Søgeresultater: 194

Summary: Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the New York Times Book Review Podcast, Reader's Digest , TIME Magazine , and more From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway , A Gentleman in Moscow , and Rules of Civility , a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories, including a novella featuring one of his most beloved characters   Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility , the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction

Summary: A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning "Undocumented Alien" The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters not unlike ourselves, who assert their independence in acts of bold and often irrevocable defiance. "Fleuve Bleu" exemplifies the rich sensuousness of Oates's prose as lovers married to other persons vow to establish, in their intimacy, a ruthlessly honest, truth-telling authenticity missing elsewhere in their complicated lives, with unexpected results. In "Big Burnt," set on lushly rendered Lake George, in the Adirondacks, a cunningly manipulative university professor exploits a too-trusting woman in a way she could never have anticipated. In a more experimental but no less intimate mode, "Les beaux jours" examines the ambiguities of an intensely erotic, exploitative relationship between a "master" artist and his adoring young female model. And the tragic "Undocumented Alien" depicts a young African student enrolled in an American university who is suddenly stripped of his student visa and forced to undergo a terrifying test of courage. In these stories, as elsewhere in her fiction, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits her fascination with the social, psychological, and moral boundaries that govern our behavior—until the hour when they do not

Summary: Kim Byeongsu is losing his mind. Quite literally. He keeps forgetting the little things in life, like basic words, whether or not he has a dog, the last time he killed someone... In his prime, Byeongsu was one of the best murderers around, spending years obsessively trying to perfect his technique, only killing in the pursuit of artistry. And then he gave it all up to be a dedicated father to his adopted-daughter, Eunhui. Now though, suffering from the onset of dementia, he decides to come out of retirement one last time and for one final target: his daughter's boyfriend, who he believes is a serial killer just like him. After all, it takes one to know one. In other dark and glittering tales, an affair between two childhood friends questions the limits of loyalty and love; a family disintegrates after a baby son is kidnapped and recovered years later; and a wild, erotic pursuit of creativity might just come at the expense of all sanity. 'Filled with the kind of sublime, galvanizing stories that strike like a lightning bolt, searing your nerves' Nylon

Summary: A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review , NPR, Los Angeles Times , Oprah Daily , The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews , BookPage, Electric Literature , Library Journal , Commonweal Magazine Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize and Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence A Must-Read: The New York Times , NPR, New York , The Guardian, Los Angeles Times , Today Show , The Boston Globe , Shondaland , St. Louis Post-Dispatch , Chicago Review of Books , Essence , Literary Hub , The Millions , The Root "Exhilarating . . . Brinkley is a writer whose versatility knows no boundaries . . . A gift of the highest quality." —Mateo Askaripour, The New York Times Book Review From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken. What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see? In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon. With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city

Summary: For readers of Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, and Tim O'Brien: Dramatic, powerful, authentic short stories of soldiers fighting a "forever war," in combat and back home, and the 2023 winner of the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. Combat takes a different toll on each soldier; so does coming home. All the Ruined Men by Bill Glose comprises linked stories that show veterans struggling for normalcy as they grapple with flashbacks, injuries (both physical and psychological), damaged relationships, loss of faith, and loss of memory. Beginning in 2003, All the Ruined Men spans ten years, from the confident beginning of America's "forever war" to the confusion and disillusionment that followed. As a former paratrooper and Gulf War veteran, author Bill Glose is closely bound to these stories. Drawing from his own experiences and military knowledge, Glose presents a cast of complex and sympathetic characters: young men who embraced what seemed like a war of just cause, who trained and fought and lived and died together, and who have returned to families, wives, children, civilian life, and an America that has lost its way. Unforgettable, moving, filled with moments of anguish, doubt, love, hope, and other emotions, All the Ruined Men is a singular debut collection

Summary: Dissent, disease, disaster. This genre-spanning anthology explores the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. These evocative, often prescient, stories showcase new and emerging writers from across Africa to investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more. In Disruption, authors from across Africa use their stories to explore the concept of change—environmental, political, and physical—and the power or impotence of the human race to innovate our way through it. From a post-apocalyptic African village in Innocent Ilo's "Before We Die Unwritten," to space colonization in Alithnayn Abdulkareem's "Static," to a mother's attempt to save her infant from a dust storm in Mbozi Haimbe's "Shelter," Disruption illuminates change around and within, and our infallible capacity for hope amidst disaster. Facing our shared anxieties head on, these authors scrutinize assumptions and invent worlds that combine the fantastical with the probable, the colonial with the dystopian, and the intrepid with the powerless, in stories recognizing our collective future and our disparate present. Disruption is the newest anthology from Short Story Day Africa, a non-profit organization established to develop and share the diversity of Africa's voices through publishing and writing workshops

Summary: A 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction Finalist for the 2022 Reading the West Debut Fiction Award Finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Set in the western sagebrush steppe, Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet. Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse. In lean, lyrical prose, Claire Boyles evokes the bleakness and beauty of our threatened western landscapes. Spanning the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future, this knockout debut introduces unforgettable characters who must confront the challenges of caregiving and loss alongside the very practical impacts of fracking, water rights law, and other agricultural policies. Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet

Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. . . . An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.”— Oprah Daily   Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, NPR, Time, USA Today, The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal The “best short-story writer in English” ( Time ) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. “Love Letter” is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. “Ghoul” is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In “Mother’s Day,” two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In “Elliott Spencer,” our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory “scraped”—a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And “My House”—in a mere seven pages—comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances

Summary: An enthralling and enchanting collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Chocolat and The Strawberry Thief ... Perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson and Kate Mosse as well as readers of Eve Chase and Stacey Halls. 'A vibrant tombola of stories...' — Time Out 'Strongly plotted and written in registers that are variously comical, sad and surreal...' - Independent 'A jewel of a book' — ***** Reader review 'Sublime and touching' — ***** Reader review 'Unputdownable' — ***** Reader review 'Compelling - you can lose yourself one story at a time' — ***** Reader review ************************************************************************** Stories are like Russian dolls; open them up, and in each one you'll find another story. Come to the house where it is Christmas all year round ; meet the ghost who lives on a Twitter timeline; be spooked by a newborn baby created with sugar, spice and lashings of cake . Conjured from a wickedly imaginative pen, here is a new collection of short stories that showcases Joanne Harris's exceptional talent as a teller of tales , a spinner of yarns. Sensuous, mischievous, uproarious and wry, here are tales that combine the everyday with the unexpected; wild fantasy with bittersweet reality

Summary: A vintage collection of short stories from the bestselling author of Light a Penny Candle and Circle of Friends. Millions of people travel on London's tube every day, yet we usually give our fellow passengers only a cursory glance. But each one of these nameless passengers has their own story to tell. At Notting Hill, the mysterious secretary, harbouring her secrets, travels to work; at Highburyand Islington, Adam has a sudden change of heart; and at Holborn, a disastrous reunion is about to take place... With her characteristic mix of compassionate humour and biting realism, this vintage collection of stories is Maeve Binchy at her very best

Summary: For readers of Miranda July, Rebecca Lee, and Mary Gaitskill, a debut short-story collection that is a mesmerizing blend of wit, transgression, and heart.  LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION A passive-aggressive couple in the midst of a divorce compete over whose new fling is more exotic. A Russian migrant in Tokyo agonizes over the money her lover accepts from a yakuza. A dead body on a drug dealer’s floor leads to the strangest first date ever. In this razor-sharp debut collection, Jen Silverman delivers eleven interconnected stories that take place in expat bars, artist colonies, train stations, and matchbox apartments in the United States and Japan. Unforgettable characters crisscross through these transient spaces, loving, hurting, and leaving each other as they experience the loneliness and dangerous freedom that comes with being an outsider. In “Maria of the Grapes,” a pair of damaged runaways get lost in the seductive underworld beneath Tokyo’s clean streets; in “Pretoria,” a South African expatriate longs for the chaos of her homeland as she contemplates a marriage proposal; in “Girl Canadian Shipwreck,” a young woman in Brooklyn seeks permission to flee from her boyfriend and his terrible performance art; in “Maureen,” an aspiring writer realizes that her beautiful, neurotic boss is lonelier than she lets on. The Island Dwellers ranges near and far in its exploration of solitude and reinvention, identity and sexuality, family and home. Jen Silverman is the rare talent who can evoke the landscape of a whole life in a single subtle phrase—vital, human truths that you may find yourself using as a map to your own heart. Praise for The Island Dwellers “These stories, in any case, are irresistible, delivering a portrait of contemporary relationships that . . . is shot through with veins of real connection.” — The New York Times Book Review    “The eleven stories that make up this collection are raw, intense in their longing, and tender in the most unexpected ways.” — Lambda Literary   “Silverman’s disarming and unconventional characters are all searching for a connection with others. Some are battling loneliness or the fear of being alone but they’re all blessed with quick wits and warmth. This is an outstanding short story debut.” — Shelf Awareness

Summary: Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. For the characters in after the quake , the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. 'When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,' says Frog. 'And right now he is very, very angry. 'In a dance with the delights of Murakami's imagination we experience the limitless possibilities of fiction. With these stories Murakami expands our hearts and minds yet again' The Times