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Safe Places
Stories
Kerry Dolan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Exploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the twelve stories of Safe Places navigate the fault lines of existence. Shifting from New York and Chicago to the American West and the Australian outback, Kerry Dolan’s characters move through an uncertain and unpredictable world, confronting situations that are alternately menacing, tragic, and funny. An aspiring anthropologist falls under the sway of her fortuneteller. An American tourist catches opal fever in an Australian mining town and binds herself to a man she despises. Two hitchhiking teens take a ride with a mysterious stranger, while an unstable graduate student stalks the object of his affections across Berkeley. Assured and distinctive, the voice-driven stories of this debut collection capture the restless heart of characters in a state of flux, as they try—and frequently fail—to move beyond chance and circumstance.
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Sailing with Noah
Stories from the World of Zoos
Jeffrey P. Bonner
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Written by the president of the nation’s number-one zoo, Sailing with Noah is an intensely personal, behind-the-scenes look at modern zoos. Jeffrey P. Bonner, who was trained as an anthropologist and came to the zoo world quite by accident, shares some of the most compelling stories ever told about contemporary zoos. The stories jump between zoos in different cities and between countries on different continents. Some are fun and funny. Others are sad, even tragic. Pete Hoskins, the director of the Philadelphia Zoo, is in bed, sound asleep, when his phone rings. . . . “There’s been a fire in the World of Primates,” he is told. “You’ve got to get over here.” Whatever he has been dreaming, it is nothing like the nightmare he will find now that he is awake. . . . “They’re all gone. They’re all gone.” All of the animals in the building—the gorillas, the lemurs, the orangutans, and the gibbons—all twenty-three of them are dead.
Written in a lively, accessible style, Sailing with Noah explores the role of zoos in today’s society and their future as institutions of education, conservation, and research. Along the way, Bonner relates a variety of true stories about animals and those who care for them (or abuse them), offering his perspective on heavily publicized incidents and describing less-well-known events with compassion and humor in turn. By bringing the stories of the animals’ lives before us, Bonner gives them a voice. He strongly believes that zoos must act for living things, and he argues that conservation is a shared responsibility of all mankind. This book helps us to understand why biodiversity is important and what it means to be a steward of life on earth.
            From the day-to-day aspects of caring for some of the world’s most exotic creatures to the role of zoos as field conservation organizations, saving wild things in wild places, this book takes the reader on an incredible journey—a journey that begins within the zoo and continues around the globe.  Everyone—from zoo visitors to animal lovers to professional conservationists, the young and old alike—will be fascinated by this extraordinary book.
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The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain
Stories
Don Waters
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Master storyteller Don Waters returns to the desert in his third book set in the American Southwest. With the gothic sensibility of Flannery O’Connor and emotional delicacy of Raymond Carver, these nine contemporary stories deftly explore the lives of characters losing or clinging to a fleeting faith and struggling to find something meaningful to believe in beneath overpowering desert skies.

Soldiers, seekers, priests, prisoners, and surfers pursue their fate amid bizarre, sometimes overwhelming circumstances. In “La Luz de Jesús,” a gutless Los Angeles screenwriter, a believer in nothing but the god of Hollywood, must reorient after he encounters a group of penitents in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The decorated soldier in “Española” faces more chaos back home than he did during his tour in Iraq. And “The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain” pairs a “trustee” prison inmate and a wild mustang horse, both wards of the state of Nevada, as they fumble toward a spiritual truth.

These stories capture the spirit of a region and its people. Once again Waters assembles an unconventional cast of characters, capturing their foibles and imperfections, and always rendering them with compassion as these modern-day martyrs and spiritually haunted survivors strive for some kind of redemption.

Ingenious, sometimes forbidding, often absurd, and altogether original, The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain is a stirring tribute to the lives, loves, and hopes of the faithful and the dispossessed.
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Saints, Statues, and Stories
A Folklorist Looks at the Religious Art of Sonora
James S. Griffith
University of Arizona Press, 2019
. . . we move to the town of Aconchi on the Río Sonora, where the mission church once contained a life-sized crucifix with a black corpus, known both as Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas . . . and El Cristo Negro de Aconchi . . .

So describes well-known and beloved folklorist James S. Griffith as he takes us back through the decades to a town in northern Sonora where a statue is saved—and in so doing, a community is saved as well.

In Saints, Statues, and Stories Griffith shares stories of nearly sixty years of traveling through Sonora. As we have come to expect through these journeys, “Big Jim”—as he is affectionately known by many—offers nothing less than the living traditions of Catholic communities. Themes of saints as agents of protection or community action are common throughout Sonora: a saint coming out of the church to protect the village, a statue having a say in where it resides and paying social calls to other communities, or a beloved image rescued from destruction and then revered on a private altar. A patron saint saves a village from outside attackers in one story—a story that has at least ten parallels in Sonora’s former mission communities. Details may vary, but the general narrative remains the same: when hostile nonbelievers attack the village, the patron saint of the church foils them.

Griffith uncovers the meanings behind the devotional uses of religious art from a variety of perspectives—from artist to audience, preservationist to community member. The religious artworks transcend art objects, Griffith believes, and function as ways of communicating between this world and the next. Setting the stage with a brief geography, Griffith introduces us to roadside shrines, artists, fiestas, saints, and miracles. Full-color images add to the pleasure of this delightful journey through the churches and towns of Sonora.
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A Scattering of Jades
Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs
Thelma D. Sullivan
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Long before Europeans came to America, the Aztecs created a unique culture based on myth and a love of language. Myths and poems were an important part of their culture, and a successful speech by a royal orator was pronounced "a great scattering of jades." A Scattering of Jades is an anthology of the best of Aztec literature, compiled by a noted anthropologist and a skilled translator of Nahuatl. It is a storehouse of myths, narratives, poems, and proverbs—as well as prayers and songs to the Aztec gods that provide insight into how these people's perception of the cosmos drove their military machine. Featuring a translation of the Mexicayotl—a work as important today for Mexico's concept of nationhood and ideology as it was at the time of the Conquest—these selections eloquently depict the everyday life of this ancient people and their unique worldview. A Scattering of Jades is an unsurpassed window on ancient Mesoamerican civilization and an essential companion for anyone studying Aztec history, religion, or culture.
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Scavengers
Stories
Becky Hagenston
University of Alaska Press, 2016
A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father—a seemingly rational man—believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has just survived a near-fatal accident flees to St. Petersburg, Russia, to wander through museums and palaces and simply try to forget. Hansel (yes, that Hansel), all grown up, tries to be a good father. A young girl begins to suspect that the séances being held in her basement just might not be as harmless as they seem.

These are the people and situations—where the familiar and bizarre intermix—that animate Becky Hagenston’s stories in Scavengers. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, characters find themselves faced with a choice: make sense of the past, or run from it. But Hagenston reminds us that even running can never be pure—so which parts of your past do you decide to hold on to? A brilliant collection from a master of short fiction, Scavengers is surprising, strange, and moving by turns—and wholly unforgettable.
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Scientific Practice
Theories and Stories of Doing Physics
Edited by Jed Z. Buchwald
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Most recent work on the nature of experiment in physics has focused on "big science"—the large-scale research addressed in Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks and Peter Galison's How Experiments End.

This book examines small-scale experiment in physics, in particular the relation between theory and practice. The contributors focus on interactions among the people, materials, and ideas involved in experiments—factors that have been relatively neglected in science studies.

The first half of the book is primarily philosophical, with contributions from Andrew Pickering, Peter Galison, Hans Radder, Brian Baigrie, and Yves Gingras. Among the issues they address are the resources deployed by theoreticians and experimenters, the boundaries that constrain theory and practice, the limits of objectivity, the reproducibility of results, and the intentions of researchers. The second half is devoted to historical case studies in the practice of physics from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These chapters address failed as well as successful experimental work ranging from Victorian astronomy through Hertz's investigation of cathode rays to Trouton's attempt to harness the ether. Contributors to this section are Jed Z. Buchwald, Giora Hon, Margaret Morrison, Simon Schaffer, and Andrew Warwick.

With a lucid introduction by Ian Hacking, and original articles by noted scholars in the history and philosophy of science, this book is poised to become a significant source on the nature of small-scale experiment in physics.
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Send Me Work
Stories
Katherine Karlin
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Winner, 2011 Balcones Fiction Prize

Unlike the heroines of domestic fiction, Katherine Karlin's women face their biggest challenges outside of the house. The characters in this debut collection encompass a broad range of contemporary American experiences: a struggling young woman in post-Katrina New Orleans persuades a welder to teach her his trade; an orchestra oboist hears a confession from a beloved teacher; an idealistic aerobics instructor decamps for revolution- era Nicaragua to pick coffee on a farming collective.

In each of these stories, Karlin offers rare insight into the place of work in the lives of women, her narrators keenly observant and attuned to the humor that arises when life doesn't turn out as planned. But even more remarkable is the fullness with which she renders characters who make us wonder how they've escaped the notice of other writers. In unadorned prose that evokes complete worlds with deceptive ease, Karlin shows us people immersed in the negotiations of survival, just at the edge of being able to make sense of their lives.
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Settlin’
Stories of Madison’s Early African American Families
Muriel Simms
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Only a fraction of what is known about Madison’s earliest African American settlers and the vibrant and cohesive communities they formed has been preserved in traditional sources. The rest is contained in the hearts and minds of their descendants. Seeing a pressing need to preserve these experiences, lifelong Madison resident Muriel Simms collected the stories of twenty-five African Americans whose families arrived, survived, and thrived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some struggled to find work, housing, and acceptance, they describe a supportive and enterprising community that formed churches, businesses, and social clubs—and frequently came together in the face of adversity and conflict. A brief history of African American settlement in Madison begins the book to set the stage for the oral histories.
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The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman
Stories
Courtney E. Morgan
University of Alabama Press, 2017
The nineteen stories in The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman track the splintered trajectory of the title character, tracing a chicken-scratch line of psychosexual development from childhood to old age.

In unfamiliar and sometimes bizarre narrative turns, the stories in Courtney E. Morgan’s The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman traverse the gamut of female/human experience, both grounded in reality and in the irreal. Two schoolgirls culminate their sexual exploration in a surreal act of cannibalism. A sister molds her dead brother’s body into a bird. A woman gives birth to balls of twine and fur (among other things). A sex worker engages a version of herself in a brothel of prostituted body parts.
 
Morgan tears apart a host of archetypes and tropes of femininity—dismembering them, skinning them, and then draping them one by one over her characters like fur coats—revealing them as ill-fitting, sometimes comedic, sometimes monstrous, and always insufficient, masks. Along with these skins of the cultural “feminine,” the collection tries on an array of genres—dissecting, mutating, and breeding them together—from fairy tale to horror, surrealism to confessional (non)fiction, and erotica to (un)creation myth.
 
The book weaves around questions of sexuality, identity, and subjectivity. Mutability, instability, and liminality are foregrounded, both in content and form, character and language—blurring the lines between birth and death, death and sex, tugging at the transitional spaces of adolescence and gestation. Even as its treatment is essentialized, gender is muddied and obscured. Morgan shows off her linguistic range in this collection, from sharp-as-nails prose to lyrical moments of poetic reach—probing the extremes of the human condition through both narrative line and language itself.
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Shake Terribly the Earth
Stories from an Appalachian Family
Sarah Beth Childers
Ohio University Press, 2013
Sarah Beth Childers grew up listening to stories. She heard them riding to school with her mother, playing Yahtzee in her Granny’s nicotine cloud, walking to the bowling alley with her grandfather, and eating casseroles at the family reunions she attended every year.

In a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling, Childers brings to life in these essays events that affected the entire region: large families that squeezed into tiny apartments during the Great Depression, a girl who stepped into a rowboat from a second-story window during Huntington’s 1937 flood, brothers who were whisked away to World War II and Vietnam, and a young man who returned home from the South Pacific and worked his life away as a railroad engineer.

Childers uses these family tales to make sense of her personal journey and find the joy and clarity that often emerge after the earth shakes terribly beneath us.
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The Shapes of Memory Loss
Stories, Poems and Essays from the University of Michigan Medical School and Health System
nan Barbas
Michigan Publishing Services, 2013
“Shapes of Memory Loss” is a collection of poetry, fiction, and narrative written by and about people with cognitive impairment or dementia. The authors, all affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System, come forward to share their personal experience as they “navigate this unknown territory”. These pieces offer the reader a view into the often isolated and not fully understood journey that those with memory loss and cognitive impairment are on. The book serves as an educational and support tool for anyone who has been touched by dementia, memory loss, and other related disorders. Healthcare professionals will gain information and insight about these disorders presented from the perspective of patients and families affected by them.
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Ships and Shipwrecks
Stories from the Great Lakes
Richard Gebhart
Michigan State University Press, 2022
From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. In the centuries since then, the records show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers. The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. Here Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes.
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Silence on the Mountain
Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
Daniel Wilkinson
Duke University Press, 2004
new in paperback
Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were “disappeared”) at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation’s manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country’s recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala’s Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets.

Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete that it verges on collective amnesia. The author’s great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories—dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking—that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.

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Sin Eaters
Stories
Caleb Tankersley
University of Alaska Press, 2022
Winner of the 2021 Permafrost Prize in fiction
 
Magical, heartfelt, and surprisingly funny, Sin Eaters paints a tumultuous picture of religion and repression while hinting at the love and connection that come with healing. The powerful stories in Caleb Tankersley’s debut collection illuminate the shadowy edges of the American Midwest, featuring aspects of religion, sex and desire, monsters and magic, and humor.
 
Tankersley’s characters—including swamp creatures looking for love, pothead pastors, ghosts obsessed with TV, and a Jesus made of rust—arrive at the crossroads of pleasure and hunger in a world that is equal parts playful, hopeful, and dark. In “Never Been More in Love” a man must come to terms with his wife’s degenerative illness. “Uncle Bob” explores suicide attempts as a family heirloom. And the titular story follows a woman who must accept her monstrous role to find redemption for herself and her small town.
 
Sin Eaters is a fight for authenticity in a world that is mysterious, muggy, and punctured by violence. This stunning collection full of complex themes will both challenge and delight.
 
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Singing for Our Lives
Stories from the Street Choirs
Campaign Choirs Writing Collective
Intellect Books, 2018

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Sleep Tight Satellite
Stories
Carol Guess
Tupelo Press, 2023
Central to Sleep Tight Satellite is the theme of queer chosen family. This positive form of connection contrasts with violent pseudo-communities formed by policing, government control, and technological surveillance. Characters struggle to survive the pandemic, but their survival skills were honed long before the Covid-19 outbreak. There’s a gritty realism to the odd jobs characters take to survive, and the ways they create loving communities of mutual aid.
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Slow Trains Overhead
Chicago Poems and Stories
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet’s eye, and capture what it’s really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O’Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city’s people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

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A Small Apocalypse
Stories
Laura Chow Reeve
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between.

In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.
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Small Bird Tell Me
Stories Of Greek Immigrants
Helen Papanikolas
Ohio University Press, 1994
Helen Papanikolas has been honored frequently for her work in ethnic and labor history. Among her many publications are Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, Peoples of Utah (ed.), and her parents' own story of migration, Emily-George. With Small Bird, Tell Me, she joins a long and ancient tradition of Greek story-tellers whose art informs and enriches our lives.
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Small Craft Warnings
Stories
Kate Braverman
University of Nevada Press, 1998
The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman’s characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman’s language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.
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Small in Real Life
Stories
Kelly Sather
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize 

Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo spies on his celebrity friend for an online tabloid. Down to her last dollar, a Hollywood hanger-on steals designer handbags from her dying friend’s bungalow. Blinded by grief, an LA judge atones after condescending to a failed actress on a date. When hunger for power, fame, and love betrays the senses, the characters in these nine stories must reckon with false choices and their search for belonging with the wrong people. Small in Real Life offers an insider’s view of California and the golden promises of possibility and redemption that have long made the West glitter. 
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Small Town America in World War II
War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania
Ronald E. Marcello
University of North Texas Press, 2014

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Snow Leopard
Stories from the Roof of the World
Don Hunter
University Press of Colorado, 2012
"Just recently, we once again traveled the high roads of snow leopard country, enjoying the beauty of Ladakh's iconic monasteries and watching blue sheep graze steep mountainsides. We saw no snow leopards but sensed their presence, feeling lucky and thrilled to be under the distant gaze of this magnificent cat. May you experience a similar feeling as you read about the snow leopard in this remarkable collection."
-Robert Bateman, from the foreword.

Like no other large cat, the snow leopard evokes a sense of myth and mysticism, strength and spirit shrouded in a snowy veil, seldom seen but always present. Giving a voice to the snow leopard, this collection of powerful first person accounts from an impressive cadre of scientist-adventurers grants readers a rare glimpse of this elusive cat and the remarkable lives of those personally connected to its future. These Stories from the Roof of the World resonate with adventure, danger, discovery, and most importantly hope for this magnificent big cat.

Very little has been written about this mystical creature. Its remote and rugged habitat among the mightiest collection of mountains on Earth, proclaimed "The Roof of the World" by awe-struck explorers, make it one of the most difficult and expensive animals to study. After a millennia thriving in peaceful isolation, human encroachment, poaching and climate change threaten the snow leopards survival. Speaking on behalf of the snow leopard, these heart-felt stories will inform and inspire readers, creating the vital connection needed to move people toward action in saving this magnificent cat. Contributors include: Ali Abutalip Dahashof, Som B. Ale, Avaantseren Bayarjargal, Yash Veer Bhatnagar, Joseph L. Fox, Helen Freeman, Darla Hillard, Don Hunter, Shafqat Hussain, Rodney Jackson, Jan E. Janecka, Mitchell Kelly, Ashiq Ahmad Khan, Nasier A. Kitchloo, Evgeniy P. Kashkarov, Peter Matthiessen, Kyle McCarthy, Tom McCarthy, George B. Schaller, and Rinchen Wangchuk

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Softie
Stories
Megan Howell
West Virginia University Press, 2024

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Some Kinds of Love
Stories
Steve Yates
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire.
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Songs At the River's Edge
Stories From a Bangladeshi Village
Katy Gardner
Pluto Press, 1997

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The Sound of Holding Your Breath
Stories
Natalie Sypolt
West Virginia University Press, 2018

The residents of The Sound of Holding Your Breath could be neighbors, sharing the same familiar landscapes of twenty-first-century Appalachia—lake and forest, bridge and church, cemetery and garden, diner and hair salon. They could be your neighbors—average, workaday, each struggling with secrets and losses, entrenched in navigating the complex requirements of family in all its forms.

Yet tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A brother, a family, and a community fail to confront the implications of a missing girl. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. And in the title story, the shame of rape ruptures more than a decade later.

Accidents and deaths, cons and cover-ups, abuse and returning veterans—Natalie Sypolt’s characters wrestle with who they are during the most trying situations of their lives.

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Sounding Thunder
The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow
Brian D. McInnes
University of Manitoba Press, 2016

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Sounding Thunder
The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow
Brian D. McInnes
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Francis Pegahmagabow (1889–1952), an Ojibwe of the Caribou clan, was born in Shawanaga First Nation, Ontario. Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he served overseas as a scout and sniper and became Canada’s most decorated Indigenous soldier. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, where he married and raised six children. He served his community as both Chief and Councillor and was a founding member of the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, the first national Indigenous political organization. In 1949 and 1950, he was elected the Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government.
 
Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historical insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay.
 
In Sounding Thunder, Brian McInnes provides a new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.
 
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Soundless Roar
Stories, Poems, and Drawings
Ava Kadishson Schieber
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Soundless Roar introduces a distinctive new voice to Holocaust literature. Ava Kadishson Schieber, author, poet, and artist, spent her teenage years hiding from the Nazis on a Serbian farm. Her cultured speech and city-bred body language could have betrayed her, so she was forced into near isolation. Schieber began drawing while in hiding, and she continues to express herself today with the same urgency. The drawings and writings in Soundless Roar are the culmination of many years of artistry. In her work, she shares her memories of loved ones killed in the Holocaust: they are "friendly ghosts" that will always be a part of her.

Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another. Her experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes Schieber's stories. In her preface, Phyllis Lassner writes: "The timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."
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The Spirit Bird
Stories
Kent Nelson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014
Winner of the 2014 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The flight path of The Spirit Bird traces many landscapes and different transitory lives. A young man scratches out a living from the desert; a woman follows a rarely seen bird in the far reaches of Alaska; a poor single mother sorts out her life in a fancy mountain town. Other protagonists yearn to cross a racial divide, keep developers from a local island, explore their sexuality, and mourn a lost loved one. The characters in this collection are compelled to seek beyond their own horizons, and as the stories unfold, the search becomes the expression of their desires. The elusive spirit bird is a metaphor for what we’ve lost, for what we hope for, and for what we don’t know about ourselves.
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Spoiling the Stories
The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction
Tamar Merin
Northwestern University Press, 2016
In Spoiling the Stories, Tamar Merin presents the as yet untold story of the rise of prose by Israeli women, while further exploring and expanding the gendered models of literary influence in modern Hebrew literature. The theoretical idea upon which this book is based is that of intersexual dialogue, a term that refers to the various literary strategies employed by Israeli female fiction writers expressing their voice within a male-dominated and (still) inherently Oedipal literary tradition. Spoiling the Stories focuses on intersexual dialogue as it evolved in the first three decades after the establishment of the state of Israel in the works of Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana Carmon, and Rachel Eytan. According to Merin, these three women writers were the most important in the history of modern Hebrew literature: each was a significant participant in the poetic development of her time.
 
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A Spy in the House of Loud
New York Songs and Stories
By Chris Stamey
University of Texas Press, 2018

Popular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, “the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it.” In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us back to the auteur explosion happening in New York clubs such as the Bowery’s CBGB as Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M., and other innovative bands were rewriting the rules. Just twenty-two years old and newly arrived from North Carolina, Stamey immersed himself in the action, playing a year with Alex Chilton before forming the dB’s and recording the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion, which still have an enthusiastic following.

A Spy in the House of Loud vividly captures the energy that drove the music scene as arena rock gave way to punk and other new streams of electric music. Stamey tells engrossing backstories about creating in the recording studio, describing both the inspiration and the harmonic decisions behind many of his compositions, as well as providing insights into other people’s music and the process of songwriting. Photos, mixer-channel and track assignment notes, and other inside-the-studio materials illustrate the stories. Revealing another side of the CBGB era, which has been stereotyped as punk rock, safety pins, and provocation, A Spy in the House of Loud portrays a southern artist’s coming-of-age in New York’s frontier abandon as he searches for new ways to break the rules and make some noise.

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Staff Development Strategies That Work!
Stories and Strategies from New Librarians
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2009

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Stone Baby
Stories
Michelle Sacks
Northwestern University Press, 2017
This debut collection of stories by Michelle Sacks features characters from many walks of life, scattered around the globe—a young Irish woman backpacking in India, an ambitious black South African businessman, a roving killer for hire, a former SS officer. Their stories usually lead them—and us—to pivotal events that reveal unexpected, hidden truths.

Working on a large canvas that encompasses the extremes of rural Africa and urban London, material poverty and the surfeit of privilege, Sacks writes stories peopled by characters whose lives occasionally crisscross, with a protagonist in one story playing a deceptively small role in another. The stories artfully illuminate the rich interconnections and clashes that occur as her characters strike out boldly, yet find themselves at the mercy of capricious waves of circumstance.

Stone Baby explores movement, loss, and reinvention in the lives of people who are in the wrong place, in the wrong body, perhaps in the wrong life—it encapsulates an engrossing and urgent message in our age of migration and dislocation. 
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The Stone Child
Stories
Stories by Gary Fincke
University of Missouri Press, 2003
A university maintenance worker and his wife decide to give birth to their anencephalic baby and to accept all the consequences that will follow. During summer vacation, a journalism student trysts with his girlfriend at her suspicious father’s house and soon witnesses the ultimate in paternal vengeance. A schoolboy faces peer violence while his mother struggles with cancer, each relying upon a hopelessly misplaced faith. In The Stone Child, Gary Fincke presents characters at turning points, where the effects of their decisions will ripple throughout the rest of their lives.
“Clean Shaven” depicts the last family vacation of a couple with two nearly grown children; in a few pivotal days, Reynolds, the father, struggles with, accepts, then embraces, his comradeship with his roguish, college-expelled son. In “Natural Borders,” the way a small-town sheriff handles the marital problems of a pair of eccentrics leads to a conflagration that will haunt him forever.
The eleven stories in The Stone Child are about families of varying kinds, what binds them, and what threatens to tear them apart. Under pressure, the characters strive to maintain whatever connections they have established with one another. In important ways, all of these stories, even those with exclusively adult characters, are coming-of-age tales, the characters arriving at those points in their lives when what they do and say will mark significant passages.
            Fincke brings great humanity to his characters and displays a sharp and wry sense of humor; his sense of place is strong, his stories richly textured, and his prose a joy to read. Primarily meditating on the viewpoints of male characters, Fincke gives us stories with beginnings that pull us right in and endings that won’t let us leave the world of the story until long after we have finished reading.
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Stories and Stone
Writing the Ancestral Pueblo Homeland
Reuben Ellis
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep . . . For many, such historic places evoke images of stone ruins, cliff dwellings, pot shards, and petroglyphs. For others, they recall ancestry. Remnants of the American Southwest's ancestral Puebloan peoples (sometimes known as Anasazi) have mystified and tantalized explorers, settlers, archaeologists, artists, and other visitors for centuries. And for a select group of writers, these ancient inhabitants have been a profound source of inspiration.

Collected here are more than fifty selections from a striking body of literature about the prehistoric Southwest: essays, stories, travelers' reports, and poems spanning more than four centuries of visitation. They include timeless writings such as John Wesley Powell's The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries and Frank Hamilton Cushing's "Life at Zuni," plus contemporary classics ranging from Colin Fletcher's The Man Who Walked Through Time to Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian to Edward Abbey's "The Great American Desert." Reuben Ellis's introduction brings contemporary insight and continuity to the collection, and a section on "reading in place" invites readers to experience these great works amidst the landscapes that inspired them. For anyone who loves to roam ancient lands steeped in mystery, Stories and Stone is an incomparable companion that will enhance their enjoyment.
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Stories as Equipment for Living
Last Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff
Barbara Myerhoff
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Barbara Myerhoff's groundbreaking work in reflexivity and narrative ethnography broke with tradition by focusing not on the raw ethnographic data, but on her interaction with those she studied. Myerhoff's unfinished projects, including her final talks on storytelling, ritual, and the "culture of aging and Yiddishkeit," offer a magisterial summary of her life's work.

"The beauty of Stories as Equipment for Living is the quality of being a compilation of rescued fragments, bits and pieces of a great master's writing and thinking that were coming towards synthesis but had never reached a finished form prior to her death. This collection is an examination of the place of narrative in human life, the synthetic nature of culture and the constant search for visibility particularly by those relegated for one reason or another to the margins. A thought-provoking book worthy of extended reflection."
---Jack Kugelmass, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Jewish Studies, University of Florida

"Stories as Equipment for Living achieves a nice balance between preserving Myerhoff's work in its original form and reconstructed contexts, but presenting it in a manner relevant to readers a generation after her death. The book documents Myerhoff's growing involvement with Jewish culture, the actual process of anthropological work through field notes, and the picture of how she always was bouncing the fine details of this combined professional and personal venture off the 'big questions' of anthropology in its broadest sense."
---Harvey E. Goldberg, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Israel

"These essays capture the rhythm of Barbara Myerhoff's words and her vivid and distinctive train of thought, bringing the reader into the classroom of one of anthropology's finest lecturers. As an anthropologist with a poet's gift for language, she utilizes the tools of ethnography and extraordinary powers of observation---a remarkable 'ethnographic eye'---to explore the outward expressions and inner lives of the Fairfax neighborhood of L.A. These stories are not only glorious introductions to the study of culture, but provide in their revelations a reason for studying it. They are required reading for anyone passionate to know what an anthropologist can teach us about communities and ultimately about ourselves."
---Steve Zeitlin, Director, City Lore: The New York Center for Urban Folk Culture

"Master of the third voice, the voice of collaboration, Myerhoff is at once a consummate listener and inspired storyteller. This book offers a rare and luminous opening into the working process and wisdom of one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth century."
---Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and coauthor of They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust

"Myerhoff and her collaborators have given her 'Hasidim,' her disciples old and new, a final and precious gift."
---Jonathan Boyarin, The Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas and author of Thinking in Jewish

Barbara Myerhoff was a renowned anthropologist who did pioneering work in gerontology, Jewish studies, folklore, and narrative anthropology. She is best known for her ethnography of and personal involvement with a community of elderly immigrant Jews in California. Her writings and lectures have had an enormous impact on all of these areas of study, and her books are widely celebrated, especially Number Our Days, whose companion documentary film won an Academy Award.

Marc Kaminsky is a psychotherapist, a poet, a writer, and the former codirector of the Institute on Humanities, Arts and Aging of the Brookdale Center on Aging.

Mark Weiss is a writer, an editor, a translator, and a poet; his books include the widely praised Across the Line/Al Otro Lado.

Deena Metzger is a novelist, a poet, and the founding codirector (with Marc Kaminsky) of the Myerhoff Center.

Thomas R. Cole is the Beth and Toby Grossman Professor and Director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and a Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University; his expertise lies in the history of aging and humanistic gerontology.

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Stories
Contemporary Southern Short Fiction
Donald Hays
University of Arkansas Press, 1989

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Stories from First-Year Composition
FYC Pedagogies that Foster Student Writing Identity and Agency
Jo-Anne Kerr
University Press of Colorado, 2020
The central value of first-year composition is often questioned, typically accompanied by characterizations of FYC as a “service” course. This collection counters those perceptions, sharing with readers a new FYC story, one that demonstrates a new “service” that the course provides to first-year students, a service that accommodates the realities of writing—that it is never just writing and that the writing process entails much more than plugging in the “right” words (that mean the same to everyone) in predetermined forms. The collection offers insights into effective FYC pedagogies and opportunities for readers to consider and think about their own teaching and their identities as FYC instructors. It offers prompts for reflection, suggestions for further reading, and multimedia components that can deepen and enrich our understandings of teaching FYC and instill a sense of agency for teaching FYC effectively and advocating for its value and relevance.
 
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Stories from Jonestown
Leigh Fondakowski
University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The saga of Jonestown didn’t end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, were elsewhere in Guyana on that day, and thousands more members of the movement still lived in California. Emmy-nominated writer Leigh Fondakowski, who is best known for her work on the play and HBO film The Laramie Project, spent three years traveling the United States to interview these survivors, many of whom have never talked publicly about the tragedy. Using more than two hundred hours of interview material, Fondakowski creates intimate portraits of these survivors as they tell their unforgettable stories.

Collectively this is a record of ordinary people, stigmatized as cultists, who after the Jonestown massacre were left to deal with their grief, reassemble their lives, and try to make sense of how a movement born in a gospel of racial and social justice could have gone so horrifically wrong—taking with it the lives of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters. As these survivors look back, we learn what led them to join the Peoples Temple movement, what life in the church was like, and how the trauma of Jonestown’s end still affects their lives decades later.

What emerges are portrayals both haunting and hopeful—of unimaginable sadness, guilt, and shame but also resilience and redemption. Weaving her own artistic journey of discovery throughout the book in a compelling historical context, Fondakowski delivers, with both empathy and clarity, one of the most gripping, moving, and humanizing accounts of Jonestown ever written.
 

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Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin
Pryse, Marjorie
Rutgers University Press, 1987
Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land."

In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman.
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Stories from the Heart
Missouri's African American Heritage
Compiled by Gladys Caines-Coggswell
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement Award, Governor's Humanities Award in Exemplary Community Achievement given by the Missouri Humanities Council, 2010

All along the river, from the front porches of Hannibal to the neighborhoods of St. Louis to the cotton fields of the Bootheel and west to Kansas City, stories are being told.

This collection of family stories and traditional tales brings to print down-home stories about all walks of African American life. Passed down from grandparents and great-grandparents, they have been lovingly gathered by Gladys Caines Coggswell as she visited Missouri communities and participated in storytelling events over the last two decades. These stories bring to life characters with uncommon courage, strength, will, and wit as they offer insight into African American experiences throughout the state’s history.

Often profound, always entertaining, some of these stories hark back to times barely remembered. Many tell of ordinary folks who achieved victories in the face of overwhelming odds. They range from recollections of KKK activities—recalling a Klan leader who owned property on which a black family lived as “the man who was always so nice to us”—to remembered differences between country and city schools and black schoolchildren introduced to Dick and Jane and Little Black Sambo. Stories from the Bootheel shed light on family life, sharecropping, and the mechanization of cotton culture, which in one instance led to a massive migration of rats as the first mechanical cotton pickers came in.

As memorable as the stories are the people who tell them, such as the author’s own “Uncle Pete” reporting on a duck epidemic or Evelyn Pulliam of Kennett telling of her resourceful neighbors in North Lilburn. Loretta Washington remembers sitting on her little wooden stool beside her great-grandmother’s rocking chair on the front porch in Wardell, mesmerized by stories—and the time when rocking chair and little wooden stool were moved inside and the stories stopped. Marlene Rhodes writes of her mother’s hero, Odie, St. Louis “Entrepreneur and English gentleman.”

Whether sharing previously unknown stories from St. Louis or betraying the secret of “Why Dogs Chase Cats,” this book is a rich repository of African American life. And if some of these tales seem unusual, the people remembering them will be the first to tell you: that’s the way it was. Coggswell preserves them for posterity and along with them an important slice of Missouri history.
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Stories from the Land
A Navajo Reader about Monument Valley
Robert S. McPherson
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Stories from the Land: A Navajo Reader about Monument Valley provides a traditional Navajo view of this iconic landscape and its people. Couched in the oral tradition of the elders, the reader is invited to view their history and culture through the eyes of those born at the turn of the twentieth century before massive inroads from the dominant culture began to erode the old ways. Each chapter follows a chronological sequence beginning with the creation of the world (specifically Monument Valley), teachings about the Anasazi, then later the Long Walk Period and incarceration at Fort Sumner. Subsequent chapters discuss traditional life and values, trading posts and their ties to the community, the devastation of livestock reduction, the film industry during the John Wayne/John Ford years, Anglo induced cultural change, uranium mining, and reaction to the current explosion of tourism. All of this as seen through the eyes of the Navajo people of Monument Valley and filtered through their unique cultural perspective. For the reader interested in authentic Navajo teachings, these people’s ties to the land, and a very different view of the world and how it functions, Stories from the Land offers fascinating insight that is fast disappearing from our world.
 
 
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Stories from the Round Barn
Jacqueline Dougan Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Using stories, anecdotes, history, and even veterinary science, Jacqueline Dougan Jackson recreates life on the Dougan Guernsey Farm Dairy, founded in 1911 by W.J. Dougan near Beloit, Wisconsin. A fascinating mix of biography, oral history, and creative nonfiction, STORIES FROM THE ROUND BARN is a moving tribute to the legacy of generations past. 53 photos and line drawings .
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Stories from the Sandbox
Reflections from children, teens and young adults living with Cancer and Blood Disorders
Jennifer Gretzema
Michigan Publishing Services, 2015
The images and stories in this book were created by patients and families living with Cancer and Blood Disorders. Their expressions, created in the sand and conveyed through the written word, provide insight into what it is like to live with health challenges. Sand tray therapy is a recognized therapeutic modality used with children and adults, providing a sacred space to process experiences using symbols instead of language. Sometimes meaning is further revealed through talking about a sand tray. Other times, it can remain a private expression that holds significance only to its creator. It is a helpful way for youth to process their past and present medical experience, help them set goals, and to teach others about their needs. Sand tray is a window into the thoughts, feelings, and coping styles of youth struggling with illness and hospitalization. Importantly, as youth with chronic medical illnesses often experience pain and discomfort as part of their treatment, the ability to have positive tactile experiences can be a very healing process. This collection of photos and personal stories, facilitated by the Child and Family Life Department, C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, was compiled so that other patients, their families, and their friends can share the authors’ journeys as we all continue to battle these difficult diseases.
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Stories from the Wreckage
A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks
John Odin Jensen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
Every shipwreck has a story that extends far beyond its tragic end. The dramatic tales of disaster, heroism, and folly become even more compelling when viewed as junction points in history—connecting to stories about the frontier, the environment, immigration, politics, technology, and industry. In Stories from the Wreckage, John Odin Jensen examines a selection of Great Lakes shipwrecks of the wooden age for a deeper dive into this transformative chapter of maritime history. He mines the archeological evidence and historic record to show how their tragic ends fit in with the larger narrative of Midwestern history. Featuring the underwater photography of maritime archeologist Tamara Thomsen, this vibrant volume is a must-have for shipping enthusiasts as well as anyone interested in the power of water to shape history.
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Stories From Under The Sky
John Madson
University of Iowa Press, 2006
In Stories from under the Sky, John Madson salutes the outdoor life. These thirty-six essays display his healthy respect for the forces of nature, without diminishing his wry awareness of the foibles of beast, bird, fish, and human.
In sections on mammals, the river, and birds, Madson acquaints readers with some real characters—not all of them four-footed! Some are old favorites: the raccoon, the otter, the fawn, and the badger. Others are less familiar—the demonic shrew, the indomitable dogfish, and the exotic blue heron. Even the “unloved” come in for their share of attention: toads, waterbugs, wasps, and turkey buzzards. Madson has a yarn to spin about each one. Where else would you find an essay on “Snake Liars”?

Whatever the topic, Madson’s love of nature shines through, be it coon hunting or an explanation of the incredible bird machine. His obvious affection is tempered with the recognition that not everything “natural” is a pretty sight. All of which leaves readers with a better understanding of life under the sky. 

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Stories in a New Skin
Approaches to Unuit Literature
Keavy Martin
University of Manitoba Press, 2012

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Stories in Red and Black
Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs
By Elizabeth Hill Boone
University of Texas Press, 2000

Winner, Arvey Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2001
Honorable Mention, Honorable Mention, George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, Art Libraries Society of North America, 2001

The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today.

This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos.

Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

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Stories in Stone
The Enchanted Gem Carvings of Vasily Konovalenko
Stephen E. Nash
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Vasily Konovalenko’s unique, dynamic, and theatrical sculptures stand alone in the gem-carving world—bawdy but not salacious, political but not diplomatic, boisterous and exuberant yet occasionally sensitive. Stories in Stone offers the first comprehensive treatment of the life of this little-known Russian artist and the remarkable history of his wonderful sculptures.
 
Part art catalogue and part life history, Stories in Stone tells the tale of Konovalenko’s impressive works, explaining their conception, creation, and symbolism. Each handcrafted figure depicts a scene from life in the Soviet Union—a bowman hunting snow geese, a woman reposing in a hot spring surrounded by ice, peasants spinning wool, a pair of gulag prisoners sawing lumber—painstakingly rendered in precious stones and metals. The materials used to make the figurines are worth millions of dollars, but as cultural artifacts, the sculptures are priceless. Author Stephen Nash draws upon oral history and archival research to detail the life of their creator, revealing a rags-to-riches and life-imitates-art narrative full of Cold War intrigue, Communist persecution, and capitalist exploitation.
 
Augmented by Richard M. Wicker’s exquisite and revelatory photographs of sixty-five Konovalenko sculptures from museums, state agencies, and private collections around the world, Stories in Stone is a visually stunning glimpse into a unique corner of Russian art and cultural history, the craft and science of gem carving, and the life of a Russian artist and immigrant who loved people everywhere.
 
Co-published with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, home to the most significant collection of Russian gem-carving sculptures by Vasily Konovalenko in the world.
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Stories, Myths, Chants, and Songs of the Kuna Indians
Compiled, edited, and translated by Joel Sherzer
University of Texas Press, 2004

The Kuna Indians of Panama, probably best known for molas, their colorful appliqué blouses, also have a rich literary tradition of oral stories and performances. One of the largest indigenous groups in the South American tropics, the majority of them (about 70,000) reside in Kuna Yala, a string of island and mainland villages stretching along the Caribbean coast. It is here that Joel Sherzer lived among them, photographing and recording their verbal performances, which he feels are representative of the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the oral literary traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America.

This book is organized into three types of texts: humorous and moralistic stories; myths and magical chants; and women's songs. While quite different from one another, they share features characteristic of Kuna literature as a whole, including appreciation of their environment and a remarkable knowledge of their plants and animals; a belief in spirits as an important component of their world in curing, magic, and aesthetics; and, especially, great humor and a sense of play.

Vividly illustrated by a Kuna artist and accompanied by photographs that lend a sense of being present at the performances, the texts provide readers with a unique aesthetic perspective on this rich culture while preserving an endangered and valuable indigenous oral tradition.

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Stories No One Hopes Are about Them
A. J. Bermudez
University of Iowa Press, 2022
2023 Lammy Award for Bisexual Fiction, shortlist

At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.
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Stories of a Forest Ranger
Tales of Life in the U.S. Forest Service
Pete Griffin
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020
Stories about the life of a Forest Ranger, the habitat and animals he has worked to protect, together with no small number of self-effacing humorous anecdotes. This book of stories draws on the author's thirty years in the US Forest service, including encounters with bears, elk, moose, and that strangest of animals, humans. Laced with happy humor, the stories inform and educate while they entertain. Adventures have come along with the work and Griffin is a natural storyteller.
 
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Stories Of An Imaginary Childhood
Melvin Jules Bukiet
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

In Stories of an Imaginary Childhood Melvin Jules Bukiet inscribes the world that might have been his own if not for the catastrophe that destroyed most of Jewish life in eastern Europe during the 1940s. Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and the rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social, and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down.

"Bukiet proves that he is an expert at the [short story] form. His stories lift and soar, encompassing a world of truth in just a few pages. His characters have flesh and life. . . . Bukiet’s topics are varied and universal: first love, growing up, trying to get along with people who are different. Each of these is approached with great humor and a deep respect for life experience."—Daniel Neman, Richmond News Leader

"Jewish-American fiction of a new order, one able to bring the best that has been thought and said about voice and literary texture to the service of a world with richer meaning and a deeper resonance."—Sanford Pinsker, Midstream

"Bukiet is enchanting, original, and thoroughly irresistible in any disguise. Stories of an Imaginary Childhood is an extraordinary achievement, an immensely enjoyable collection of truly remarkable tales."—Susan Miron, Miami Herald

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Stories of Becoming
Demystifying the Professoriate for Graduate Students in Composition and Rhetoric
Claire Lutkewitte
Utah State University Press, 2021
Based on findings from a multiyear, nationwide study of new faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition, Stories of Becoming provides graduate students—and those who train them—with specific strategies for preparing for a career in the professoriate. Through the use of stories, the authors invite readers to experience their collaborative research processes for conducting a nationwide survey, qualitative interviews, and textual analysis of professional documents.
 
Using data from the study, the authors offer six specific strategies—including how to manage time, how to create a work/life balance, and how to collaborate with others—that readers can use to prepare for the composition and rhetoric job market and to begin their careers as full-time faculty members. Readers will learn about the possible responsibilities they may take on as new faculty, particularly those that go beyond teaching, research, service, and administration to include navigating the politics of higher education and negotiating professional identity construction. And they will also engage in activities and answer questions designed to deepen their understanding of the field and help them identify their own values and desired career trajectory.
 
Stories of Becoming demystifies the professoriate, compares what current new faculty have to say of their job expectations with the realities that students might face when on the job, and brings to light the invisible, behind-the-scenes work done by new faculty. It will be invaluable to graduate students, those who teach graduate students, new faculty, and hiring administrators in composition and rhetoric.
 
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Stories of Capitalism
Inside the Role of Financial Analysts
Stefan Leins
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The financial crisis and the recession that followed caught many people off guard, including experts in the financial sector whose jobs involve predicting market fluctuations. Financial analysis offices in most international banks are supposed to forecast the rise or fall of stock prices, the success or failure of investment products, and even the growth or decline of entire national economies. And yet their predictions are heavily disputed. How do they make their forecasts—and do those forecasts have any actual value?
 
Building on recent developments in the social studies of finance, Stories of Capitalism provides the first ethnography of financial analysis. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in a Swiss bank, Stefan Leins argues that financial analysts construct stories of possible economic futures, presenting them as coherent and grounded in expert research and analysis. In so doing, they establish a role for themselves—not necessarily by laying bare empirically verifiable trends but rather by presenting the market as something that makes sense and is worth investing in. Stories of Capitalism is a nuanced look at how banks continue to boost investment—even in unstable markets—and a rare insider’s look into the often opaque financial practices that shape the global economy.
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Stories of Chicago
George Ade
University of Illinois Press, 1941
The stories of George Ade are energetic, detailed, and affectionate slices of the social life of Chicago in the Gay Nineties. Originally appearing in the Chicago Record between 1893 and 1900, they range from candid character sketches and snapshots of everyday street scenes to fiction and fantasies drawing on the endless stream of inspiration the bustling city provided.
 
Ade was hailed by such contemporaries as Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and William Dean Howells, and the stories contained in this volume showcase the full spectrum of his skills: his keen eye for the absurd and sublime moments of daily urban life, his ear for the vernacular, his shrewd understanding of the Midwestern character, and above all his firm belief that all of human life was worthy literary subject matter.
 
This volume includes many lively and evocative drawings by John T. McCutcheon, Ade's college classmate and friend who came to be known as "the Dean of American Cartoonists." Also included is an introduction by Franklin J. Meine, incorporating interviews with Ade and letters from John McCutcheon, Mark Twain, and Ade's managing editor, Charles H. Dennis.
 
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Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Shane White
Harvard University Press, 2002

Stories of Freedom in Black New York recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to observe the style of black men and women, to watch their public behavior, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen.

Taking center stage in this story is the African Company, a black theater troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often of disgust by many whites for whom the theater's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation.

Stories of Freedom in Black New York brilliantly intertwines black theater and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites, and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.

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The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen
A New Translation from the Danish
Hans Christian Andersen
Duke University Press, 2005
On the bicentennial of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth, this collection takes Andersen out of the nursery and places him squarely in the literary pantheon. While Andersen’s tales continue to seize the imagination with their singular blend of simplicity, eccentricity, and charm, English-language readers have until now had to content themselves with inaccurate retellings and inadequate translations. Diana Crone Frank, a Danish novelist and linguist, and Jeffrey Frank, a novelist and editor at the New Yorker, offer a much-needed modern translation.

In this collection are twenty-two tales that best represent Andersen’s literary legacy, including such classics as “The Little Mermaid,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Thumbelisa,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as well as largely unfamiliar stories like “By the Outermost Sea.” Illuminating notes clarify references in the tales. And in an introductory essay, the Franks explore the writer and his times, placing the enigmatic and often bizarre figure of Andersen among his literary contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens and Søren Kierkegaard, with whom he crossed paths; and they bring to life Andersen’s fascinating relationship with the United States. Illustrated with the delicate and beautiful drawings that accompanied the original Danish publication, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen will delight readers of all ages.

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Stories of Nation
Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience
Christopher Hebert
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

Throughout American history there has been an oddly close relationship between the seductive appeals of narrative fiction and those of political rhetoric and advocacy. The aim of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience is to explore what political narratives and the cultural poetics behind them reveal about the way our personal and intimate lives are deeply connected with the public arena and the political process.

The first section of the book, “The Politics of Fictions,” contains essays focused on works of fiction consciously dramatizing the political realm. The second group of contributions, “The Fictions of Politics,” explores structures and motifs from the narrative arts in discourses of American political life, and the interactions of public institutions and policy with forms of fictional representation, from novels to popular music and TV drama.

The essays presented here broaden the conversation in American literary studies about what constitutes “the political” in literature and culture by reintroducing the dimension of institutional or representative politics. Likewise, Stories of Nation aims to repair the lines of communication between the idea that all fiction is political, and the view that political speech is a subgenre of literature all the more in need of examination in a highly polarized society.

The range of perspectives in Stories of Nation will engage students of literature, popular culture, and politics alike.

MARTIN GRIFFIN is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (2009) and co-author, with Constance DeVereaux, of Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (2013).

CHRISTOPHER HEBERT is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee and is former senior acquisitions editor at the University of Michigan Press. He is the author of the novels Angels of Detroit (2016) and The Boiling Season (2012).

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Stories of New Jersey
Stockton, Frank
Rutgers University Press, 1961
Frank R. Stockton's stories recreate the events and moods of New Jersey from the days of the Lenni-Lenape Indians and the Dutch colonists to the expolits of New Jerseyans in the Mexican War. Here are the colorful historical and legendary figures of New Jersey's past: colonials who fought, traded with, and were captured by Indians; the perpetrators of New Jersey's own Tea Party; revolutionary heroes and heroines; frontiersmen, early inventors, schoolmasters, doctors, and privateersmen. Some of their stories have been told many times, but rarely as well. These tales are reproduced exactly as they first appeared in 1896, in a book which remained in print until 1945 and which has remained so popular over the years that it has in itself become a part of New Jersey's history. The book's turn-of-the-century flavor is enhanced by many illustrations, including drawings by twenty-one artists that provide realistic detail in the style of a bygone era.
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Stories of Oka
Land, Film, and Literature
Isabelle St-Amand
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

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Stories of Open
Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry
Emily Ford
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2021
Peer review processes in scholarly publishing are often hidden behind layers of opacity, leaving authors—and even reviewers—with many questions about the process. Open peer review is one way to improve the practice. It can shorten the time between manuscript submission and publication, hold reviewers accountable for their work, make more apparent the hidden labor of reviewing and editing, allow for collaborative discourse between authors and reviewers, and more. Even with these benefits, open peer review is not widely accepted or understood. Few academic librarians have experienced it, and each implementation can be different; anything open is highly nuanced and contextual. Ultimately, when we discuss “open,” we must discuss the stories around it. What is the aim? What are the pitfalls? What are the gains? And are we trying to simply replicate a broken system instead of reinventing it?

Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry examines the methods and processes of peer review, as well as the stories of those who have been through it. Eleven chapters are divided into three parts:

• Part 1: Orientation. This section offers a conceptual frame for the book, providing details about narrative inquiry as a methodology and the author’s worldview and research approach.
• Part 2: The Stories (The Story Middle). What is the standard experience of peer review in our field? This section shares stories told from a variety of viewpoints and roles—author, editor, and referee—and explores how these roles interact, the tension between them, and the duality and sometimes multiplicity of roles experienced by any one individual.
• Part 3: Coda. These four chapters tie the stories to the idea of open and look in detail at the research method, as well as imagine how we might move forward—reflecting on our past stories to create future ones.

When we open ourselves to others’ experiences, we reflect on our own. Stories of Open offers questions for reflection at the end of many chapters in order to assist in the continued exploration of your own experiences with peer review, and encourages the use of these reflections in creating new and improved peer review methods.

This book is also available as an open access edition at 
https://bit.ly/ACRLStoriesofOpen
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Stories of Our Lives
Memory, History, Narrative
Frank de Caro
Utah State University Press, 2013
In Stories of Our Lives Frank de Caro demonstrates the value of personal narratives in enlightening our lives and our world. We all live with legends, family sagas, and anecdotes that shape our selves and give meaning to our recollections. Featuring an array of colorful stories from de Caro’s personal life and years of field research as a folklorist, the book is part memoir and part exploration of how the stories we tell, listen to, and learn play an integral role in shaping our sense of self. 
 
De Caro’s narrative includes stories within the story: among them a near-mythic capture of his golden-haired grandmother by Plains Indians, a quintessential Italian rags-to-riches grandfather, and his own experiences growing up in culturally rich 1950s New York City, living in India amid the fading glories of a former princely state, conducting field research on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico, and coming home to a battered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
 
Stories of Our Lives shows that our lives are interesting, and that the stories we tell—however particular to our own circumstances or trivial they may seem to others—reveal something about ourselves, our societies, our cultures, and our larger human existence.
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Stories of Our Living Ephemera
Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907
Emily Legg
Utah State University Press, 2023
Stories of Our Living Ephemera recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.
 
Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.
 
By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.
 
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Stories Of Raymond Carver
A Critical Study
Kirk Nesset
Ohio University Press, 1994
Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the “godfather of minimalism,” has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 Kenyon Review story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver’s stories.) Drawing on representative tales from each of Carver’s major volumes of fiction, Nesset’s critical exploration leads us deep into the heart of Carver country, an eerie post-industrial world of low-rent survivors. In the earliest fiction, the politics of sex are tied to politics of fortune and chance; marriage as an institution is capricious and unsettling. In later stories, the gesture of telling stories provides an escape for certain of these characters, metaphorically and otherwise; and in Carver’s last stories, subtle strategies of language offer a similar, if more tentative release. From beginning to end, Carver’s distinctive, highly imitative style is intrinsic to his subject and is crucial in presenting what Carver called the “dark side of Reagan’s America.”

In this comprehensive study of Carver, Nesset discusses the relationship of minimalism and postmodern trends and the rise of new realism. By locating Carver in the gallery of American letters, Nesset shows him to be at once more simple and more complex than we might have believed, skillfully laying the groundwork for Carver studies to come.
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Stories of Survival
Arkansas Farmers during the Great Depression
William Downs Jr.
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
Through dozens of in-depth interviews representing all sections of the state, farm families recall their best times, their worst times, and day-to-day experiences such as chores, washing, bathing, clothes making, medical care, home remedies, spiritual life, courtship and marriage, and school experiences. Their stories reveal how ordinary men and women, frequently living in abject poverty, endured cataclysmic natural disasters and economic collapse with extraordinary courage, faith, resourcefulness, and a good sense of humor.
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Stories of the House People
Told by Peter Vandall and Joe Douquette
Freda Ahenakew
University of Manitoba Press, 1987

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Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis
Thomas Christensen
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
 
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Stories
Screen Narrative in the Digital Era
Edited by Ian Christie and Annie van der Oever
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Stories are perceived as central to modern life. Not only in narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, theater, but also in social media. Telling/having "a story" is widely deemed essential, in business as well as in social life. Does this mark an intensification of what has always been part of human cultures; or has the realm of "story" expanded to dominate twenty-first century discourse? Addressing stories is an obvious priority for the Key Debates series, and Volume 7, edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, identifies new phenomena in this field — complex narration, puzzle films, transmedia storytelling — as well as new approaches to understanding these, within narratology and bio-cultural studies. Chapters on such extended television series as Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones and Dickensian explore distinctively new forms of screen storytelling in the digital age.With contributions by Vincent Amiel, Jan Baetens, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, John Ellis, Miklós Kiss, Eric de Kuyper, Sandra Laugier, Luke McKernan, José Moure, Roger Odin, Annie van den Oever, Melanie Schiller, Steven Willemsen, Robert Ziegler.
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Stories, Songs, and Stretches!
Creating Playful Storytimes with Yoga and Movement
Katie Scherrer
American Library Association, 2017

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Strange Philadelphia
Stories from the City of Brotherly Love
Lou Harry
Temple University Press, 1995

Most history books paint Philadelphia as a place of revolutionary greatness, but there exists a forgotten, alternative history of the City of Brotherly Love. For example, did you know that

when Ben Franklin was Deputy Postmaster General for the American colonies, he ignored rival printers' requests for mailing priveleges. Instead, he loaded down the mail carriers with his own papers and enjoyed the use of a private delivery system that cut off the competition.


the Slinky was created by a marine engineer stationed in Philadelphia, who later became an evangelist and Bible salesman in Bolivia, leaving behind his wife, his children, and the Slinky fortune.


50,000 people gathered in Fairmount Park in 1953 hoping to see a vision of the Virgin Mary, who three schoolgirls claimed to have seen near a park bush. Though the Blessed Mother never did appear, visitors to the site left behind offerings of rosaries, flowers, crutches, and over $6,000.


while 11,000 spectators sat in the Spectrum waiting for the Ice Capades to begin, 32-mile-an-hour winds blew a chunk of the roof off the city's newly constructed stadium.


Find these and a hundred more "strange" and fascinating stories in this collection of vignettes. These pieces of the past can't be found in history books—they are surprising side bars to the famous and not-so-famous events and people of historical Philadelphia.

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A Strong and Steady Pulse
Stories from a Cardiologist
Gregory D. Chapman, MD
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A seasoned cardiologist shares his experiences, opinions, and recommendations about heart disease and other cardiac problems

A Strong and Steady Pulse: Stories from a Cardiologist provides an insider’s perspective on the field of cardiovascular medicine told through vignettes and insights drawn from Gregory D. Chapman’s three decades as a cardiologist and professor of medicine. In twenty-six bite-sized chapters based on real-life patients and experiences, Chapman provides an overview of contemporary cardiovascular diseases and treatments, illuminating the art and science of medical practice for lay audiences and professionals alike.

With A Strong and Steady Pulse, Chapman provides medical students and general readers with a better understanding of cardiac disease and its contributing factors in modern life, and he also provides insights on the diagnostic process, medical decision making, and patient care. Each chapter presents a patient and their initial appearance, described in clear detail as Chapman gently walks us through his evaluation and the steps he and his associates take to determine the underlying problem. Chapman’s stories are about real people dealing with life and death situations—including the physicians, nurses, medical students, and other team members who try to save lives in emergent, confusing conditions.

The sometimes hard-won solutions to these medical challenges combine new technology and cutting-edge research together with insights drawn from Chapman’s past experiences as an intern and resident in Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the 1990s, and in practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions addressed include the recognition and management of heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular heart disease, cardiac transplantation, broken heart syndrome, hypertension, and the depression some people experience after a heart attack, as well as related topics like statin drugs, the Apple Watch ECG feature, and oral anticoagulants. Finally, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of normal hospital routines as the pandemic unfolded is addressed in an epilogue.

 
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Sunlit Riffles and Shadowed Runs
Stories of Fly Fishing in America
Kent Cowgill
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
Ranging from the riotously comic to the nostalgic, edgy, and suspenseful, these sixteen stories offer richly developed and engaging portraits of characters across the spectrum of life, all absorbed by the thrill of fly fishing. A marriage betrayal on a trout stream in the north woods, a young boy’s coming of age as a fly fisherman in the Black Hills of South Dakota, angler rage on the redfish flats of the Gulf of Mexico, an epic quest for bullish rainbows in Montana’s celebrated Bighorn, the quiet mystique of Wisconsin’s Brule River, the intensity of combat fishing on a salmon pool in the Pacific Northwest, these are just a few of the fascinating tales of fly fishing offered in Sunlit Riffles and Shadowed Runs. Rendered in sparkling prose that will resonate with every angler, this collection will also delight any reader who enjoys outdoor pastimes.
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The Surprising Place
Stories
Malinda McCollum
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
A synchronized swimming coach pops pills during practice, a bagpiper cold-cocks a hawk, and an orphan puts her fist through a window, discovering in the engine noise of a jet passing overhead, the perfect witness to her inner pain. In this debut collection from prizewinning short story writer Malinda McCollum, people adrift in the American Midwest struggle to find their way in the world, with few signposts for guidance. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, over the expanse of several decades, these twelve stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories offer confrontation and consolation in equal measure.
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Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits
Stories of the Great Lakes
Selected and Edited by Victoria Brehm
University of Michigan Press, 1991

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Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing
Poems and Stories
Luci Tapahonso
University of Arizona Press, 1993
In this cycle of poetry and stories, Navajo writer Luci Tapahonso shares memories of her home in Shiprock, New Mexico, and of the places and people there. Through these celebrations of birth, partings, and reunions, this gifted writer displays both her love of the Navajo world and her resonant use of language. Blending memoir and fiction in the storytelling style common to many Indian traditions, Tapahonso's writing shows that life and death are intertwined, and that the Navajo people live with the knowledge that identity is formed by knowing about the people to whom one belongs. The use of both English and Navajo in her work creates an interplay that may also give readers a new way of understanding their connectedness to their own inner lives and to other people.

Luci Tapahonso shows how the details of everyday life—whether the tragedy of losing a loved one or the joy of raising children, or simply drinking coffee with her uncle—bear evidence of cultural endurance and continuity. Through her work, readers may come to better appreciate the different perceptions that come from women's lives.
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