What the World Will Look Like when All the Water Leaves Us
What the World Will Look Like when All the Water Leaves Us

Author: Laura Van den Berg

Publisher: Scribe Publications

Published: 2011-01-31

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1921640898

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The stories in Laura van den Berg's rich and inventive debut illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane. A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A grieving missionary becomes obsessed with a creature rumoured to live in the forests of the Congo. And, in the title story, a young woman travelling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer. Rendered with grace and precision, this breathtaking collection is narrated by women yearning for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary that will forever alter their lives. 'Laura van den Berg taps into her characters' losses with an impressive clarity . . . These tales are the work of a notable author finding her voice.' - Publishers Weekly 'A young writer with talent to burn; the beauty of her writing is matched only by the fierce emotional empathy for her characters.' - The Courier-Journal

You Must Be This Tall to Ride
You Must Be This Tall to Ride

Author: B.J. Hollars

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2009-04-29

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1599633639

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Compelling stories have the power to generate infinite wonder: It's nearly impossible to imagine how the author began, and yet we sense there's much more beyond the final word. It's this mystery–a combination of inspiration and craft, smoke and mirrors–that makes writing feel momentous. But it can also feel overwhelming, causing us to become small, scared, not quite ready for the "big" rides, such as finishing that story, that novel, and finding the courage to share it with the world. In You Must Be This Tall to Ride, you'll find 20 works of fiction and nonfiction by acclaimed contemporary authors, each offering fresh perspective on ''coming of age'' (a story to which we can all relate), as well as exclusive personal essays and practical exercises.In their own words, these writers grant you a guided tour of craft with unparalleled access to the process behind their creation, including how to: • grow a story from the seed of an image or sentence • allow experiments with language to lead you to plot • turn even the most unlikely characters into heroes • transform raw anecdotes from your own life into compelling fiction and essay Join 20 writers as we grow up and down, taking a rollercoaster ride in stories. You'll not only begin to understand what makes the wheels of a story turn, you'll also gain the tools and strategies to transform lost characters and runaway plots into the greatest show on earth. So go ahead, step right up. Listen for the calliope music, and take your place in line. Your ride has just begun.CONTRIBUTORS: • Steve Almond • Aimee Bender • Kate Bernheimer • Ryan Boudinot • Judy Budnitz • Dan Chaon • Brock Clarke • Michael Czyzniejewski • Stuart Dybek • Michael Martone • Antonya Nelson • Peter Orner • Jack Pendarvis • Benjamin Percy • Andrew Porter • Chad Simpson • George Singleton • Brady Udall • Laura van den Berg • Ryan Van Meter

The Best American Short Stories 2014
The Best American Short Stories 2014

Author: Jennifer Egan

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0547819226

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Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

Find Me
Find Me

Author: Laura van den Berg

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0374710600

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After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel—a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy's immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients—including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel. As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.

Freeman's: Arrival
Freeman's: Arrival

Author: John Freeman

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0802190847

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A new literary journal arrives on the scene with unpublished works from such superstars as Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, and others. In this inaugural edition of Freeman’s, a new biannual of unpublished writing, former Granta editor and NBCC president John Freeman brings together the best new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about that electrifying moment when we arrive. Strange encounters abound. David Mitchell meets a ghost in Hiroshima Prefecture; Lydia Davis recounts her travels in the exotic territory of the Norwegian language; and in a Dave Eggers story, an elderly gentleman cannot remember why he brought a fork to a wedding. End points often turn out to be new beginnings. Louise Erdrich visits a Native American cemetery that celebrates the next journey, and in a Haruki Murakami story, an aging actor arrives back in his true self after performing a role, discovering he has changed, becoming a new person. Featuring startling new fiction by Laura van den Berg, Helen Simpson, and Tahmima Anam, as well as stirring essays by Aleksandar Hemon, Barry Lopez, and Garnette Cadogan, who relearned how to walk while being black upon arriving in NYC, Freeman’s announces the arrival of an essential map to the best new writing in the world. “A terrific anthology . . . Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell and a host of other lively writers let loose their imaginations in editor John Freeman’s first outing with a new literary journal that is sure to become a classic in years to come.” —San Francisco Chronicle

State of Paradise
State of Paradise

Author: Laura van den Berg

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0374612218

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An Apple Best Book of July | Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Oprah Daily, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, ELLE, Bustle, and Lit Hub "A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems." —Mona Awad, author of Rouge "A wholly original and epically engaging novel from a master of episodic oddity." —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den Berg It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button. Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself. A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

Eat Joy
Eat Joy

Author: Natalie Eve Garrett

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1936787792

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Named a Best Cookbook of the Year by Martha Stewart Living "Magnificent illustrations add spirit to recipes and heartfelt narratives. Plan to buy two copies—one for you and one for your best foodie friend." —Taste of Home This collection of intimate, illustrated essays by some of America’s most well–regarded literary writers explores how comfort food can help us cope with dark times—be it the loss of a parent, the loneliness of a move, or the pain of heartache. Lev Grossman explains how he survived on “sweet, sour, spicy, salty, unabashedly gluey” General Tso’s tofu after his divorce. Carmen Maria Machado describes her growing pains as she learned to feed and care for herself during her twenties. Claire Messud tries to understand how her mother gave up dreams of being a lawyer to make “a dressed salad of tiny shrimp and avocado, followed by prune–stuffed pork tenderloin.” What makes each tale so moving is not only the deeply personal revelations from celebrated writers, but also the compassion and healing behind the story: the taste of hope. "If you've ever felt a deep, emotional connection to a recipe or been comforted by food during a dark time, you'll fall in love with these stories."—Martha Stewart Living “Eat Joy is the most lovely food essay book . . . This is the perfect gift." —Joy Wilson (Joy the Baker)

Sightings
Sightings

Author: B. J. Hollars

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-03-25

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 0253008468

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“Savagely entertaining characters . . . adept humor and impeccable prose. [Readers] come away with the feeling of having had a true encounter with the fantastic.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love B.J. Hollars’s debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. They feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern. “An imaginatively sculpted collection of absurdist concepts applied liberally to the equally preposterous notion of growing up.” —Kirkus Reviews

xo Orpheus
xo Orpheus

Author: Kate Bernheimer

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-09-24

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0143122428

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Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse—his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions. Aimee Bender retells the myth of the Titans. Elizabeth McCracken retells the myth of Lamia, the child-eating mistress of Zeus. Madeline Miller retells the myth of Galatea. Kevin Wilson retells the myth of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Emma Straub and Peter Straub retell the myth of Persephone. Heidi Julavits retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Ron Currie, Jr. retells the myth of Dedalus. Maile Meloy retells the myth of Demeter. Zachary Mason retells the myth of Narcissus. Joy Williams retells the myth of Argos, Odysseus’ dog. If “xo” signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbye to an old way of mythmaking. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, a squid who falls in love with the sun, and a girl who gives birth to cubs, here are extravagantly imagined, bracingly contemporary stories, heralding a new beginning for one of the world’s oldest literary traditions.