Award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. "The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.
What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.
The first collection of short stories are deeply personal in nature, all located in Mumbai- its folds and seams- which the writer has explored all his life. Familial bond or the lack of them, an intimate dekko at a media group's machinations, a close study of the Irani community which is fast vanishing in the metropolis, the underworld and the staggeringly bold new world of sexual relationships sparked by websites are just some of the narratives, with a twist in the tale. KHALID MOHAMED started as reviewer and co-editor, during his teenage years for close-up, a film society magazine. He reviewed television for The Economic Times basides contributing articles to The Illustrated Weekly of India and Femina. His writing has writing has also featured in India Today,The Indian Express, The Telegraph, the international film weekly Variety and in Sunday Observer, London. He was film critic for Mid-day, Senior Editor of DNA newspaper, and National Culture Editor and film critic for Hindustan Times. Currently, he is Consulting Editor to the Deccan Chronicle media group. He wrote the original stories and screenplays and also directed the films Fiza, Tehzeeb and Silsilaay . He debuted recently as a playwright and director of the stageplay Kennedy Bridge. His documentary The Last Irani Chai has been screened widely. His second documentary Smiles and Tears on Mumbai's street children is under post-production. Presently, he is writing his second stageplay and his first novel.
Despite the political instability characterizing twentieth-century Taiwan, the value of baseball in the lives of Taiwanese has been a constant since the game was introduced in 1895. The game first gained popularity on the island under the Japanese occupation, and that popularity continued after World War II despite the withdrawal of the Japanese and an official lack of support from the new state power, the Chinese Nationalist Party.
Spanning a century, from Kate Chopin and Fannie Hurst to J. California Cooper and Elana Dykewomon, this bold and deeply satisfying anthology of women's stories explores women's relationships to, and perceptions of, their physical selves. Addressing the peculiarities, the pleasures, and the shames of body politics, these stories of bodies that refuse to be contained offer a variety of perspectives on fully inhabiting the flesh. Whether celebrating bodies deemed transgressive or simply daring to acknowledge that such bodies exist, these diverse literary representations of fatness render the excessive body brilliantly, unapologetically visible. Book jacket.
In John Updike's largest and most varied short story collection he captures people, their marriages, children, affairs, and wrings emotion from what others consider sterile suburbia.
A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Tibor Déry (1894-1977), winner of Hungary's highest artistic honor, the Kossuth Prize, in 1948, was first imprisoned in 1934 by the Horthy regime for translating André Gide's diary of his journey to Russia, and again, over twenty years later, for his writings and political activities during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 against Soviet occupation. Around the world, Tibor Déry Committees formed: Picasso, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russel, E.M. Forster, and in the Indian Congress Committee were among the many involved. Today, Tibor Déry is venerated as one of the most important literary figures of Hungary and, like Chekhov, a master of the modern short story. Love and Other Stories presents some of Déry's finest work. In "Games of the Underworld," ordinary people in Budapest try to survive the winter of war in cramped cellars and encounter menacing Arrow-Cross men, a towering giant, a blind horse, a vinegar sponge; in "The Circus," a group of bored children transmogrifies into a grotesque spectacle; in "Love," a political prisoner is released after seven years and returns home to his wife and son. George Szirtes, the award-winning translator from the Hungarian and winner of the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, gives a brilliant introduction to this visionary collection that deals passionately with questions of responsibility and conscience, of social justice and renewal.
