Wisconsin is not where Alice, a girl raised in Florida, meant to end up. But when she falls in love with Anders Dahl, a descendant of Norwegian farmers born for generations in the same stone farmhouse, she realizes that to love Anders is to settle into a life in Wisconsin in the small house they buy before their daughter, Maude, is born. Together, Alice and Anders move forward into a life of family, friends, and the occasional troubled student until they face their biggest challenge. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval's The Alice Stories tells the tale...
Wisconsin is not where Alice, a girl raised in Florida, meant to end up. But when she falls in love with Anders Dahl, a descendant of Norwegian farmer...
K. L. Cook's debut collection of linked stories spans three generations in the life of one West Texas family. Events both tender and tragic lead to a strange and lovely vision of a world stitched together in tenuous ways as the characters struggle to make sense of their lives amid the shifting boundaries of marriage, family, class, and culture. A series of unusual incidents-a daughter's elopement, a sobering holiday trip, a vicious attack by the family dog, a lightning strike-provokes a mother of five to abandon her children. An oil rigger, inspired by sun-induced hallucinations, rescues his...
K. L. Cook's debut collection of linked stories spans three generations in the life of one West Texas family. Events both tender and tragic lead to a ...
From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl's first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother's yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours. Katherine Vaz is a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in fiction at Harvard University. She is the author of Saudade, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; Mariana, available in six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the...
From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl's first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virg...
Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, -two female icons of disability.- Or the story of -Moby Dick, or, The Leg, - told from Ahab's perspective. What if Vincent Van Gogh resided in a twentieth-century New York hotel, surviving on food stamps and direct communications with God? Or if the dwarf pictured in a seventeenth-century painting by Velazquez should tell her story? And, finally, imagine the encounter between David and Goliath from the Philistine's point of view. These are the characters who people history and myth as counterpoints to the -normal.- And they...
Imagine a Hollywood encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo, -two female icons of disability.- Or the story of -Moby Dick, or, The Leg, - told ...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. A Cambodian refugee negotiates the icy waters of American social and sexual life. A young couple seeks peak experiences to escape grief, only to discover that they ve brought it along with them. A teenage girl, unable to face the imminent end of her grandfather s life, risks her own life in an impulsive act. A man s fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his finding, albeit through a terrifying...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Storiesis a collection that explores what it means to be human and inhuman. These ten stories have won an array of honors and whether set in the historical past or in a speculative future, each is wildly imaginative and shockingly real. In Sagittarius, selected for The Best American Short Stories, a mother and father search a dark forest for their missing newborn, who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous creature. In False Positive, a ghostly girl...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Storiesis a collection that explores what it...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Brown s Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of women and men grappling with the loss and pain of everyday existence, people inhabiting a suburban landscape haunted by ghosts: a mother who leaps from a ridge, a mistress found at the bottom of the Connecticut River, a father who dresses in a pale blue-custom suit and disappears. The dead leave behind postcards, houses, bottles of sherry, bones. They become local legends, their stories part of the characters own: an expectant mother in an isolated...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Brown s Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of wome...
In this tenth anniversary edition of K. L. Cook s debut collection, the linked stories of Last Call span three generations in the life of one West Texas family. Events both tender and tragic lead to a strange and lovely vision of a world stitched together in tenuous ways as the characters struggle to make sense of their lives amid the shifting boundaries of marriage, family, class, and culture.
A series of unusual incidents a daughter s elopement, a sobering holiday trip, a vicious attack by the family dog, a lightning strike provokes a mother of five to abandon her...
In this tenth anniversary edition of K. L. Cook s debut collection, the linked stories of Last Call span three generations in the life of on...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble s previous works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life. In these stories, Keeble populates what journalist Joel Garreau once called the Empty Quarter of North America with complex humanity. Life ranges vibrantly through these airy spaces, at times finding...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and pow...
Just down the highway from Connecticut s Gold Coast is the state s rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu s Domesticated Wild Things the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all. These are the children of immigrants who found boarded-up brass mills instead of the gilded streets of America; they re the teenaged girls raised in the fluorescent glow of Greek diners, the middle-aged men with pump trucks and teratomas. These are people who have fled, or who should have. And if they are indeed...
Just down the highway from Connecticut s Gold Coast is the state s rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhene...