The vibrant illustrations showcase a signing family and will captivate young minds, while the engaging text reinforces learning. These charming board books contain positive messages and practical lessons, support early childhood development, and encourage children to explore the world with Shakur. This series honors and celebrates Black deaf experiences through everyday adventures that will resonate with young children and their families.
Published in partnership with The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center.
As he drifts through the countryside, Stephen struggles to resolve the trauma and sorrow of losing his son, and soon the landscape begins to mirror his own inner battles. After a return trip to America fails to heal the rift between himself and the mother of his child, Stephen returns to Sarajevo, where he begins a project to document images of the Bosnian people—not war images, but personal portraits of an embattled nation. There he finds himself falling in love with a German journalist, who helps to heal his ailing body and to overcome his tragic loss.
The Goat Bridge is an unforgettable tale of memory and oblivion, a probing story of loss and redemption, of letting go and holding on, and of the universal human search for meaning. In the end, it is also a love story about finding the wisdom and courage to surrender to one’s own and another’s heart.
In the southern Indian state of Kerala, Najeeb’s dearest wish is to work in a Persian Gulf country and earn enough money to send some back home. One day, he finally achieves this dream, only to be propelled by a series of incidents—grim and absurd—into a slave-like existence, herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of his loving family and of the lush, verdant landscape of his village haunt Najeeb, whose only solace is the companionship of goats. In the end, the lonely young man is forced to contrive a hazardous scheme to escape his desert prison.
An instant bestseller in India, Goat Days is available for the first time in English, translated by Joseph Koyippally. Benyamin is a brilliant new talent of Malayalam literature and his wry and tender telling transforms the strange and bitter comedy of Najeeb’s life in the desert into a universal tale of loneliness and alienation.
The thirteen stories of Michael Krüger’s The God behind the Window capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Krüger’s stories, world-weary characters seek—and only temporarily find—solace in nature and culture, rendering their search for a better life simultaneously comedic and heart wrenching. From a solitary hiker in the Swiss Alps to the book’s eponymous shut-in, these aging malcontents are continually surprised by the unexpected interventions of a world that has come to seem predictable. Krüger captures this stage in life masterfully, contrasting the deeply personal emotions of affection, melancholy, and longing with an indifferent world. The resulting stories are lyrical, philosophical, and tender despite their cynicism.
Grappling with innate desires and LGBTQ identity, a family struggles under the oppressive expectations foisted on them by fundamentalist Christianity.
Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover.
To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation—Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. Berna keeps her secret hidden as she struggles to be the wife and mother she believes God wants her to be. Berna and Zechariah’s children struggle as well, trying to reconcile the theology they are taught at home with the fast-changing world around them. And Jordan struggles to find a community and a life that allow him both to be safely and fully himself, as Jay, and to be loved for who he is.
As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. God of River Mud delves into the quandary of those marginalized and dehumanized within a religious patriarchy and grapples with the universal issues of identity, faith, love, and belonging.
In award-winning legal scholar and novelist Yxta Maya Murray’s new novel, federal agent Reyna Rodriguez reports on a real-life nuclear reactor meltdown and accidents that occurred in 1959, 1964, and 1968 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. An infamous research and development complex in California’s Simi Valley, the lab was eventually dismantled by the US government—but not before it created a toxic legacy of contamination and numerous cancer clusters. Toxins and nuclear residue may have been further released by the 2018 Woolsey Fire and 2019 floods in the area.
God Went Like That takes the form of an EPA report in which Reyna presents riveting interviews with individuals affected by the disasters. With imagination and artistry, Murray brings to life an actual 2011 Department of Energy dossier that detailed the catastrophes and the ensuing public health fallout and highlights the high costs of governmental malfeasance and environmental racism.
The dramatic desert landscapes of the Big Bend country along the Texas-Mexico border reminded historian Walter Prescott Webb of "an earth-wreck in which a great section of country was shaken down, turned over, blown up, and set on fire." By contrast, naturalist Aldo Leopold considered the region a mountainous paradise in which even the wild Mexican parrots had no greater concern than "whether this new day which creeps slowly over the canyons is bluer or golder than its predecessors, or less so." Whether it impresses people as God's country or as the devil's playground, the Big Bend typically evokes strong responses from almost everyone who lives or visits there.
In this anthology of nature writing, Barney Nelson gathers nearly sixty literary perspectives on the landscape and life of the Big Bend region, broadly defined as Trans-Pecos Texas and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. In addition to Leopold and Webb, the collection includes such well-known writers as Edward Abbey, Mary Austin, Roy Bedichek, and Frederick Olmsted, as well as a wide range of voices that includes explorers, trappers, cowboys, ranch wives, curanderos, college presidents, scientists, locals, tourists, historians, avisadores, and waitresses. Following a personal introduction by Barney Nelson, the pieces are grouped thematically to highlight the distinctive ways in which writers have responded to the Big Bend.
"Mr. Narayan gives vitality and an original viewpoint to the most ancient of legends, lacing them with his own blend of satire, pertinent explanation and thoughtful commentary."—Santha Rama Rau, New York Times
"Narayan's narrative style is swift, firm, graceful, and lucid . . . thoroughly knowledgeable, skillful, entertaining. One could hardly hope for more."—Rosanne Klass, Times Literary Supplement
In spare, precise prose, Dichter brings to life the tensions between ideologues and pragmatists, Polish patriots and their Soviet masters. These evocative novels also provide a psychologically persuasive and profoundly moving portrait of the narrator. The author's alter ego, supported by his stalwart and overly indulgent mother, possesses the tenacity to transform himself from an awkward, traumatized child survivor into an unsettled but eventually independent-minded young man.
A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing God’s Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a still-censored form in 1969, God’s Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.
The first English translations of the original novellas about the iconic kaijū Godzilla
Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequel and, in 1955, published these novellas.
Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. This book finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions.
Kayama’s fiction depicts Godzilla as engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against humanity, which has allowed the destruction of the natural world through its irresponsible, immoral perversion of science. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Bernhard’s work can seem off-putting on first acquaintance, as he suffers no fools and offers no hand to assist the unwary reader. But those who make the effort to engage with Bernhard on his own uncompromising terms will discover a writer with powerful comic gifts, penetrating insight into the failings and delusions of modern life, and an unstinting desire to tell the whole, unvarnished, unwelcome truth. Start here, readers; the rewards are great.
In Granada, a boy in a dress begs in the white alleys of the old town. A vulnerable runaway, he turns to an American painter who is living in the city for protection, Madeleine James. The boy also meets Madeleine's new friend, poet Cy Jacobs. Although the two adults mean to help the boy, they unwittingly expose him to more peril. Soon, all the characters in the story have been scraped on the touchstone of hard realities and made to show their mettle, be it base or gold. This novel, at times somber and at times flaring with intensity, calls up indelibly the difficulties of making a good life—or a good death—in a world in which we are all, in one way or another, going.
Maggie Foltz is a fifty-five-year-old cocktail waitress in a rundown casino in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert. She spends her days serving drinks to lonely old folks playing the slot machines and her nights trying to escape her bitter past. When she befriends Sarah, a young Native American woman who is hired to cook in the casino coffee shop, her life begins to change. Maggie finds herself falling in love with a memory-haunted Vietnam veteran and warily begins to hope that together they can find peace. Then Sarah is mysteriously murdered, and Sarah’s ghost enlists Maggie to accompany her on a quest for the wisdom that she needs in order to move into the next world. The story ranges from smoky casinos into the harsh magnificence of the desert and the reservation where Sarah’s people are trying to preserve their culture and find their own place in a modern world that seems to want them to be either shamans or losers. Sojourner’s characters are compellingly real, and the Mojave setting has rarely been depicted as sensitively or truthfully. This is a memorable story of love, redemption, and solace, told by one of the West’s finest writers.
The Subarnarekha River shimmers with legend; once said to carry flecks of gold, it remains a source of both promise and hardship for those who live along its banks. In Gold Sand, Gold Water, Nalini Bera conjures a world where folklore and reality flow together, and forbidden love defies caste. Through the eyes of young Lolin, we witness the daily struggles of the Hatua people—part of the marginalized Adivasi and Dalit communities—as they navigate a world where ancient traditions are slowly being eroded by modern industry.
The novel paints an intimate, kaleidoscopic portrait of a vanishing way of life. Lyrical and haunting, Gold Sand, Gold Water is an essential addition to Bengali literature in translation—one that ensures these overlooked stories, like the river itself, continue to flow.
When Etta's grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel to Myanmar to explore complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother's family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and complex relationships, The Golden Land explores those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.
"Golk is a rich and marvelously detailed novel by a man with a cultivated intelligence; it is also the first really good book I have read about television."—Norman Mailer
"An original: sharp, funny, intelligent, rare. . . . Working in a clean, oblique style reminiscent of Nathanael West, Mr. Stern has written in Golk a first-rate comic novel, a piece of fiction that is at once about and loaded with that kind of recognition that junkies call the flash."—Joan Didion, National Review
"Golk is fantastic, funny, bitter, intelligent without weariness. Best of all Golk is pure—that is to say necessary. Without hokum."—Saul Bellow
"Golk (like Golk himself) is a wonderous conception. Its world responds to personification, not analysis, and personify it Mr. Stern has done. A book in a thousand."—Hugh Kenner
"What I like about Mr. Stern's fantasy is that it has been conceived and written with so much gaiety. Far from a political melodrama, it reminds me of a René Clair movie, and even the surrealist touches needed to bring out the power and pretense of the television industry are funny rather than symbolically grim."—Alfred Kazin, Reporter
"A mighty good book, altogether alive, full of beans and none of them spilled."—Flannery O'Connor
Runner-up, Best Popular Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010
The golondrina is a small and undistinguished swallow. But in Spanish, the word has evoked a thousand poems and songs dedicated to the migrant's departure and hoped-for return. As such, the migrant becomes like the swallow, a dream-seeker whose real home is nowhere, everywhere, and especially in the heart of the person left behind.
The swallow in this story is Amada García, a young Mexican woman in a brutal marriage, who makes a heart-wrenching decision—to leave her young daughter behind in Mexico as she escapes to el Norte searching for love, which she believes must reside in the country of freedom. However, she falls in love with the man who brings her to the Texas border, and the memories of those three passionate days forever sustain and define her journey in Texas. She meets and marries Lázaro Mistral, who is on his own journey—to reclaim the land his family lost after the U.S.-Mexican War. Their opposing narratives about love and war become the legacy of their first-born daughter, Lucero, who must reconcile their stories into her struggle to find "home," as her mother, Amada, finally discovers the country where love beats its infinite wings.
Bárbara Renaud González, a native-born Tejana and acclaimed journalist, has written a lyrical story of land, love, and loss, bringing us the first novel of a working-class Tejano family set in the cruelest beauty of the Texas panhandle. Her story exposes the brutality, tragedy, and hope of her homeland and helps to fill a dearth of scholarly and literary works on Mexican and Mexican American women in post–World War II Texas.
The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe. As the Great Depression creeps across the world at the close of the twenties, however, the farsighted see hard times coming.
The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then Chloe goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.
The urgent investigation tests Thomas’s abilities to draw out the secrets Harlem harbors, untangling the color-coded connections and relationships that keep company with greed, ghosts, and grief. With nuanced characters, lush historical detail, and a lyrical voice, Gone Missing in Harlem affirms the restoring powers of home and family.
Good for the Jews is a smart, funny, sexy novel set in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Bush administration. Part mystery and part stranger-comes-to town story, Good for the Jews is loosely based on the biblical book of Esther. Like Esther, Debra Spark's characters deal with anti-Semitism and the way that powerful men—and the women who love them—negotiate bureaucracies.
At the core of the story of right and wrong are young, attractive Ellen Hirschorn and her older cousin Mose, a high school teacher who thinks he knows, in fact, what is "good for the Jews"—and for Ellen, too. Their stories intertwine with those of the school superintendent, his ex-wife and son, and a new principal. Workplace treachery, the bonds of family, coming of age, and romantic relationships all take center stage as the characters negotiate the fallout from a puzzling fire.
Spark's evocative writing style and sharp, understanding treatment of her diverse characters draw the reader into this surprising page-turner, a finalist for the 2009 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award.
In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it.
Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.
About the Shakur Series:
The Shakur Series features Black deaf characters who use American Sign Language, offering a unique and inclusive reading experience for children. The vibrant illustrations showcase a signing family and will captivate young minds, while the engaging text reinforces learning. These charming board books contain positive messages and practical lessons, support early childhood development, and encourage children to explore the world with Shakur. This series honors and celebrates Black deaf experiences through everyday adventures that will resonate with young children and their families.
Published in partnership with The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center.
About the Shakur Series:
The Shakur Series features Black deaf characters who use American Sign Language, offering a unique and inclusive reading experience for children. The vibrant illustrations showcase a signing family and will captivate young minds, while the engaging text reinforces learning. These charming board books contain positive messages and practical lessons, support early childhood development, and encourage children to explore the world with Shakur. This series honors and celebrates Black deaf experiences through everyday adventures that will resonate with young children and their families.
Published in partnership with The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center.
Their village is called Haapaahnitse, Oak Place, and it lies at the foot of a mountain. Once there was a lake and a stream nearby, but they have dried up. Once rain and snow came, but no more. Not only did the crops wither and die, even the hardy oak trees have become brittle sticks. The land has become barren and dry.
Two brothers, Tsaiyah-dzehshi, whose name means First One, and Hamahshu-dzehshi, Next One, are chosen for an important mission. They are sent on a westward trek to the home of the Shiwana, the Rain and Snow Spirits, to ask them to bring the gift of water to the village again. The brothers cross deserts and mountains on an arduous journey until they are finally stopped short by a treacherous canyon filled with molten lava.
The Good Rainbow Road tells how the brothers overcome this last challenge and continue on to their destination. Written in the tradition of Native American oral storytelling and accompanied by colorful illustrations from celebrated Native artist Michael Lacapa, it brings the powers of language, memory, and imagery to a tale that will captivate children ages seven and up.
As Simon Ortiz writes, "The Good Rainbow Road is located in the Native American world, but it is not limited to that world. Even considering humankind's many ethnic and racial differences, we are all part of each other as people and the rest of all Creation, and our stories join us together." This is the foundation of The Good Rainbow Road, and on that road young readers will broaden their understanding of humanity's common bonds.
The Good Rainbow Road is presented in Keres, the language of Acoma Pueblo and six other Pueblo communities in New Mexico, and in English, with an additional Spanish translation in the back of the book.
In this multigenerational family story, Katherine, Carter, and Scott all try to navigate an evolving world in the Golden State that doesn’t seem quite so golden any longer. Scott returns and hopes to restore and recreate their past happiness, Katherine contemplates divorce and explores new love along the way, and Carter works to find a place for himself in a new school among classmates who are hostile to him.
The characters fervently chase their dreams across Silicon Valley and beyond, from the gleaming office parks of Cupertino to a self-help seminar on the Las Vegas Strip and an underfunded high school theater production of The Tempest. The one element tying them all together is the house of the title, a 1950s tract home that once represented happiness and now holds the family close in its protective embrace, until, in the end, even this constant changes.
Good-bye, Son and Other Stories, Janet Lewis’s only collection of short fiction, was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death. A mother’s encounters with her deceased son, an aging woman sitting with the new knowledge of her troubled older sister’s death, and a teenager disillusioned by her own mortality are among the characters, mostly women and girls, whom Lewis delivers. Her understated style and knack for unadorned observation embed us with them as they reckon with the disquieting forces—incomprehensible and destructive to some, enlightening to others—that move us from birth, through life, to death. In the process, Lewis has crafted a paean to the living.
Goshen Road is an elegiac, unvarnished, and empathetic portrait of one working-class family over two decades in rural West Virginia, with sisters Dessie and Billie Price as its urgently beating heart. Bonnie Proudfoot captures them, their husbands, and their children as they balance on the divide between Appalachia old and new, struggling for survival and reconciling themselves with past hurts and future uncertainties as the economy and culture shift around them.
The story opens in 1967 with a logging accident and the teenaged Lux Cranfield’s headlong plunge into the courtship of Dessie—a leap he takes not only in the wake of his near-death experience but to exchange his bitter home life for a future with the Prices, a family that appears to have the stability and peace that his own lacks. Within the year Lux and Dessie marry. Meanwhile, Dessie’s rebellious younger sister, Billie, fights her way through adolescence with an eye toward an escape of her own, only to land with Lux’s friend Alan Ray Munn and settle into a life of hardship. Ultimately, the voices and passions of Dessie, Billie, Lux, Alan Ray, and the Cranfield children build on one another to create an unforgettable chorus about the promises and betrayals of love—and what it takes to preserve a family when everything else is uncertain.
Thirteen-year-old Grace is not looking forward to her summer vacation. She’ll have to fend for herself and take care of her siblings while her mom smokes the day away in the back bedroom of the cabin. But when an unexpected companion shows up in the middle of a crisis, she gains hope that maybe the summer won’t be a disaster after all. In Grace Above All, readers will experience a young summer romance and join Grace in gaining a newfound appreciation of family.
“Rubiaux Rising” (a Best American Short Stories selection) is a tale of triumph amid calamity during Hurricane Katrina, while “Her Great Blue” a surreal interspecies love story. “Mulligan” reveals the private pain of parents traveling across the country to give away their children, and “Wraiths in a Swelter” is both a ghost story and a confessional memoir—following a deliriously exhausted EMT through a deadly Chicago heat wave.
Many of the stories in Grace for Grace are set against the backdrop of natural or manmade catastrophes. These disasters test the characters’ limits as they confront sudden changes and extremes, discovering through their unexpected resourcefulness and endurance something beyond suffering. . . something that approaches the sublime.
A masterpiece by one of the West’s best-loved authorsJust when Sacramento journalist Marty Martinez thinks his life can’t get any worse, it does. His beloved son has died of AIDS, his wife has divorced him and joined a cult, and his daughter blames him for the disintegration of their family. Then a chance medical examination reveals that he has prostate cancer. Marty faces his new role as a cancer patient with awkward grit and desperation. He is a sympathetic, utterly convincing character seeking faith in a Catholic Church as troubled as he is. He brings increased intensity to his career as he investigates a far-reaching political scandal, reunites his family in unexpected ways, and finds love with a fellow cancer patient. Grace Period is a profound and sometimes hilarious novel about living with serious illness. Marty copes with fear and the painful, sometimes embarrassing, treatment of his disease, but instead of winding down his life he finds fresh purpose and a joyful new love. Haslam brilliantly depicts the complexities of everyday life and the intricate, sometimes tortured bonds of family and friendship. In Grace Period, Haslam shows us that existence at the precarious edge of life offers not only pain and loss but hope, a chance at redemption, love, and even happiness. Grace Period is his masterwork.
Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, who was, at one time, the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in love with a young woman. His attention now torn between past and present, he tries to stay focused on Gramsci’s story: frail, feverish, and recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian comrade instead. Moving backward and forward in time, the story is told from the alternating perspectives of Stover’s conversational first-person narrative and lyrical third-person prose that recreates Gramsci’s inner life. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another and fighting for great ideals.
The Grand Gennaro, a riveting saga set at the turn of the last century in Italian American Harlem, reflects on how youthful acts of cruelty and desperation follow many to the grave. A classic in the truest sense, this operatic narrative is alive once again, addressing the question: How does one become an "American"?
Crasnaru portrays the lives of people so used to hardship that it never occurs to them to surrender. An unhappily married woman waits in vain for a call from a potential lover. A foul-mouthed mother of seven accuses a war hero of conning her out of her life savings. A lawyer is lured to a forest by a dead coworker's stories of a beautiful woman. Those with drab lives use fantasy to endure and those who believe themselves happy are forced to face grim realities. Crasnaru mixes elements of the ridiculous, the fanciful, and the grotesque with vivid realism and her remarkable stories, while taking place in a dark era in her nation's history, are about the human as well as the Romanian condition.
Halloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles “Alvin's lounge” in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots.
Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.
Susan Messer's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, and Colorado Review. She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.
Cover photograph copyright © Bill Rauhauser and Rauhauser Photographic Trust
The Grandmothers is the chronicle of Alwyn’s ancestors: the bitter Henry Tower, who returned from Civil War battlefields to find his beautiful wife Serena lost in a fatal fever; Rose Hamilton, robust and eager, who yearned to leave the cabin of her bearded, squirrel-hunting brothers for the company of courteous Leander Tower; the boy-soldier Hilary Tower, whose worship of his brother made him desperate; fastidious Nancy Tower, whose love for her husband Jesse Davis could not overcome her disgust with the dirt under his fingernails; Ursula Duff, proud and silent, maligned among her neighbors by her venal husband; Alwyn’s parents, Ralph Tower and Marianne Duff, whose happiness is brought about only by the intervention of a determined spinster.
In its first modern translation, a novel-cum-memoir of a Frenchman’s erotic awakening in Italy by a preeminent writer of the Romantic period
In 1812 Alphonse de Lamartine, a young man of means, traveled through southern Italy, where, during a sojourn in Naples, he fell in love with a young woman who worked in a cigar factory—and whose death after he returned to France would haunt him throughout his writing life. Graziella, Lamartine called this lost girl in his poetry and memoirs—and also in Graziella, a novel that closely follows the story of his own romance.
“When I was eighteen,” the narrator begins, as if penning his memoir, “my family entrusted me to the care of a relative whose business affairs called her to Tuscany.” The tale that unfolds, of the young man’s amorous experiences amid the natural grandeur and subtle splendors of the Italian countryside, is one of the finest works of fiction in the French Romantic tradition, a bildungsroman that is also a melancholy portrait of the artist as a young man discovering the muse who would both inspire and elude him.
Remarkable for its contemplative prose, its dreamy passions and seductive drawing of the Italian landscape, and its place in the Romantic canon, Graziella is a timeless portrait of love, chronicling the remorse and the misguided ideals of youth that find their expression, if not their amends, in art.
In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda’s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us—and what it can do to us.
The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country’s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film—perhaps his last—in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society—homeless people and migrants—but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism.
Things don’t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can’t help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the “Great Fall”? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.
The book vividly depicts the multiracial and multiethnic alliances that developed as Chicago railroad workers struggled to organize. It presents some of its narrative through the complex consciousness of Stephanie Koviak, a young, first-generation Polish-American.
In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotsky’s assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotsky’s work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican “peón,” and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century.
Soon the fracas over frac sand attracts some national attention, including that of Stony Field, the pen name of a nationally syndicated columnist. Will the village board vote to solve their budget problems with a cut of the mining profits? Will the mine create real jobs for local folks? Will Stony Field come to the village to lead protests against the mine? And will defenders of the Trail Marker Oak literally draw a battle line in the sand?
Over more than four decades, J. R. R. Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien completed some twenty-four volumes of his father’s work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Thanks to Christopher’s extraordinary publishing efforts and scholarship, readers today can survey and understand the vast landscape of Tolkien’s legendarium.
The Great Tales Never End sheds new light on J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. Essays by world-renowned scholars and Tolkien family reminiscences offer unique insights into the publication process. What was Tolkien’s intended ending for The Lord of the Rings, and did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience’s response to the first-ever adaptation of The Lord of the Rings—a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC’s archives?
The book is illustrated with color reproductions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s manuscripts, maps, drawings, and letters, as well as photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works. Many of these documents have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers, and fans.
Cyclic verse.
Greek epics of the archaic period include poems that narrate a particular heroic episode or series of episodes and poems that recount the long-term history of families or peoples. They are an important source of mythological record. Here is a new text and translation of the examples of this poetry that have come down to us.
The heroic epic is represented by poems about Heracles and Theseus, and by two great epic cycles: the Theban Cycle, which tells of the failed assault on Thebes by the Seven and the subsequent successful assault by their sons; and the Trojan Cycle, which includes Cypria, Little Iliad, and The Sack of Ilion. Among the genealogical epics are poems in which Eumelus creates a prehistory for Corinth and Asius creates one for Samos. In presenting the extant fragments of these early epic poems, Martin West provides very helpful notes. His Introduction places the epics in historical context.
Scurrilous verse.
The poetry of the archaic period that the Greeks called iambic is characterized by scornful criticism of friend and foe and by sexual license. The purpose of these poems is unclear, but they seem to have some connection with cult songs used in religious festivals—for example, those honoring Dionysus and Demeter. In this completely new Loeb Classical Library edition of early Greek iambic poetry, Douglas E. Gerber provides a faithful and fully annotated translation of the fragments that have come down to us.
Archilochus expressed himself in colorful and vigorous language. Famous throughout antiquity for his winged barbs, he is often considered the archetypal poet of blame. Other major poets in this volume are Semonides, best known for a long misogynistic poem describing ten types of wives; and Hipponax, who was much admired by the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria, in part for his depictions of the licentious and seamy side of society.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2025
The University of Chicago Press