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"Short stories Fiction."
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Heartbreaker : stories
\"In her debut story collection, Heartbreaker, Maryse Meijer, flashlight in hand, goes deep into the darkest rooms of the psyche. With gorgeously restrained and exacting prose that packs a cumulatively devastating punch, she unapologetically unmasks the violence we are willing to perform upon one another in the name of love and loneliness and the unremitting desire to survive. In doing so, she lights societal convention and reader expectation on fire, exploring the darker emotional truths surrounding love and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Other One
Set in Sri Lanka and America, the ten short stories in this debut collection feature characters struggling to contend with the brutality of a decades-long civil war while also seeking security, love, and hope. The characters are students, accountants, soldiers, servants. They are immigrants and strivers. They are each forced to make sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, choices. What they share, despite what they've endured, is the sustaining power of human connection.
An excerpt from the book:
\"All I want to know is when you are coming? When are you bringing my sons, my family?\"
She watched as a gecko, tinier than normal, skittered across the far wall. It disappeared into a small crack. The room was very hot, and she hadn't turned on the ceiling fan so that the family could save a little money. She took a handkerchief from her nightstand and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead and the back of her neck.
\"I can't leave malli alone here. He's making progress but -- \"
\"It will be for two years only. Then you can sponsor him.\"
\"The lawyer says it's not so easy.\"
\"He's a grown man. Let the government take him. The government did this to malli. Let the government pay the price for his care.\"
Even though there was no chance that her brother Ranjith could hear her, Anoja dropped her voice. \"Malli is all alone here. He has nobody but aiya and me.\"
eBook
This is not a love song : stories
A collection of dark, witty stories explores the efforts of ordinary people to persevere when marriages, friendships, and families come undone.
Book
The Viewing Room
In The Viewing Room, two hospital chaplains console the living during the moments when they look upon their beloved dead for one last time in a large urban hospital in Los Angeles. But this room is also a character, linking stories together and bearing witness in chilling testimony of grief and wisdom. Henrietta and Maurice, the chaplains, are ministers who have lost their faith due to devastating personal tragedy. Still, they regain their hold on their own lives through their work, one death at a time. Jacquelin Gorman lays bare nine parallel worlds of suffering in stories of unflinching detail, vividly told with heart, guts, and compassion. In these pages, the children are both murderers and victims, and the adults fare no better: a teenage father shakes his screaming baby to death; high school surfers kill the homeless for sport as a way of cleaning up their beaches; a Muslim basketball player readies her best friend for burial with a sacred ritual that reveals forbidden love; a scorned ex-wife leaves a message in permanent ink on the body of her betrayer; and a pet therapy dog's unconditional love for a decaying body memorializes the spirit within. This moving and unsettling collection of stories shines a piercing light on the dark corners of our modern world, illuminating necessary truths that convey a clearer and, undoubtedly, greater vision of humanity.
eBook
The spirit bird : stories
\"The flight path of The Spirit Bird traces many landscapes and different transitory lives. A young man scratches out a living from the desert; a woman follows a rarely seen bird in the far reaches of Alaska; a poor single mother sorts out her life in a fancy mountain town. Other protagonists yearn to cross a racial divide, keep developers from a local island, explore their sexuality, and mourn a lost loved one. The characters in this collection are compelled to seek beyond their own horizons, and as the stories unfold, the search becomes the expression of their desires. The elusive spirit bird is a metaphor for what we've lost, for what we hope for, and what we don't know about ourselves\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Wars of Heaven: Short Stories
The lives of the working class in West Virginia--a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed--are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone--but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.
eBook
The dark dark : stories
\"This is the first collection of stories from a widely acclaimed novelist writing in the realm of the literary fantastical. They urge an understanding of youth and mortality, ghosts, ghost towns, doubling and loss, with the hope that we can know one another more deeply or at least stand side by side to observe the mystery of the world\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Deaf Heart
Told through a series of quirky, irreverent short stories and
letters home during the early 1980s, The Deaf Heart
chronicles a year in the life of Dempsey \"Max\" McCall, a Deaf
biomedical photography resident at a teaching hospital on the
island of Galveston, Texas. Max strives to become certified as a
Registered Biological Photographer while straddling the deaf and
hearing worlds. He befriends Reynaldo, an impoverished Deaf
Mexican, and they go on a number of unusual escapades around the
island. At the hospital, Max has to contend with hearing doctors,
nurses, scientists, and teachers. While struggling through the
rigors of his residency and running into bad luck in meeting women,
Max discovers an ally in his hearing housemate Zag, a fellow
resident who is also vying for certification. Toward the end of his
residency, Max meets Maddy, a Deaf woman who helps bring balance to
his life. Author Willy Conley's stories, some humorous, some
poignant, reveal Max's struggles and triumphs as he attempts to
succeed in the hearing world while at the same time navigating the
multicultural and linguistic diversity within the Deaf world.
eBook
The Dance Boots
In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In \"Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth,\" this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling. The Dance Boots narrates a century's evolution of Native Americans making choices and compromises, often dictated by a white majority, as they try to balance survival, tribal traditions, and obligations to future generations.
eBook