A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
20 represents the best of the best—one story from each of the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and original characters, settings, and emotions, charting the evolution of the short story over the past two decades. One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has helped launch the careers of a score of previously "undiscovered" writers, many of whom have gone on to great critical success.
Past Winners of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize: David Bosworth, Robley Wilson, Jonathan Penner, Randall Silvis, W. D. Wetherell, Rick DeMarinis, Ellen Hunnicutt, Reginald McKnight, Maya Sonenberg, Rick Hillis, Elizabeth Graver, Jane McCafferty, Stewart O’Nan, Jennifer Cornell, Geoffrey Becker, Edith Pearlman, Katherine Vaz, Barbara Croft, Lucy Honig, Adria Bernardi.
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner
Winner, 2022 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for Best Fiction
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché.
One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother’s suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways—the passing of an era or of a daughter’s childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in’s recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.
Not for sale in the United Kingdom.
Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and Seth Horton are now reviving the series in Best of the West 2009.
Thomas and Horton combed some 250 literary journals and magazines to gather these eighteen stories published since the fall of 2007. They come from both emerging and established writers, including Lee K. Abbott, Louise Erdrich, Dagoberto Gilb, Antonya Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Annie Proulx. Like Bass, the editors believe "the Western short story" inhabits a wide territory; the subjects in this collection range from illegal immigrants tending illegal crops in California's national forests, to mismatched Mormon missionaries on the conversion trail in Nevada, to a Native American college student exploring her sexuality, to Papa Hemingway's meditations as he loads the shotgun in his Idaho cabin. As these stories make clear, the West continues to shape our literary landscape. Thomas and Horton have preserved the best of that work in this vital anthology.
Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.
Best of the West 2010 brings together established and emerging writers who reinterpret this most vital of literary regions and create, as Kent Meyers puts it in his foreword, "gift[s] the nation needs right now." Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen nineteen stories by writers including Sherman Alexie, Rick Bass, Ron Carlson, Julia Glass, William Kittredge, Kent Nelson, and Deb Olin Unferth. Their subjects vary from a Greek community in Wyoming dealing with a suicide, to a re-creation of Christ's crucifixion in New Mexico, to an unlikely friendship that peaks at a burial ground in Alaska. Best of the West 2010 is the latest indication that the West has become one of the most crucial settings for contemporary American fiction.
Contributors:
- Sherman Alexie
- Rick Bass
- John Blanchard
- Elea Carey
- Ron Carlson
- Natalie Diaz
- Darren Dillman
- Ben Ehrenreich
- Julia Glass
- Dina Guidubaldi
- Ben Kostival
- William Kittredge
- Paul Mihas
- Kent Nelson
- Daniel Orozco
- Kirstin Valdez Quade
- Aurelie Sheehan
- Justin St. Germain
- Deb Olin Unferth
Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.
Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri is the latest volume in what has become one of the nation's most important anthologies. Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen twenty stories by writers including Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Ron Carlson, Philipp Meyer, Dagoberto Gilb, Yiyun Li, Antonya Nelson, and Sam Shepard. Subjects vary from an Idaho family that breeds lions and tigers with disastrous results, to a Mormon veteran whose mind is taken over by a nineteenth-century consciousness, to a Texas boy who spends an afternoon with Bonnie and Clyde shortly before their deaths. Taken together, these stories suggest that the West has become one of the most exciting and diverse literary regions in the twenty-first century.
In the tradition of Joyce’s Dubliners, Demigods on Speedway is a portrait of a city that reflects the recession-era Southwest. Inspired by tales from Greek mythology, these gritty heroes and heroines struggle to find their place in the cosmos. Each of these linked stories develops the extremes of the modern psyche: an executive struggling to understand his wife’s illness even as he compulsively cheats on her, a teenage runaway whose attraction to her “twin” is bound to fail, an overweight boy vicariously experiencing true love through the tales of his trainer, a car-wash attendant with outsized dreams of Hollywood.
Characters with mythical-sounding names like Dagfinn and Zero plot their courses through a sky riddled with flawed constellations. Sheehan’s edgy language aptly reveals her characters as they lurch toward the next day’s irreverent beginning. As the characters’ lives overlap, their stories carry mythology out of the past and into a very modern dilemma: the cumulative sense that here is a city with its own demigods, individuals struggling to survive under siege while passionately seeking to make something immortal in their lives.
The book shows how perspectives from theater studies, anthropology, and performance studies can enrich readings of the short-story form. Moving beyond arbitrary distinctions between performance and text, it suggests that this literature had a social life and was engaged with questions of circumatlantic and transnational culture. It suggests that the short story itself was never conceived as a nationalist literary form, but worked by mobilizing cosmopolitan connections and meanings. In so doing, the book resurrects a neglected history of American Federalism and its connections to British literary forms.
Short story collections focusing on Jewish writers have—no surprise—typically given women authors short shrift. This new volume represents the best Jewish feminist fiction published in Lilith magazine, and does what no other collection has done before in its geographic scope, its inclusion of twenty-first-century stories, and its Jewish feminist focus.
This collection showcases a wide range of stories offering variegated cultures and contexts and points of view: Persian Jews; a Biblical matriarch; an Ethiopian mother in modern Israel; suburban American teens; Eastern European academics; a sexual questioner; a Jew by choice; a new immigrant escaping her Lower East Side sweatshop; a Black Jewish marcher for justice; in Vichy France, a toddler’s mother hiding out; and more.
Organized by theme, the stories in this book emphasize a breadth of content, and our hope is that in reading you’ll appreciate the liveliness of the burgeoning self-awareness brought to life in each tale, and the occasional funny, call-your-friend-and-tell-her-about-it moment. Skip around, encounter an author whose other work you may know, be enticed by a title, or an opening line. We hope you’ll find both pleasure and enlightenment—and sometimes revelation—within these pages.
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 stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman’s experience with sexual assault to a child’s foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.
If every story is born of a question—How did we get here? How do you make your arm do that?—the stories in Geoff Wyss’s How search for answers to the mysteries of an astonishing range of characters. The narrator of “How I Come to Be Here at the GasFast” explains why he hasn’t left a truck stop in the two days since he scratched a winning lottery ticket. In “How to Be a Winner,” a sports consultant browbeats a high school football team with his theory of history and a justification of his failed coaching career. Lost in the mazes they’ve made of themselves, Wyss’s characters search for exits on ground that shifts dizzyingly from humor to pathos, from cynicism to earnestness, from comedy to tragedy, often within the same sentence. Although propelled by a razor-sharp, contemporary voice, Wyss’s stories—many set in a New Orleans unknown to television and tourists—have more in common with Chekhov and O’Connor than with “Treme.”
Texas has always staked a large claim on the nation's imagination, and its mystery literature is no exception. Hundreds of crime novels are set within the state, most of which have been published in the last twenty years. From the highest point atop the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas to the Piney Woods of East Texas, from the High Plains of the Panhandle to the subtropical climate of the lower Rio Grande Valley, mystery writers have covered every aspect of Texas's extraordinarily diverse geography.
The first book to emphasize the wealth of Texas's mystery writers and the images they convey of the state's wide range of regions and cultures, Lone Star Sleuths is a noteworthy introduction not only to the literary genre but also to a sense of Texas as a place in fiction. Celebrating a genre that has expanded to include women and an increasing diversity of cultures, the book features selections from the works of such luminaries as Kinky Friedman and Mary Willis Walker, lesser-known stars in the making, and even some outsiders like Nevada Barr and Carolyn Hart who have succumbed to the allure of the state's weather, geography, and colorful history.
Lone Star Sleuths captures the sense of place that distinguishes much of the great literature set in Texas, and is a must-read for mystery lovers.
Finalist, 2019 Weatherford Award (Fiction) • A Great Group Reads Selection for National Reading Group Month from The Women’s National Book Association
Set in Appalachian Ohio amid an epidemic of prescription opiate abuse, Michael Henson’s linked collection tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption, and brings the novel-in-stories form to new heights. Maggie Boylan is an addict, thief, liar, and hustler. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and resilience. The stories follow Maggie as she spirals through her addictive process, through the court system and treatment, and into a shaky new beginning.
In these masterful stories, we rarely occupy Maggie’s perspective, but instead gain a multilayered portrait of a community as we see other people’s lives bump up against hers—and we witness her inserting herself into their spheres, refusing to be rebuffed. The result is a prismatic view of a community fighting to stay upright against the headwinds of a drug epidemic: always on edge, always human.
New Stories from the Midwest presents a collection of stories that celebrate an American region too often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature. The editors solicited nominations from more than three hundred magazines, literary journals, and small presses, and narrowed the selection to nineteen authors comprising prize winners and new and established authors.
The stories, written by midwestern writers or focusing on the Midwest, demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the heart of the country rivals that of any other region.
The anthology includes an introduction from Lee Martin and short fiction by emerging and established writers such as Rosellen Brown, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Christie Hodgen, Gregory Blake Smith, and Benjamin Percy.
The beauty and barrenness of the southwestern landscape naturallylends itself to the art of storytellers. It is a land of heat and dryness, aland of spirits, a land that is misunderstood by those living along thecoasts.
New Stories from the Southwest presents nineteen short stories that appeared in North American periodicals between January and December 2006. Though many of these stories vary by aesthetics, tone, voice, and almost any other craft category one might wish to use, they are nevertheless bound together by at least one factor, which is that the landscape of the region plays a key role in their narratives. They each evoke and explore what it means to exist in thisunique corner of the country.
Selected by editor D. Seth Horton, the former fiction editor for the Sonora Review, from a wide cross-section of journals and magazines, and with a foreword by noted writer Ray Gonzalez, New Stories from the Southwest presents a generous sampling of the best of contemporary fiction situated in this often overlooked area of the country. Swallow Press is particularly pleased to publish this wide-ranging collection of stories from both new and established writers.
Contributors to New Stories from the Southwest are:
- Alan Cheuse
- Matt Clark
- Lorien Crow
- Kathleen De Azvedo
- Alan Elyshevitz
- Marcela Fuentes
- Dennis Fulgoni
- Ray Gonzalez
- Anna Green
- Donald Lucio Hurd
- Toni Jensen
- Charles Kemnitz
- Elmo Lum
- Tom McWhorter
- S. G. Miller
- Peter Rock
- Alicita Rodriguez
- John Tait
- Patrick Tobin
- Valery Varble
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.
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.
Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.
Coal burns underground and destroys a small town. A woman confronts police officers with her pet copperheads. A young girl drinks Drano. A man is banned from his favorite bar.
Within these eleven short stories, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and poet Gary Fincke brings into focus the small struggles of ordinary people. The characters within this collection, from boys and girls to fathers, mothers, and the aging, live in cities, in towns, and in rural areas. Yet, no matter the surroundings, all seem alone within a collective anxiety. Set against extraordinary events, such as the Three Mile Island accident, the Challenger Disaster, and the Kennedy assassination, these stories personalize history through a juxtaposition between large and small tragedies and the unflinching desire to find insight within and redemption from weakness and shortcoming.
Focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer’s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson’s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson’s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.
The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the “buried cultures” of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the “folk” aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer'’ monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.
Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to “Young America,” suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.
Mark Whalan is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Exeter. He is the editor of The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of American Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Studies in American Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies.
This innovative collection reinvents the standard American short fiction anthology and offers readers an invigorated, inclusive, and nuanced understanding of American literary history and culture from the Civil War to the end of World War I.
Beginning with one of Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, originally published in 1863, this anthology offers a refreshing perspective on American literature from the latter half of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Based on Alcott’s brief stint as a Civil War nurse, Hospital Sketches stands in contrast to the sentimentality of her better-known Little Women and illustrates a blending of romanticism and realism. Furthermore, its thematic focus on the tension between idealized notions of noble, patriotic duty and the horrific reality of war exemplifies a dominant American cultural mindset at the time.
Following this model of complicating accepted ideas about realism and of particular authors, Reimagining Realism brings together dozens of texts that engage with the immense changes and upheavals that characterized American culture over the next six decades: war, abolition, voting rights, westward expansion, immigration, racism and ethnocentrism, industrial production, labor reforms, transportation, urban growth, journalism, mass media, education, and economic disparity.
Reimagining Realism presents a collection of works much more diverse than what is typically found in other anthologies of short fiction from this era. Some selections are lesser-known works by familiar authors that enable readers to see dimensions of these authors that are rarely considered but deserve further study. The book also features authors from many previously underrepresented groups and includes some outstanding works by authors whose names are almost completely unknown to today’s readers—but which deserve greater attention.
The volume’s editors, in their intent to spur readers to further reimagine realism, to represent the spectrum of viewpoints prevalent during this era, and to spark critical thinking and productive discussion, have been careful not to apply any type of political litmus test to the included works. They have also refrained from categorizing works according to convention, so as not to predispose readers to restrictive interpretations, and have provided only brief, highly readable headnotes and annotations that will help readers better understand the texts.
Here we find a delightful and long-forgotten story by the doyen of Nevada writers, Robert Laxalt; a moving story by Adrian C. Louis, a Native American from Lovelock who has found national acclaim for his powerful fiction and poetry about reservation life; and excerpts from work by best-selling writers Teresa Jordan, Steven Nightingale, Douglas Unger, and Richard Wiley.
Settings range from rural Nevada to rural post-revolutionary China, from the glitz of Las Vegas to a Basque immigrant household in Carson City, from the hills of Appalachia to the Pacific during World War II. Characters include a pair of Mormon teenagers trying to escape the moral rigors of their faith, a fugitive Shoshone Indian trying to preserve the ways of his ancestors against the pressures of history, an immigrant family in Las Vegas coping with the father’s final illness, a trio of escaped prisoners bent on revenge, and an aging African American jazz musician. There is work by writers whose names are known to readers of fine fiction everywhere and work by talented newcomers.
Editor Griffin has provided for each selection a brief biographical sketch of the author and some comments on the qualities of the piece that prompted its inclusion in the anthology. As a collection of fiction, this is exciting reading—provocative, often moving, sometimes startling in its brilliance. It demonstrates unequivocally that writing, and writers, are flourishing in Nevada, and that the state’s literary community is remarkably abundant in talent, creativity, and the range of its voices and concerns.
Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Gloria Steinem, Susan B. Anthony, Robin Morgan, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom.
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West.
Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
Marcy Knopf's introduction surveys the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the periodicals and books it generated, and describes the rise to prominence of these women writers and their later fall from fame. She also includes a brief biography of each of the writers. Nellie Y. McKay's foreword analyzes the themes and concerns of the stories.
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West.
Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
Marcy Knopf's introduction surveys the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the periodicals and books it generated, and describes the rise to prominence of these women writers and their later fall from fame. She also includes a brief biography of each of the writers. Nellie Y. McKay's foreword analyzes the themes and concerns of the stories.
These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.
Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s—reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others—to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes experimental prose of Doug Crowell, William Harrison, and Peter LaSalle.
Here are stories by such celebrated authors as Paul Horgan and William A. Owens, as well as startling, in some cases previously unpublished work by writers like Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pat Ellis Taylor, and Thomas Zigal. A few stories may already be favorites—Larry McMurtry's "There Will Be Peace in Korea," Amado Muro's "Cecilia Rosas." Many others have become classics, such as Vassar Miller's poignantly autobiographical "Pact," Hughes Rudd's hilarious record of grade school fieldtrips, R. E. Smith's gripping story of a Houstonian's life-changing encounter with nature, and Dave Hickey's astonishing account of an old cowboy's imprisonment . . . in a bathtub.
Bill Brett, James Crumley, Linda West Eckhardt, Robert Flynn, Mary Gray Hughes, Carolyn Osborn—all are represented here by stories guaranteed to banish stereotypes and boredom and to enlarge one's vision of the Lone Star State. Anyone who thinks that oil wells and big hair define Texas will find out differently in the dazzling short fiction presented in South by Southwest.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
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