The Old Child & Other Stories

The Old Child & Other Stories PDF Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
"The one novella and four stories in The Old Child go beyond the limits of the expected, the real. Somber, nostalgic and often mystical, these marvelous fictions provide glimpses into the minds of outcasts and eccentrics. The parable-like novella The Old Child describes a girl's mind seemingly blank: picked up off the street with no discoverable past, she is brought to a children's home where she finds she can "succeed by her silence." In another story, "Siberia," the heroine smuggled out of a Russian camp vigorously re-establishes herself in her old home. In "Hale and Hallowed," a woman pays a surprise nighttime visit to her friend with whom she shared a hospital room when their two sons were born."--BOOK JACKET.

The Old Child & Other Stories

The Old Child & Other Stories PDF Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book

Book Description
"The one novella and four stories in The Old Child go beyond the limits of the expected, the real. Somber, nostalgic and often mystical, these marvelous fictions provide glimpses into the minds of outcasts and eccentrics. The parable-like novella The Old Child describes a girl's mind seemingly blank: picked up off the street with no discoverable past, she is brought to a children's home where she finds she can "succeed by her silence." In another story, "Siberia," the heroine smuggled out of a Russian camp vigorously re-establishes herself in her old home. In "Hale and Hallowed," a woman pays a surprise nighttime visit to her friend with whom she shared a hospital room when their two sons were born."--BOOK JACKET.

Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538765497
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author "pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale" and includes a foreword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times). When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

Orange World and Other Stories

Orange World and Other Stories PDF Author: Karen Russell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525656146
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In“Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

The First Person and Other Stories

The First Person and Other Stories PDF Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141900326
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The First Person and Other Stories is the fourth collection of short stories by Ali Smith. The First Person and Other Stories effortlessly appeals to our hearts, heads and funny bones. Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, Smith explores the ways and whys of storytelling. In one, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her gauche fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting and beautiful child. Challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, a third presents its narrator, 'Ali', as she drinks tea, phones a friend and muses on the relationship between the short story and - a nymph. Innovative, sophisticated and intelligent, the stories in The First Person and Other Stories are packed full of ideas, jokes, nuance and compassion. Ali Smith and the short story are made for each other. 'Smith's is a profoundly optimistic vision. These stories are frightening yet funny, and the sheer exuberance and playfulness of her language endows dark matters with a lightness of touch' New Statesman 'She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense' Alain de Botton 'Terrific . . . hurrah for Ali Smith . . . The best short-story writers make it look as easy as making a cup of tea. Ali Smith is one of these . . . A bold and brilliant collection of stories by a writer unafraid to give it to us as it is' Times 'A glorious collection that celebrates and subverts the short story form' Independent

The Power of Horses and Other Stories

The Power of Horses and Other Stories PDF Author: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816525508
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The fifteen stories contained in The Power of Horses portray, each in a different way, the sensitive and enduring culture of the Dakota of the Upper Plains and convey many of the basic truths that have sustained Elizabeth Cook-LynnÕs people for countless generations. Though the stories are often filled with violence and grief, they are also brimming with beauty, gentleness, charm, and humor. In these striking and memorable tales of Dakota country, Joseph grieves that the body of his middle son will never be returned to his native shores from the distant World War I battlefields where he was killed; family members gather to bury their father and barely survive their own weaknesses and bickering; a grandmother takes her grandchild for a walk and imparts to the child some of the old wisdom of times past; a whining hound dogÑprimordial to the DakotaÑcompetes unwittingly with Reverend TilestonÕs efforts to bring the word of the Christian God to a tight-knit family, and wins; Magpie is a poet but is also on parole, and just as his friends have begun to rethink the finality of justice, he is ÒaccidentallyÓ shot and killed in the white manÕs jail. Cook-Lynn writes unsparingly yet compassionately of reservation life in the last century. In each of these gemlike stories she reveals something of the mystery and essential toughness of the Dakota people.

The It Doesn't Matter Suit and Other Stories

The It Doesn't Matter Suit and Other Stories PDF Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571314651
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
A timeless collection of stories for younger children. In the eponymous The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit, little Max Nix is on a quest to find the perfect suit he can go ice-fishing, cow-milking and town-walking in. There's magic afoot in Mrs Cherry's Kitchen and children will love to find their perfect Nighty-night little / Turn-out-the-light little Bed! in The Bed Book.

Morning Child and Other Stories

Morning Child and Other Stories PDF Author: Gardner Dozois
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 1618249223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A collection of award-winning science fiction written by two-time Nebula award winner, Gardner Dozois. Here youll find Dozois short stories "Morning Child" and _The Peacemaker,Ó both winners of the Nebula for best science fiction short story. Also includes Dozois classics "A Dream at Noonday," "Chains of the Sea," "The Hanging Curve," "The Bride" (with Jack Dann), and "Ancestral Voices" (with Michael Swanwick). From the introduction: The stories in this collection were published between 1970 and 2003, and thus represent a considerable chunk, perhaps a majority share, of not only my career but my life. . .when some critic asks me what was in my mind when I came up with a certain trope in one of those stories, or what some bit of symbolism really means, why I chose some word or image instead of another, or sometimes even just what the specific inspiration for a story was, often I just cant tell him¾Im not that kid anymore. . .So, perhaps its an odd way to review your career, by the places where youve lived. Probably not very satisfactory to the critics. The most disgruntled among them will just have to get that time-machine and go back and ask that bright-eyed young twenty-year-old kid about his work. If you see him, say hi for me. Gardner Dozois is known for his beautiful evocation of setting and emotional intensity within a truly alien and often austere vision of the future. He is a science fiction master of the first order¾a fact fully on display in this outstanding collection. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). _Lyric, haunting, heartbreaking¾this is science fiction at its best.Ó¾George R.R. Martin Science Fiction Hall of Fame Inductee Gardner Dozois is the winner of two Nebula awards for fiction. _My generation of writers has produced relatively few authentic masters of the short form. Gardner Dozois is one of them.Ó¾William Gibson

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories PDF Author: Ken Liu
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
ISBN: 1982134038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories. Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.

Wild Child

Wild Child PDF Author: T.C. Boyle
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101189908
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A superb new collection from "a writer who can take you anywhere" (The New York Times) In the title story of this rich new collection, T.C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human. There is perhaps no one better than T.C. Boyle at engaging, shocking, and ultimately gratifying his readers while at the same time testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance. The fourteen stories gathered here display both Boyle's astonishing range and his imaginative muscle. Nature is the dominant player in many of these stories, whether in the form of the catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity ("La Conchita") or the wind-driven fires that howl through a high California canyon ("Ash Monday"). Other tales range from the drama of a man who spins Homeric lies in order to stop going to work, to that of a young woman who must babysit for a $250,000 cloned Afghan and the sad comedy of a child born to Mexican street vendors who is unable to feel pain. Brilliant, incisive, and always entertaining, Boyle's short stories showcase the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

The Accidental Diary of B.U.G.

The Accidental Diary of B.U.G. PDF Author: Jen Carney
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241455456
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Meet Billie Upton Green and her VERY accidental diary - and don't you DARE call her B.U.G! Billie has taken the new girl at school under her wing. She'll teach her the important stuff - Biscuit Laws, Mrs Patterson and of course where to sneakily eat a Jaffa Cake. She might even get invited to the EVENT OF THE YEAR (Billie's mums' are getting married). But then suspicion sets in. The new girl seems VERY close to Billie's best friend Layla. And she knows a LOT about the big school heist - the theft of Mrs Robinson's purse. But, Billie is on to her. Well, as long as Patrick doesn't catch her eating biscuits first. Join Billie in this laugh-out-loud adventure! A sparky, funny new series perfect for fans of Diary of A Wimpy Kid - Daily Mail Jen Carney knows how to make kids laugh . . . and I mean totally unreserved roll-on-the-floor belly laugh. Billie Upton Green is a firm favourite in our house - Emma Mylrea, author of Curse of the Dearmad