Other books that might interest you

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  Dogfight

  Michael Knight

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  A Los Angeles Times Notable Book: Short fiction by the author of Eveningland, “a writer of the first rank” (Esquire).   “These 10 distinctive and intensely affecting stories confirm Knight as a writer of significant gifts. In short narratives that invariably entice the reader with an arresting opening sentence, he establishes a solid sense of place, using the local color of his native Alabama, and transforms ordinary people into nearly mythic figures. The first story, ‘Now You See Her,’ sets the stage, constructing a conflict of nearly Oedipal proportions. A veterinarian widower and his teenage son, Xavier, who calls himself X, spy on Grace, their next-door neighbor, who ‘it would appear . . . renounced clothing altogether’; the surprising climax occurs when her dog suddenly takes ill. In many of Knight’s offerings, animals act as agents of change: in the title story, a dogfight is the catalyst for an adulterous affair and results in a parallel clash between the dogs’ owners. ‘Gerald’s Monkey’ uses a man’s desire for a pet monkey to examine the emotional aftermath of Vietnam. Knight demonstrates agility with a diversity of viewpoints: he is equally at ease with first-person narration or third, an adult perspective or an adolescent’s, as in a stunner called ‘A Bad Man, So Pretty’ (taken from a Muhammad Ali quote) that works up to a Cain and Abel-style confrontation. Knight’s characters are both recognizable and transcendent, suddenly drawn into trespassing the ordinary limits of their lives to enter the realm of allegory.” —Publishers Weekly

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  The Shadow in the Rose Garden

  D H Lawrence

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  'The Shadow in the Rose Garden'. Lawrence is often accused of misogyny and this story used as evidence against him. There is the simple but honest mine worker, who has taken on a wife who is 'above' him but who is struggling to understand her and her feelings for him. Slowly, the story unravels the woman's past. The reader cannot be entirely unsympathetic to her plight, Lawrence is too good a writer to let that happen, but her dishonesty has probably ruined two lives and our feelings are for the husband.

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  Accra Noir

  Nana-Ama Danquah

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  Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Now,Accra joins Lagos, Nairobi, Marrakech, and Addis Ababa in representing the African continent in the Noir Series arena.  Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction. The telling of such tales—ones involving or suggesting death, with a protagonist who is flawed or devious, driven by either a self-serving motive or one of the seven deadly sins—is woven into thefabric of the city’s everyday life …  Accra is more than just a capital city. It is a microcosm of Ghana. It is a virtual map of the nation’s soul, a complex geographical display of its indigenous presence, the colonial imposition, declarations of freedom, followed by coupsd’état, decades of dictatorship, and then, finally, a steady march forward into a promising future … Much like Accra, these stories are not always what they seem. The contributors who penned them know too well how to spin a story into a web … It is an honor and a pleasure to share them and all they reveal about Accra, a city of allegories,one of the most dynamic and diverse places in the world. —Nana-Ama Danquah, from the introduction

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  The Three Sisters

  W. Jacobs

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  At the deathbed of Ursula, the eldest of three sisters, the dying women declares that she will return from the dead when the time comes to accompany each of her younger siblings into the afterlife. The two survivors and their old housekeeper, now live on in fear of encountering Ursula's ghost, and strange happenings in the house bring this terror to an unholy climax.

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  Abaft The Funnel

  Rudyard Kipling

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  Men in pajamas sitting abaft the funnel and swapping lies of the purple seas. Thirty one early short stories by the master story teller Kipling. (Summary by David Wales and title page)

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  First Body - Stories

  Melanie Rae Thon

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  Winner of the 1997 Whiting Writers’ Award:Taut, persistent, and brilliantly cadenced, First, Body is a testament to the breathtaking virtuosity of Granta-acclaimed author Melanie Rae Thon Through nine searing works of fiction, Melanie Rae Thon looks to the people who live in the borderlands, turning a keen and compassionate eye to those marginalized by circumstance and transgression. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, from dance halls to hospital morgues, these urgent tales careen between the faults of the body and those of the mind, exploring the irruption of the past through the present, the sudden accidents and misguided passions that make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.

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