Pure Hollywood - And Other Stories

Christine Schutt

Summary

“With terse sentences that read like poetry, Schutt strips each scene of excess context and cuts to the heart of the moment….Schutt's haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page.”—Los Angeles Times



Hailed by George Saunders as “a truly gifted writer,” with Pure Hollywood & Other Stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her acclaimed career and her inimitable style that John Ashbery once described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.” 



In 11 captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion, to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt.  



In league with JD Salinger, Katherine Mansfield and Guy De Maupassant, in Pure Hollywood Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.

Available since: 03/13/2018.

Other books that might interest you

Dating with Allergies

Martin Lundqvist

A flash fiction story about Jasmine and Francois who inadvertently send eachother to hospital on their first two dates, due to ignorance of the partners obscure allergies.

Show book

Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

GK Chesterton, Joseph Conrad,...

The top 10 short stories of all time written by British authors.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?

The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme. Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature.

Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

The British literary tradition almost needs no introduction. World famous authors are not sprinkled but saturate history with a remarkable range of genres and forms that few, if any, can equal. Down the centuries they have written in ground-breaking ways on the world they know and the one they imagine.

Genius really does have many names.
1 - The Top 10 - The British - An Introduction
2 - A Somewhat Improbable Story by G K Chesterton
3 - An Informer by Joseph Conrad
4 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens
5 - Sextons Hero by Elizabeth Gaskell
6 - August Heat by W F Harvey
7 - Lost Hearts by M R James
8 - The Rocking Horse Winner by D H Lawrence
9 - The Interlopers by Saki
10 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson
11 - Solid Objects by Virginia Woolf

Show book

After The Wake

Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan's genius was to strike a chord between critic and common man. When he died, at the age of 41, he was arguably the most celebrated Irish writer of the twentieth century.
After the Wake is a collection of seven prose works and a series of articles. It includes all that exists of an unfinished novel, 'The Catacombs', and pieces together items whose comic and fanciful accounts evoke Flann O'Brien. Also featured are works of acknowledged excellence, 'The Confirmation Suit' and 'A Woman of No Standing'. This writing bears all the hallmarks of the author's talent – an ability to bring characters to life quickly and unforgettably, a sharp ear for dialogue and dialect, and a natural vocation for story-telling.
This diverse collection is a delightful and entertaining windfall from one of Ireland's most colourful writers. An essential complement to Behan's master works.

Show book

Hard Times

Charles Dickens

Hard Times is unusual in several respects. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based upon 19th-century Preston. One of Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times was that sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and it was hoped its publication in instalments would boost circulation - as indeed proved to be the case. Since publication it has received a mixed response from critics. Critics such as F. R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay have mainly focused on Dickens's treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide between capitalist mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.

Show book

The Invisible Man

G.K Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) is best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown. In 'The Invisible Man', Father Brown is able to solve the mystery of the jilted lover who is able to track his beloved, threaten and attack his rival and yet is never seen by anybody, even those who are specifically on the look-out for him.Can it be that he really is invisible? And when he does manage to murder his rival, how does he make the body disappear too?

Show book

Chain of Fools - Prison Bids

Brian Coyle, N'Tyse

“I couldn’t see my man, but I knew he would be proud of me for what I was about to do. And for that, it was worth it.”—"Covenant" by Briana ColeFrom a single mother who gets lured into her pastor’s twisted den of lies, to a deadly revenge plot gone wrong, and an illicit affair that leaves a bloody trail of evidence, author and filmmaker N’Tyse presents Chain of Fools: Prison Bids, her most gripping, collaborative work thus far—featuring crime of passion tales served by bestselling authors Briana Cole, Shakir Rashaan, Brandie Davis, Erick S. Gray, and India Williams.

Show book