front cover of The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood and Other Stories
The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood and Other Stories
Michael Fillerup
Signature Books, 2022
In this new collection of short fiction, award-winning author Michael Fillerup explores the shuttered landscapes of Mormon culture where feel-good clichés falter and the faithful are scorched in the refiner’s fire. The seventeen stories in Fillerup’s new compilation run the gamut in length, style, and voice, but all share an unapologetic authenticity. Whether examining the hypocrisy of sexism, the crucible of forgiveness, or the heartbreak of parenthood, Fillerup leads readers through a labyrinth of emotions but never feeds them to the Minotaur. Light shines at the end of each tortuous tunnel and, to the thoughtful reader, genuine joy.
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front cover of You Are the Phenomenology
You Are the Phenomenology
Timothy O'Keefe
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
You Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book—a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms—that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?

One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called "Quadrilaterals"—four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:

Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your Heel

Soars the mackled sound, kites ago :
A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :
When were we first older than we wanted to be :
That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.
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front cover of You as of Today My Homeland
You as of Today My Homeland
Stories of War, Self, and Love
Tayseer Al-Sboul
Michigan State University Press, 2016
This volume comprises a translation of the first post-modernist historical Arabic novella, You as of Today, by the renowned Jordanian writer Tayseer al-Sboul, and his two short stories “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry.” “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry” complement You as of Today by providing, with striking transparency and precision, narratives that examine man’s journey to self-discovery through events that are culturally unique, transparent, and at times shocking. This volume is rich with tales of war, love, politics, censorship, and the search for self in a complex and conflicting Arab world at a critical time in its history. In a captivating style consistent with the nature of events narrated in the text, al-Sboul unveils the inner nature of social, political, and religious patterns of life in Arab society with an honesty and skill that renders You as of Today My Homeland a testimony of human experiences that transcend the boundaries of time and place.
 
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front cover of You Never Get It Back
You Never Get It Back
Cara Blue Adams
University of Iowa Press, 2021
The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms.

Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.
 
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front cover of Your Madness, Not Mine
Your Madness, Not Mine
Stories of Cameroon
Makuchi
Ohio University Press, 1999
Women’s writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman, who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state. The stories in Your Madness, Not Mine are about postcolonial Cameroon, but especially about Cameroonian women, who probe their day-to-day experiences of survival and empowerment as they deal with gender oppression: from patriarchal expectations to the malaise of maldevelopment, unemployment, and the attraction of the West for young Cameroonians. Makuchi has given us powerful portraits of the people of postcolonial Africa in the so-called global village who too often go unseen and unheard.
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