Results by title
428 books match the query 'Stories' and 32 start with a
A Bird in the House
StoriesMargaret Laurence
University of Chicago Press, 1974
"Vanessa rebels against the dominance of age; she watches [her grandfather] imitate her aunt Edna; and her rage at times is such that she would gladly kick him. It takes great skill to keep this story within the expanding horizon of this young girl and yet make it so revealing of the adult world."—Atlantic
"A Bird in the House achieves the breadth of scope which we usually associate with the novel (and thereby is as psychologically valid as a good novel), and at the same time uses the techniques of the short story form to reveal the different aspects of the young Vanessa." —Kent Thompson, The Fiddlehead
"I am haunted by the women in Laurence's novels as if they really were alive—and not as women I've known, but as women I've been."—Joan Larkin, Ms. Magazine
"Not since . . . To Kill a Mockingbird has there been a novel like this. It should not be missed by anyone who has a child or was a child."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
One of Canada's most accomplished writers, Margaret Laurence (1926-87) was the recipient of many awards including Canada's prestigious Governor General's Literary Award on two separate occasions, once for The Diviners.
A Body in the O
Performances and StoriesTim Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
A Bridge of Stories
Risking it All to Connect Classrooms and CultureKristin Pedemonti
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2017
“With openhearted generosity, Kristin shares not only the story of her amazing journey but complete lesson plans and valuable tips on inter-cultural work. She deepens our understanding of the culture and legends of Belize all the while imparting courage and a can-do philosophy that could truly change the world. Read and be inspired!”
—Diane Edgecomb, author of A Fire in My Heart: Kurdish Tales
A Brief Alphabet of Torture
StoriesVi Khi Nao
University of Alabama Press, 2017
An unflinching and riveting meditation on the pain that attends every facet of existence—love and sacrifice and intimacy and beauty—a biography of torture.
Like all of Vi Khi Nao’s acclaimed and award-winning work, A Brief Alphabet of Torture bleeds across many modes and genres—poetry, essay, fiction, drama—and itself almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale captures the emotional, physical, psychological, political, and artistic concerns that pervade life like breath and which, even when very beautiful, are filled with pain.
These stories are all facets of Nao’s imagination that define the way she views creation, sexuality, violence, and the role of life in an ontological system that relies heavily on cultural, social, and artistic duress. Some stories like “Winter Rose” and “I Love You Me Neither” rise above the boundaries of pain to places of beauty and grace and love, where pain has no place, but make clear how rare such moments appear in life.
A Curious Land
Stories from HomeSusan Muaddi Darraj
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Susan Muaddi Darraj's short story collection about the inhabitants of a Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou, spans generations and continents to explore ideas of memory, belonging, connection, and, ultimately, the deepest and richest meaning of home. A Curious Land gives voice to the experiences of Palestinians in the last century.
An excerpt from A Curious Land:
When Rabab lowered the magad and clapped-clapped to the well in her mother's too-big slippers, the stone jar digging into her shoulder, she didn't, at first, see the body. The morning sun glazed everything around her—the cement homes, the iron rails along one wall, the bars on the windows, the stones around the well—and made her squint her itchy eyes.
She was hungry. That was all.
They'd arrived here only last night, stopping as soon as Awwad and the men were sure the army had moved south. It must have been the third time in just a few weeks—collapse the tents, load the mules, disappear into the sands. She hoped this war would end soon, and she didn't really care who won, as long as it ended because they hadn't eaten well in two years. In the past few months, her mother had sold all her gold, except for her bracelet made of liras. It was the only thing left, and she was holding onto it, and Rabab realized, so were they all; she imagined that, the day it was sold, when her mother's wrist was bare, would signal that they were at the end.
A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer
StoriesChristine Schutt
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Schutt's indomitable, original talent is once again on full display in each of these deeply informed, intensely realized stories. Many of the narratives take place in a space as small as a house, where the doors are many and what is hidden behind these thin domestic barriers tends towards violence, abusive sex, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments that also reveal how the characters are often hopeful, even optimistic. With a style that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, she exposes the terrible intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives.
A Deeper Sense of Place
Stories and Journeys of Collaboration in Indigenous ResearchJay T. Johnson and Soren C. Larsen
Oregon State University Press, 2013
These first-person narratives offer insight into the challenges faced by Native and non-Native scholars to their academic and personal approaches during research with Indigenous communities. By addressing the ethical, political, intellectual, and practical meanings of collaboration with Indigenous peoples, A Deeper Sense of Place highlights the ways in which collaborative research can help Indigenous and settler communities find common ground through a shared commitment to land, people, and place.
A Deeper Sense of Place will inform students and academics engaged in research with Indigenous communities, as well as those interested in the challenges of employing critical, qualitative methodologies.
A Kind of Dream
StoriesKelly Cherry
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
The selves in this book include Nina, a writer, and her husband, Palmer, a historian, who, having settled into marriage and family life, are now faced with the bittersweetness of late life; BB and Roy, who make a movie in Mongolia; Tavy, Nina’s adopted daughter, a painter in her twenties who meets her birth mother for the first time; and Tavy’s young daughter, Callie, a budding violinist. Other vivid characters confront the awful fact of violence in America; try to cope with political ineptitude; and one devises his own code of sexual morality. Perhaps the most important character is Nina's dog, a salt-and-pepper cairn terrier of uncommon wisdom.
Fame, death, rash self-destruction, laughter, the excitement of making good art, love, marriage, being a mother, being a father, the appreciation of beauty, and always life—life itself, life in all its shapes and guises—it’s all here.
A Kind of Dream is the culminating book in a trilogy Kelly Cherry began with My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers and The Society of Friends. Each book stands alone, but together they take us on a Dantean journey from midlife to Paradise. Cherry’s prose is hallmarked by lyric grace, sly wit, the energy of her intelligence, and profound compassion for and understanding of her characters. Set in Madison, Wisconsin, A Kind of Dream reveals a surprisingly wide view of the world and the authority of someone who has mastered her art. It is a book to experience and to reflect upon.
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
A Leaf of Voices
Stories of the American Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived and Died, 1861-65Jennifer McSpadden
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
A Place Remote
StoriesGwen Goodkin
West Virginia University Press, 2020
In each of these ten stories, Gwen Goodkin forces her characters to face the dramatic events of life head-on—some events happen in a moment, while others are the fallout of years or decades of turning away. A boy is confronted by the cost of the family farm, an optometrist careens toward an explosive mental disaster, a mourning teen protects his sister, lifelong friends have an emotional confrontation over an heirloom, and a high school student travels to Germany to find his voice and, finally, a moment of long-awaited redemption.
A Place between Stations
StoriesStories by Stepanie Allen
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Selma detests my small considerations of strangers. When she catches me nodding at the panhandlers she ignores, or opening doors for women I don't know, she says nothing, but holds herself tall and aloof. She is doing it for the both of us. She is compensating for what she believes is a weakness in her husband that, even in this day and age, a black man still cannot afford. And she may be right. But at this stage of my life I feel not so much black or male, middle-aged or well-to-do or professional, as incomplete. I am son to my father, father to my boys, husband to my unhappy wife, but somehow more lost than found in the mix.
A Preponderance of Starry Beings
StoriesSamantha Edmonds
Northwestern University Press, 2025
Genre-bending stories of the cosmos and the worlds within our own skin
Blending fairy tale and science fiction with the otherworldliness of adolescence, A Preponderance of Starry Beings is a collection for anyone preoccupied with looking skyward. These stories probe the experience of coming of age on the outskirts of the universe, whether that be a small Midwestern town or a distant galaxy, and of weighing earthly obligations against the vast promises of space.
In a sleepy Ohio neighborhood, two girls seek refuge from their homophobic schoolmates in an antiques shop filled with Star Trek memorabilia. On a generation spaceship, children revolt against their parents’ plans to colonize a distant world. Deep in the Florida Everglades, seven sisters must protect their otherworldly mythology when two men arrive to fix the family automobile.
A Preponderance of Starry Beings invites us into a mundane and whimsical world of night islands, small towns, and faith lost and found, where a safe landing matters less than taking the leap.
A Private State
StoriesCharlotte Bacon
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
Here is a finely crafted collection of stories about women who have arrived at awkward edges in their lives. Some are adolescents, some at the brink of old age, and some find themselves suddenly ill or pregnant. Others come to the abrupt discovery that their marriages are not as whole as they had believed, while a few tumble onto startling secrets. But despite their range in age and situation, they all try to use their new knowledge to stitch together a fresh pattern by which to live.
While most of the action unfolds along the East Coast—in Maryland, Maine, Boston, Philadelphia, New York—several of the women travel to Arizona, California, and Jamaica. Often the light is too bright in these glittery places and they wonder why they have come. Many seem to be searching for a sense of home, which one girl describes as a place that is “complete and full of longing all at once.”
Yet this desire for a personal territory, a point of constancy, is not necessarily rewarded: in this book, separations lead to divorce, sisters continue to misread each other, cancers kill. Still, the women refuse to turn their gaze away from what the world has thrown in their path. Often as not, they pick it up, wonder at it, test its relevance, and continue on, not happier perhaps, but certainly more knowing.
With humor and insight, Charlotte Bacon illuminates the unexpected ambiguities of women's lives. A Private State marks the arrival of an extremely talented writer.
A Radiant Curve
Poems and StoriesLuci Tapahonso
University of Arizona Press, 2008
These engaging words draw us into a workaday world that, magically but never surprisingly, has room for the Diyin Dine’é (the Holy People), Old Salt Woman, and Dawn Boy. When she describes her grandson’s First Laugh Ceremony—explaining that it was originally performed for White Shell Girl, who grew up to be Changing Woman—her account enriches us and we long to hear more. Tapahonso weaves the Navajo language into her work like she weaves “the first four rows of black yarn” into a rug she is making “for my little grandson, who inherited my father’s name: Hastiin Tsétah Naaki Bísóí.”
As readers, we find that we too are surrounded by silent comfort, held lovingly in the confident hands of an accomplished writer who has a great deal to tell us about life.
A Scattering of Jades
Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the AztecsThelma D. Sullivan
University of Arizona Press, 2003
A Short History of Indians in Canada
StoriesThomas King
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
A Small Apocalypse
StoriesLaura Chow Reeve
Northwestern University Press, 2024
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.
A Spy in the House of Loud
New York Songs and StoriesBy 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.
A Strong and Steady Pulse
Stories from a CardiologistGregory 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.
A Thousand Souls
A Novel in StoriesCatherine Tudish
Acre Books, 2026
Catching sight of the village of Neptune nestled in a remote Vermont valley, a traveler likens it to “a lost kingdom.” The fourteen stories in Catherine Tudish’s gorgeously crafted volume interweave the lives of three generations in this “embarrassingly pretty town” of “upward of a thousand souls” as they inevitably touch the outside world. A boy born of a secret affair travels by train to South Carolina for a first-time meeting with his respected father. A recent widow and Boston transplant solves the mystery of a teen girl gone missing. A beloved sheriff breaks up a drug operation, only to get busted himself for helping undocumented workers evade ICE. The disappointed wife of a rural mail driver presents him with a nude portrait—of herself. A shy girl with a speech impediment loses her stutter when she befriends and speaks to a black bear. Another boy has nightmares that seem to be the memories of a distant stranger’s tragedy.
Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through loss, betrayal, and startling discovery, the characters in A Thousand Souls embody the belonging that comes from a close-knit community. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.
Acceleration Hours
StoriesJesse Goolsby
University of Nevada Press, 2020
2020 Foreword INDIE awards, longlist
From the author of the critically-acclaimed novel, I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby’s Acceleration Hours is a haunting collection of narratives about families, life, and loss during America’s twenty-first-century forever wars. Set across the mountain west of the United States, these fierce, original, and compelling stories illuminate the personal search for human connection and intimacy. From a stepfather’s grief to an AWOL soldier and her journey of reconciliation to a meditation on children, violence, and hope, Acceleration Hours is an intense and necessary portrayal of the many voices living in a time of perpetual war.
Across The Red Line
Stories From The Surgical LifeRichard C. Karl
Temple University Press, 2003
After Coal
Stories of Survival in Appalachia and WalesTom Hansell
West Virginia University Press, 2018
What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do communities and cultures survive?
Central Appalachia and south Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal’s decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labor unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy. It tells the story of four decades of exchange between two mining communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and profiles individuals and organizations that are undertaking the critical work of regeneration.
The stories in this book are told through interviews and photographs collected during the making of After Coal, a documentary film produced by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University and directed by Tom Hansell. Considering resonances between Appalachia and Wales in the realms of labor, environment, and movements for social justice, the book approaches the transition from coal as an opportunity for marginalized people around the world to work toward safer and more egalitarian futures.
All Roads
StoriesColleen O'Brien
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In “Charlie,” a new mother tells the story of her confusing attachment to a former mentor, uncovering the deep pain that has largely defined her life. In “The Fathers,” an awkward bachelor party leads to an unexpected moment of overdue connection between the bride’s father and brothers. The title story tracks the drunken monologue of a nihilistic middle-aged man attempting to seduce a young woman into a threesome, while “The Deal” alternates perspectives between a cynical divorced woman and her adult son, the only person with whom she’s been able to sustain a lasting relationship. Relentlessly self-revealing, these characters vacillate between vulnerability and self-protection, exposing the necessity of both. Dark, comic, and altogether unforgettable, All Roads introduces an original voice attuned to the docility of the stingray as well as the ancient spear of its tail.
All Things Are Labor
StoriesKatherine Arnoldi
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
In one story, a Mennonite mother leaves her alcoholic husband and moves with her three children into an abandoned house and back to a life of faith, though a new faith, one of her own making. In another story, a teenager living in the darkness of a failing rust-belt city holds before her the only light she sees, her child, to guide the way as she moves across the border and beyond.
A young artist in New York City pursues a simple life, a passive life, the yielding life of a Mennonite, even as she immerses herself in the gritty urban culture of the East Village. Another woman, given a short time to live, sets up ant farms on her stoop in Alphabet City and is determined to discover how worlds are made by watching the ants and only the ants. A Vietnam veteran finds meaning as a dishwasher at the Catholic Worker, where he circles on his stump of a leg, aware that the thing that is missing, that cannot be seen, is most present.
Many of these stories experiment with the form of writing itself. They reflect the vision of an artist who remains separate—in the world, but not of the world—and whose goal is not to dazzle or entertain, but simply, humbly to be present for each word.
Allegiance
StoriesGurney Norman
Ohio University Press, 2021
Always Leading, Forever Valiant
Stories of the University of Michigan, 1817–2017Edited by Kim Clarke
University of Michigan Press, 2017
American Grief in Four Stages
StoriesSadie Hoagland
West Virginia University Press, 2019
American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché.
One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother’s suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways—the passing of an era or of a daughter’s childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in’s recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.
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.
Antipodes
StoriesHolly Goddard Jones
University of Iowa Press, 2022
A harried and depressed mother of three young children serves on a committee that watches over the bottomless sinkhole that has appeared in her Kentucky town. During COVID lockdown, a thirty-four-year-old gamer moves back home with his parents and is revisited by his long-forgotten childhood imaginary friend. A politician running for a state congressional seat and a young mother, who share the same set of fears about the future, cross paths but don’t fully understand one another. A woman attends a party at the home of a fellow church parishioner and discovers she is on the receiving end of a sales pitch for a doomsday prepper.
These stories and more contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.”
Arizona Friend Trips
Stories from the RoadLisa Schnebly Heidinger and Julie Morrison
University of Arizona Press, 2025
Southwest Books of the Year Pick
In Arizona Friend Trips, Lisa Schnebly Heidinger and Julie Morrison invite readers to explore the state’s most cherished places through a blend of poetry, prose, and photography. From the iconic landmarks to hidden gems, each chapter of this captivating travelogue provides a rich tapestry of historical insight, personal anecdotes, and emotional reflections, painting a vivid portrait of Arizona’s diverse landscapes and vibrant culture. Be part of this unique journey as Lisa and Julie embark on an unforgettable adventure, filled with laughter, nostalgia, and a deep appreciation for the beauty of the Grand Canyon State.
Arizona Friend Trips is a celebration of friendship, discovery, and the enduring spirit of exploration. As Lisa and Julie share their favorite trips and formative experiences, readers are treated to an intimate glimpse into their lives, making this book a joyous and uplifting read for travelers and armchair explorers alike. Whether you're planning your own Arizona adventure or simply yearning to wander from the comfort of home, Arizona Friend Trips promises to inspire, delight, and leave you longing for the open road.
As If She Had a Say
StoriesJennifer Fliss
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Who has a right to tell us how to experience our grief? How to perform—or not perform—the roles society prescribes to us based on our various points of identity?
As If She Had a Say, the second story collection from Jennifer Fliss, uses an absurdist lens to showcase characters—predominantly women—plumbing their resources as they navigate misogyny, abuse, and grief. In these stories, a woman melts in the face of her husband’s cruelty; a seven-tablespoons-long woman lives inside a refrigerator and engages in an affair with the man of the house; a balloon-animal artist attends a funeral to discover he was invited as more than entertainment; and a man loses all his nouns.
Fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado will appreciate how As If She Had a Say’s inventive narratives expose inequities by taking us on imaginative romps through domesticity and patriarchal expectations. Each story functions as a magnifying glass through which we might examine our own lives and see ourselves more clearly.