"Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary" is an intimate, exquisite, and true account of what it is to help a parent die. After her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, former home care worker and award-winning writer Rebecca Brown cared for her mother during the last six months of her life. This spare, unsentimental book comes out of that experience. In short chapters headed by definitions of medical terms, she confronts anemia, chemotherapy, metastasis, cremation. Brown s is a poignant and unflinching story of how one family coped with loss and learned about the longevity of...

The girls on the prowl in The Terrible Girls are indeed terrible relentless in love, ruthless in betrayal. These thematically linked stories depict a contemporary Gothic world in which body parts are traded for love, wounds never heal, and self-sacrifice is often the only way out."

"One of the freshest, most memorable story collections of my lifetime. And 'A Good Man, ' one of the most important. Rarer than the newness, the wit, the vivid readability, is the deep caring understanding, the wholeness, the truth which this astonishing, haunting writer creates her people. 'A Good Man' will be a revelation, an epiphany to many a reader."--Tillie Olsen

"In Annie Oakley's Girl, people are so much larger, their motives, dreams and mysteries so much more complex than you ever imagined. Love is so much more dangerous, grief so much more powerful, hope so...

The nameless narrator of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary lives in her studio apartment with a pack of Doberman pinchers. The dogs, led by the cruel, charismatic bitch named Miss Dog, alternate between being brutal attack animals and loyal companions, being real and otherworldly. Some chapters draw upon the ecstatic and horrifying visions of Christian mystics; others take place in the landscapes of familiar fairytales; others in the banal settings of the late-night pick-up bars or suburban picnics. The narrator uneasily inhabits these worlds until the dogs force her to take irrevocable...

The End of Youth is a collection of 13 linked stories, essays and rants, about carrying on after youth's hope is gone. In -Afraid of the Dark, - a child learns that there is good reason to be afraid. The adolescent narrator of -Description of a Struggle- finds that love can be brutal. -The Smokers- -examines an adult's realization that longevity means seeing loved ones die. Written with the same spare and vivid beauty as her earlier award-winning works, The End of Youth is certain to win even wider acclaim.

Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls,...

Es usted una de las muchas victimas de alguna maldicion sin quebrantar? Hoy dia, innumerables cristianos en todo el mundo estan llenos de una inexplicable pobreza, de calamidades y de una variedad de circunstancias adversas. Sus vidas estan comadas de pesares y frustraciones, mientras luchan de manera constante contra poderosas tentaciones, enfermedades fisicas y mentales, y una miriada de sucesos catastroficos. Por lo general, no se han dado cuenta de que esta condicion es el resultado de alguna maldicion sobre ellos y quizas tambien sobre sus familias.

Algunas De Las...

• Traces the rich artistic traditions in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia across time periods, media, cultural contexts, and geography - from the terracotta armies of the First Emperor of Qin to late 20th-century installation art
  
• Covers both imperially commissioned works and popular, vernacular art
  
• Includes an accessible introduction which provides suggestions of thematic connections...