Results by title
905 books match the query 'Literary' and 81 start with a
Against a Darkening Sky
Janet Lewis
Ohio University Press, 1985
Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.
Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.
Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.
Against the Flood
Ma Van Khang
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Agents and Patients
A NovelAnthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1936
In Agents and Patients, we return to London with the newly wealthy, memorably named Blore-Smith: an innocent, decent enough chap . . . and a drip. Vulnerable to the machinations of those with less money and more lust, Blore-Smith falls victim to two con artists whose ploys carry him through to the art galleries and whorehouses of Paris, Berlin, and beyond.
Written from a vantage point both high and necessarily narrow, Powell’s early novels nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and what makes people behave as they do. Filled with eccentric characters and piercing insights, Powell’s work is achingly hilarious, human, and true.
Air Raid
Alexander Kluge
Seagull Books, 2014
A powerful work by the heralded writer, this collection is a touchstone event in German literature of the post-war era.
On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt. A mid-sized cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance, Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the ground.
All Coyote's Children
Bette Lynch Husted
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Still fragile, a bereft Annie returns to the ranch, where she is befriended by Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor. Leona, as it turns out, has a long connection to the family that even Jack never knew about. At the time of his disappearance, Jack had been grappling with his family’s legacy—with the conflicts and consequences of white settlement of native ground. Three generations before he was born, the family ranch was taken from the Umatilla reservation through the Allotment Act. Jack’s mother died when he was six, but his father’s stern presence still cast a shadow on the land.
“Survival is hard sometimes,” Leona says, but with her help, Annie is able to bring Riley home from rehab and begin the work of healing their small family, learning, season by season, how to go on living without Jack. Leona, Riley’s friends Alex and Mattie, and old neighbors Gus and Audrey become a larger family for Annie as they share the stories that connect them—long-silenced stories from both cultures that could solve the mystery of Jack’s disappearance.
In prose that is lyrical and clear-eyed, All Coyote’s Children weaves an unforgettable tale of cultures and families caught in the inescapable web of who they are and what they have inherited.
All Night Movie
Alicia Borinsky
Northwestern University Press, 2002
All That Rises
A NovelAlma García
University of Arizona Press, 2023
What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
All Things Tending towards the Eternal
A NovelKathleen Lee
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Traveling through China in 1989, not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Fanny hopes to make sense of her brother Bruno’s death in a motorcycle accident by finding a woman with whom he had exchanged letters. On her journey Fanny’s fate becomes entwined with a handsome British rogue, an American of Russian-Cuban descent returning to Tashkent, and two Chinese men—one who loves Charles Dickens, the other a budding, entrepreneurial con man—struggling to find their way in a country undergoing tumultuous transformation. Kathleen Lee’s debut novel explores the tension between the allure of the unfamiliar that draws us to distant lands and its unbidden tendency to reveal us to ourselves. With its rollicking sense of humor and slyly lyrical voice, as well as an extraordinary deftness in the rendering of place, All Things Tending towards the Eternal is an unforgettable ride.
All the Roads Are Open
The Afghan JourneyAnnemarie Schwarzenbach
Seagull Books, 2011
All the Tiny Beauties
A NovelJenn Scott
Acre Books, 2022
All the Tiny Beauties begins with a kitchen fire that sends the reclusive Webster Jackson to the home of his new neighbor, Colleen, who discovers him on her doorstep wearing a lacy peignoir, his house in flames. Unwilling to take responsibility for the lonely eccentric, Colleen reaches out to Webb’s estranged daughter, Debra. She also helps him find a live-in companion, a young adult reeling from the loss of her childhood friend.
Moving among perspectives and generations, we see the longings and vulnerabilities that drive and impede these characters as their stories intertwine—Webb’s first love clashing with his last; Colleen embarking on a secret affair with Debra; the older Webb and his young housemate, Hannah, forming a bond over tragedy, guilt, and his passion for baking.
Confronting the many ways they’ve failed others as well as themselves, Webb, Colleen, Hannah, and Debra slowly find ways forward and ways out. While exploring the fragile nature of our connections to one another, All the Tiny Beauties asks larger questions about the constraints society imposes that warp and wound, leading us to deny those things that make us wholly ourselves.
Almost Family
35th Anniversary EditionRoy Hoffman
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Nebraska Waters is black. Vivian Gold is Jewish. In an Alabama kitchen where, for nearly thirty years, they share cups of coffee, fret over their children, and watch the civil rights movement unfold out their window, and into their homes, they are like family—almost.
As Nebraska makes her way, day in and out, to Vivian’s house to cook and help tend the Gold children, the “almost” threatens to widen into a great divide. The two women’s husbands affect their relationship, as do their children, Viv Waters and Benjamin Gold, born the same year and coming of age in a changing South. The bond between the women both strengthens and frays.
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award and Alabama Library Association Award for fiction, Roy Hoffman’s Almost Family explores the relationship that begins when one person goes to work for another, and their friendship—across lines of race, income, and religion—develops degrees of understanding yet growing misunderstanding. This edition commemorates the 35th anniversary of the book’s publication and features a foreword by the author and includes a discussion guide for readers and book clubs.
Almost Like Spring
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2014
Always Crashing in the Same Car
A Novel after David BowieLance Olsen
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A prismatic, imaginative exploration of David Bowie’s last days
An intricate collage-novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination, Always Crashing in the Same Car is a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives—the protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowie’s orbit.
At its core beat questions about how we read others, how we are read by them, how (if at all) we can tell the past with something even close to accuracy, what it feels like being the opposite of young and still committed to bracing, volatile innovation.
Set during Bowie’s last months—those during which he worked on his acclaimed final album Black Star while battling liver cancer and the consequences of a sixth heart attack—yet washing back and forth across his exhilarating, kaleidoscopically costumed life, Always Crashing in the Same Car enacts a poetics of impermanence, of art, of love, of truth, even of death, that apparently most permanent of conditions.
American Homes
Ryan Ridge
University of Michigan Press, 2014
From the nostalgia of front porches to the hidden mysteries of basements, Ridge turns ordinary spaces into insightful meditations on homeownership, personal identity, and cultural expectations. American Homes is as much an architectural guidebook as it is a critique of consumerism, presenting a vivid portrait of how we live and the structures that define us. The result is a thought-provoking, humorous, and occasionally surreal commentary on what it means to call a place "home" in America.
An Incomplete History of the American West
Storiesurza
University of Nevada Press, 2026
Rooted in the traditions of Western literature but unafraid to challenge them, author Gabriel Urza brings a fresh and unflinching perspective to stories that span race, class, and time. Unsentimental yet deeply humane, An Incomplete History of the American West asks readers to reconsider what the West truly means—and why the stories we tell about it still matter.
An Old Carriage with Curtains
Ghassan Zaqtan
Seagull Books, 2023
An Old Carriage with Curtains is the third and final book in a masterful trilogy of novels encompassing the history of the people of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya. The novels trace the wandering trajectories and inner lives of characters connected to this village across decades, as well as the vicissitudes of historical change and displacement in the land. Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of tortuous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection.
The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.
And Never Said a Word
Heinrich Boll
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Angels and Outcasts
An Anthology of Deaf Characters in LiteratureTrent Batson
Gallaudet University Press, 1985
Another Life and The House on the Embankment
Yuri Trifonov
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Widely regarded as a major writer of his generation, Yuri Trifonov tolerated attack and admiration in the Soviet Union. His novellas are celebrated as being in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. In "Another Life," a woman suddenly widowed attempts to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband, and to understand their life together. "The House on the Embankment" is the story of an academic opportunist who rises to apparatchik but suffers the oppression of society, friends, and most of all his inability to make decisions.
Answerable Style
The Idea of the Literary in Medieval EnglandFrank Grady and Andrew Galloway
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Antonina
Evgeniya Tur
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Any Time But This Time
Adam Peterson
The Ohio State University Press, 2026
The stories of Adam Peterson’s funny, daring, and deliciously outrageous debut Any Time But This Time span our history and confront our future. From the first woman on Earth grieving among the Neanderthals to the last man alive nursing the dying flame of love, this collection moves across human history and geography to reveal us at our best and lament our worst. Jesus declares himself a superhero. Lost sailors launch an ill-fated attempt to colonize medieval England. A young woman fights to commandeer the founding of America. A pioneer’s wife satisfies her endless sexual appetite in barren Nebraska. Children hurtle into space to confront alien life—even though they really, really just want love. For fans of George Saunders and Kelly Link, these voices, unbound by time and undaunted by consequence, show us that there are truly no limits to what a short story—so long as it centers our relentless human heart—can do.
Apostoloff
Sibylle Lewitscharoff
Seagull Books, 2019
“Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation.”
Two sisters travel to Sofia—in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile—to bury their less-than-beloved father. Like tourists, they are chauffeured by the ever-charming Ruben Apostoloff—one sister in the back seat, one in the passenger seat, one sharp-tongued and aggressive, the other polite and considerate. In a caustic voice, Apostoloff shows them the treasures of his beloved country: the peacock-eye pottery (which contains poisonous dye), the Black Sea coast (which is utterly destroyed), the architecture (a twentieth-century crime). His attempts to win them over seem doomed to fail, as the sisters’ Bulgarian heritage is a heavy burden—their father, a successful doctor and melancholy immigrant, appears in their dreams still dragging the rope with which he hanged himself.
An account of a daughter’s bitterly funny reckoning with her father and his country, laden with linguistic wit and black humor, Apostoloff will introduce the unique voice of Sibylle Lewitscharoff to a new and eager audience.
Arcadio
William Goyen
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Artaud the Mômo
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2020
This edition is translated by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed foremost translator of Artaud’s work. This will be the first edition since the original 1947 publication to present the work in the spatial format Artaud intended. It also incorporates eight original drawings by Artaud—showing reconfigured bodies as weapons of resistance and assault—which he selected for that edition, after having initially attempted to persuade Pablo Picasso to collaborate with him. Additional critical material draws on Artaud’s previously unknown manuscript letters written between 1946 and 1948 to the book’s publisher, Pierre Bordas, which give unique insights into the work from its origins to its publication.
As If Fire Could Hide Us
Melanie Rae Thon
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Three lives. One song. A fire that reveals what cannot be hidden.
As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.
A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.
A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.
An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria—desolation, peace, despair, rapture.
Ascension
A NovelSteve Tomasula
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A visually stunning narrative of three eras in humankind’s vexed relationship with nature.
Ascension is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.
Ascension is a story of how we continually remake the world and are in turn remade by the new nature we’ve created. It is the story of humans yearning to understand their families, themselves, and the world they live in as it comes to a close, leaving them to anticipate what will follow. Rich in visual depictions of the natural world—from nineteenth century engraving and paintings to twentieth century photography and twenty-first century databases—Ascension uses the materials of three eras to drive home our inability to escape nature, and the ways our fates are irrevocably bound together even as our actions usher in an end-time.
Ashes and Diamonds
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Assault on Paradise
Tatiana Lobo
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Aunty Lily
and other delightfully perverse storiesJennifer Munro
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
Munro’s stories were born five decades ago in a small English village where children were seen and not heard, fathers were wacky, neighbors were snoopy, and maiden aunts were beautifully crafted artifices. Her original stories, dolloped with characters reminiscent of those from her childhood, telling of domestic shenanigans and outings gone revealingly awry are written with meticulous timing. Rich in details about the frailty and strength of the human spirit, her stories resonate with the truth of what is means to be human.
Avala Is Falling
Biljana Jovanovic
Central European University Press, 2020
In Avala Is Falling, Jovanović’s breakout success in 1978, a young woman challenges the expectations that teachers, parents, bus drivers, and doctors have for her. The “Avala” of the title refers to a mountain south of Belgrade which is home to some of Serbia’s most important nationalist monuments and shrines; it is also the site of the main mental hospital for the region, and its “falling” is the unexpected fulfillment of a prophecy from a traditional Serbian folk song. Jovanović’s use of stream of consciousness in her characters’ thinking and speaking, as well as of intertextuality in description and plot advancement heralded the arrival of an innovative new writer who was determined to break with the of traditional concerns of earlier women writers.
This book is now recognized as much more than “jeans prose,” although the fame the book achieved under that characterization eventually pushed it to cult status. Jovanović is now considered a major avant-garde writer, whose stylistic innovations were as challenging as her women-centered themes.