One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist PDF Author: Dustin M. Hoffman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803288980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Rare voices in fiction, the lives of the working class consume this collection. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist brings to life the narratives of midwestern blue-collar workers. In these sixteen stories, author Dustin M. Hoffman invites readers to peek behind the curtain of the invisible-but-ever-present “working stiff” as he reveals their lives in full complexity, offering their gruff voices—so often ignored—without censorship. The characters at the heart of these stories work with their hands. They strive to escape invisibility. They hunt the ghost of recognition. They are painters, drywall finishers, carpenters, roofers, oil refinery inspectors, and hardscapers, all aching to survive the workday. They are air force firemen, snake salesmen, can pickers, ice-cream truck drivers, and Jamaican tour guides, seething forth from behind the scenes. They are the underemployed laborers, the homeless, the retired, the fired, the children born to break their backs. One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist initiates readers into the secret nightmares and surprising beauty and complexity of a sweat-stained, blue-collar world.

One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist PDF Author: Dustin M. Hoffman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803288980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rare voices in fiction, the lives of the working class consume this collection. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist brings to life the narratives of midwestern blue-collar workers. In these sixteen stories, author Dustin M. Hoffman invites readers to peek behind the curtain of the invisible-but-ever-present “working stiff” as he reveals their lives in full complexity, offering their gruff voices—so often ignored—without censorship. The characters at the heart of these stories work with their hands. They strive to escape invisibility. They hunt the ghost of recognition. They are painters, drywall finishers, carpenters, roofers, oil refinery inspectors, and hardscapers, all aching to survive the workday. They are air force firemen, snake salesmen, can pickers, ice-cream truck drivers, and Jamaican tour guides, seething forth from behind the scenes. They are the underemployed laborers, the homeless, the retired, the fired, the children born to break their backs. One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist initiates readers into the secret nightmares and surprising beauty and complexity of a sweat-stained, blue-collar world.

Survival House

Survival House PDF Author: Wendell Mayo
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1622882083
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Often humorous, always resonant, the ten stories in Survival House not only look back to the collective mind of doom in the atomic age of the 1950s and 1960s, but also address its legacy in our time—the emergence of new nuclear powers, polarizing politics, and the ever-tightening grip of corporations. In contemporary stories, such as “Doom Town,” a festival annually celebrates the survival of the human race by conducting riotous air raids. In “The Trans-Siberian Railway Comes to Whitehouse,” a bar owner desperately clings to a new all-things-Russian theme to save himself from financial ruin. Other stories, set in the 1960s, recast the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy assassination, and Space Race in personal histories of the human heart that remind us what it takes to endure—both then, and now.

Better Times

Better Times PDF Author: Sara Batkie
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496211979
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on what’s happening in places people don’t think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in women’s lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for “troubled women” imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times. Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here—with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change—interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories PDF Author: Del Raye
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496238222
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows a family's tenacity in the face of relationships fractured by language and distance.

Thanks for This Riot

Thanks for This Riot PDF Author: Janelle Bassett
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496240332
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went "okay"). Grouped by types of riot--external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots--Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes PDF Author: Venita Blackburn
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201868
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments -- Black Jesus -- Brim -- A Savior, Belief, Tupac, and Balloons -- We Buy Gold -- The Hurt Will Make You Stronger -- Chew -- Take Me to the Water -- In the Middle of Everything There Are Ribbons of Light -- String Theory -- A Brief Excerpt from the History of Salt -- Ephemeros -- Dog People -- Barbers -- End of the World -- Ways to Mourn an Asshole -- Rites -- They Only Look Like They're Smiling -- The Immolator -- There Are No Ninjas in the End -- Hold 'til Warm -- Ravished -- Not Like You, Not at All -- The Annie Oakley Gun Training for Women -- Scars -- Run Away Screaming

Extinction Events

Extinction Events PDF Author: Liz Breazeale
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496218302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
In this collection of short stories, Liz Breazeale explores the connections between humans and the natural world by examining the processes and history of our planet. A myriad of extinction events large and small have ruptured the history of the earth, and so it is with the women of this book, who struggle to define themselves amid their own personal cataclysms and those igniting the world around them. They are a mother watching the islands of the world disappear one by one, a new bride using alien abduction to get closer to her estranged parent, a daughter searching for her mother among the lost cities of the world, a sister trying and failing to protect her mythical continent-obsessed brother. Here extinction events come in all sizes and shapes: as volcanic eruptions and devastating plagues and meteor impacts, as estrangements and betrayals and losses. Dark, angry, and apocalyptic, Extinction Events is a compendium of all the ways in which life can be annihilated.

What Isn't Remembered

What Isn't Remembered PDF Author: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496229134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The stories in this collection explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home.

If the Body Allows It

If the Body Allows It PDF Author: Megan Cummins
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496223055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame--about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath--are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they've lost everyone else, including themselves. Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.

Vanished

Vanished PDF Author: Karin Lin-Greenberg
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496233778
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description