Winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Shannon Cain’s stories chart the treacherous territory of the illicit. They expose the absurdity of our rituals, our definitions of sexuality, and above all, our expectations of happiness and self-fulfillment.
Cain’s protagonists are destined to suffer—and sometimes enjoy—the consequences of their own restless discontent. In the title story, Lisa, a city dweller, is dissatisfied with her life and relationships. Her attempt at self-rejuvenation takes her on a hiking excursion through a foreign land. Lisa discovers a remote village where the ritualized and generous bisexual love of its inhabitants entrances her. She begins to abandon thoughts of home.
In “Cultivation,” Frances, a divorced mother strapped with massive credit card debt, has become an expert at growing pot. When she packs her three children and twelve pounds of homegrown into the minivan and travels cross-country to sell the stash, their journey becomes one of anguish, revelation, and ultimately transformation. “Cultivation,” like many of the stories in The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, follows a trail of broken relationships and the unfulfilled promises of modern American life.
Told in precise, evocative prose, these memorable stories illuminate the human condition from a compelling, funny, and entirely original perspective.
Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's third collection of short stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and expatriation—strangers in strange lands, far from home. These dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with the family who helped them immigrate. In "The Other End of the World," an American soldier who has survived life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp grieves for members of his family murdered in a Nazi death camp, and in "Poppa's Books" a young boy learns to share his father's passion for the rare books that represent the Old World. "This Third Life" tells of a divorced woman who travels across Germany searching for new meaning in her life after her children leave home, while both "His Violin" and "The Golden Years" explore the plight of elderly Jews, displaced from New York City to retirement communities in Florida, who struggle with memory, madness, and mortality.
Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater diaspora—geographical, emotional, or spiritual—in which many of us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.
News is “one of the few things that connects us as a nation” observes the protagonist in the title story of Newsworld, a new collection by Todd James Pierce that explores America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. The characters in “Newsworld” seek to design realistic theme park attractions, such “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride” and “Seige at Waco,” that allow park guests to experience the complexities of contemporary news events for themselves. In the story “Columbine: The Musical,” high school students stage a musical written as a means of discussing school violence, while their vice principal wrangles a 10 percent discount on a school security system in exchange for corporate sponsorship of the play. In “Wrestling Al Gore,” a national wrestling federation uses costumed wrestlers to cast the Gore/Bush election recount into the ring. In an ironic twist, fans become sympathetic to the underdog Gore, champion his cause, and ultimately reflect on the fate of the real politician. In “The Yoshi Compound: A Story of Post-Waco Texas,” the followers of the Dalai Yoshi amass weapons and riot gear in hopes of attracting media attention in order to spread their message of love and world peace.
The characters in Newsworld, like many Americans, are engulfed in a life-imitating-art phenomenon caused by the hyperreality presented in the media, and they struggle with this overwhelming influence trying to understand whether their own lives fall within or outside its domain.
The first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Charles W. Chesnutt remains best known for his depictions of Southern life before and after the Civil War. But he also produced a large body of what might best be called his “Northern” writings, and those works, taken together, describe the intriguing ways in which America was reshaping itself at the turn of the last century.
The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt collects for the first time eighteen Chesnutt stories—several of them first appearing in Northern magazines or newspapers—that portray life in the North in the period between the Civil War and World War I. Living in Ohio from 1883 until his death in 1932, Chesnutt witnessed and wrote about the social, cultural, and racial upheavals taking place in the North during a crucial period of American history. His Northern stories thus reflect his vision of a newly reconstituted America, one recommitted to the ideals of freedom and economic opportunity inherent in our national heritage.
The stories, compiled and edited with critical introductions to each by Professor Charles Duncan, offer a new Chesnutt, one fascinated by the evolution of America into an urban, multiracial, economically driven democracy.
The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt presents richly imagined characters, both black and white, working to make better lives for themselves in the turbulent and stimulating universe of the turn-of-the-century North. Indeed, Chesnutt stands virtually alone as the first African American chronicler of Northern culture, anticipating such figures as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. This critical edition of The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt is a significant addition to the body of African American literature.
Poised on the precipice of mystery and longing, each character in Now You Know It All also hovers on the brink of discovery—and decision. Set in small-town North Carolina, or featuring eager Southerners venturing afar, these stories capture the crucial moment of irrevocable change. A young waitress accepts an offer from a beguiling stranger; a troubled boy attempts to unleash the villain from an internet hoax on his party guests; a smitten student finds more than she bargained for in her favorite teacher’s attic; two adult sisters reconvene to uncover a family secret hidden in plain sight. With a sharp eye for rendering inner life, Joanna Pearson has a knack for creating both compassion and a looming sense of threat. Her stories peel back the layers of the narratives we tell ourselves in an attempt to understand the world, revealing that the ghosts haunting us are often the very shadows that we cast.
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