Other books that might interest you

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  Ayiti

  Roxane Gay

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  From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, a powerful short story collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. 
   
  In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood.  
   
  Roxane Gay is an award-winning literary voice praised for her fearless and vivid prose, and her debut collection Ayiti exemplifies the raw talent that made her “one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada). 
   
  Praise for Ayiti 
   
  “Highly dimensioned characters and unforgettable moments. . . . Dismantling the glib misconceptions of her complex ancestral home, Gay cuts and thrills. Readers will find her powerful first book difficult to put down.” —Booklist 
   
  “The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here. Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. It’s Gay’s unflinching directness—the sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it is—that makes her irresistible.” —Vogue 
   
  “A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak . . . This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman’. . . . This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.” —Kirkus Reviews

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  Had a Good Time - Stories from...

  Robert Olen Butler

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  ”Gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories” inspired by vintage twentieth-century postcards, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Booklist, starred review). 
   
  For many years, author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century—not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler here creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition.  
   
  In “Up by Heart,” a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In “The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving “Carl and I,” in which a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar “The One in White,” in which a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these short stories are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age. 
   
  “A wonderful collection.”—The Atlantic Monthly

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  Another Chance to Get It Right -...

  Andrew Vachss

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  The acclaimed and ground breaking collection of short stories, poetry, and allegory by Andrew Vachss, one of the most powerful voices in the field of child protection. This work is an illumination of the realities of child abuse, juvenile violence...and tribute to the power of imagination.  
  People Magazine says, "Another Chance is Dr. Seuss dressed up as a Scorsese movie, another on-target hit by an author who has made children his primary concern." 
  Another Chance to Get it Right offers a unique look at the potential of parenting, as much inspirational as it is instructional, both a blessing and a warning for us all.

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  Life Here Below - Stories

  Michael J Farrell

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  A dippy photographer shoots talking donkeys and invisible strangers. A professor who in his youth vowed to kill Ian Paisley has so far failed to do so. A brash young journalist wants the local paper to save the world, but the editor prefers football. Only a thin veil separates the world we think we know from the other universe we suspect. Does a son always know his father and vice versa? When a large old duffer gets stuck in Newgrange, can love provide a way out? Why can't the future be obvious as the past? Michael J. Farrell insists his stories are what people brood over in the small hours until some see the light. What they see is the fragile earth redeemed time and again by surprises. Ballinasloe may seem an odd beginning of the end of George W. Bush. A saintly old archbishop and a worldly new bishop climb Croagh Patrick together, ecclesiastical chalk and cheese each in search of a different end of the rainbow. New arrivals find one astronaut too many at the International Space Station. Life here below, Farrell contends, would be a dire place without insights and epiphanies and, of course, porter.

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  Edgar Allan Poe - Chapter &...

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Literature is a world of words and wonder, able to take us on almost unimaginable journeys from the wild and fantastic to the grind and minutiae of life. 
   
  An author’s ideas are his building blocks, his architecture of the mind, building a structure on which all else will rest; the narrative, the characters, the words - those few words that begin the adventure. 
   
  In this series we look at some of our leading classic authors across two genres: the short story and the poem.  In this modern world there is an insatiable need to categorise and pigeon-hole everyone and everything.  But ideas, these grains and saplings of the brain, need to roam, to explore and find their perfect literary use vehicle.  Our authors are masters of many literary forms, perhaps known for one but themselves favouring another. 
   
  Story. Poems. Story.  Within these boundaries come all manner of invention and cast of characters.  And, of course, each author has their own way of revealing their own chapter and verse.    
   
  1 - Chapter & Verse - Edgar Allan Poe - An Introduction 
  2 - The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe 
  3 - Alone by Edgar Allan Poe 
  4 - Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe 
  5 - The Bridal Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe 
  6 - A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe 
  7 - A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe 
  8 - El Dorado by Edgar Allan Poe 
  9 - To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe 
  10 - In Youth I Have Known One by Edgar Allan Poe 
  11 - Evening Star by Edgar Allan Poe 
  12 - Israfel by Edgar Allan Poe 
  13 - Sonnet - Silence by Edgar Allan Poe 
  14 - The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe 
  15 - The Fall of the House of Usher Part 1 by Edgar Allan Poe 
  16 - The Fall of the House of Usher Part 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

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  Fish Cough

  Craig Buchner

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  What if your possessions, the painting hanging in your living room or the photograph on your bathroom wall, could influence you to the point of action? Or worse yet, pass on some innate degenerate trait? Disease? Neuroses? 
  In Portland, Oregon, an inquisitive soul, Thom, spends much of his day having these thoughts. Obsessed by what is around him, he begins to question his own wishy-washy life philosophies. But as he and his husband, Howard, struggle to navigate their rollercoaster relationship and their shaky careers as freelance writers, Thom is faced with a challenge far greater than the persuasive power of their possessions. During a once-every-33-years meteor shower, an evil unlike anything on earth lands in their neighbor's tree, setting off a string of puzzling and unsettling events - beginning with the appearance of an anthropomorphic squirrel named Gordito and an invisible presence capable of mind-control. 
  This debut novel from acclaimed poet and short fiction writer, Craig Buchner, Fish Cough is punctuated by gallows humor and finely attuned observations of the human experience. American in setting and style, Buchner presents an alluring, uniquely disquieting journey into the dynamics of the modern psyche. Fish Cough is a new breed of novel that blurs genre and tugs at the heart, all while questioning the foundational ideas of the world we live in.

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