Публицистика: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Публицистика: прочееAn Amateur's Guide to the Night
"Mary Robison's short stories are short, subtle, and substantial . . . Her ironic sense of detail bursts from every sentence." – Vogue An Amateur's Guide to the Night stands as a perfect example of Mary Robison's beloved narrative style: purposeful, clipped, and devastating in its restraint. Reflecting on the life of disaffected youth, these stories speculate on how they often manage to remain deferent towards the rest of society—and document how spectacularly they often fail. "These thirteen stories are glimpses from a moving train into lit parlors, dinettes, bedrooms and dens . . . Think of Robison as the engineer, blowing the whistle, calling the stops and starts; invisible when you want to ask her why we're stalled here in the middle of nowhere, between stations, jobs, relationships and decisions." — Los Angeles Times
Tell Me
The second Counterpoint Robison reissue, after Why Did I Ever in Winter 2018 Robison, a beloved writer and essential voice on the Counterpoint list, is one of the writers Counterpoint is celebrating by reissuing importance books from the backlist Major national media outlets have already expressed enthusiasm over the Robison reissues, and strong positive coverage is expected Display and newsletter co-ops available and encouraged
Refund
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST We think about it every day, sometimes every hour: Money. Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.In Refund , Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world—swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value—a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.
Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley
Ann Pancake’s 2007 novel Strange as This Weather Has Been centered on mountaintop removal and its effects upon a single coal mining family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing short stories, Pancake returns to her native West Virginia to tell stories of other traditional people. These are folks living much as they have for three hundred years, tried by poverty and ill health but needing the coal companies’ upon which the economy is entirely dependent, even as they witness the air and land and water of this beautiful place being imperiled and destroyed.Ann Pancake’s ear for the Appalachian dialect – in both towns and in the countryside – is both pitch perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her characters are ensnared in the complexities of rural economies where there are no quick fixes to questions surrounding right livelihood even going off to college. With first-hand knowledge of the provincial locale and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families, she might well remind you of Alice Munro. In her intimate depiction of the natural history of rural Appalachia, Me and My Daddy
The Last Animal
The Last Animal by Abby Geni is that rare literary find — a remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life. These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.“Terror Birds” tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; “Dharma at the Gate” features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between man’s best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; “Captivity” follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; “The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr” details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; “In the Spirit Room” centers on a scientist suffering the heartbreaking loss of a parent from Alzheimer’s while living in the natural history museum where they both worked; in “Fire Blight” a father grieving over his wife’s recent miscarriage finds an outlet for comfort in their backyard garden and makes a surprising discovery on how to cherish living things; and in the title story, a retired woman traces the steps of the husband who left her thirty years ago, burning the letters he had sent along the way, while the luminous and exotic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean opens up to receive her.Unflinching, exciting, ambitious and yet heartfelt, The Last Animal will guide readers through a menagerie of settings and landscapes as it underscores the connection among all living things.
The End of the Straight and Narrow
This debut collection received critical acclaim and is now available for the first time in trade paper. The stories in The End of the Straight and Narrow take on the inner lives of the zealous, their passions and desires, and the ways religious faith is both the compass for navigating daily life and the force that makes ordinary life impossible.In “Landslide,” an aspiring evangelist witnesses the miraculous event that launches his career, but fails to notice the mental decline of his college roommate. In “Moonland on Fire,” a divorced, born-again father, his new wife, and his estranged teenage son battle to save their dilapidated home from a massive fire. In “Deep in the Heart” a dying boy reveals his final wish to his estranged parents: he wants to kill a deer. In “Seventeen One-Hundredths of a Second” an aging virgin is drawn into a precarious friendship. The five linked stories that comprise the collection’s latter half focus on a woman blinded suddenly while giving birth, who years later begins a process of disappearing that confuses her family and leads to ultimately violent and disintegrating ends.Ranging from the coastal highways of Southern California, to the mountains above Salt Lake City, to the swampy bayous and pine forests surrounding Houston, Texas, the stories often take place against the backdrop of disaster—a landslide, a fire, a drowning, a hurricane—as the characters question whether faith illuminates the world or leaves them isolated within it.
Enchantment
The short fiction of Thaisa Frank has captivated readers for two decades, and now many of those pieces are collected in one volume, along with several new stories. In the title story, a lonely mother and housewife orders an enchanted man from a website called The Wondrous Traveler, who arrives with instructions for use and a list of frequently asked questions about enchantment. In “Thread,” two circus performers who pass through the eye of a needle become undone by a complicated love triangle. In “Henna,” a young writing teacher must contend with an exotic student who will not write, her hands covered in dye and her fingers “sprouting innumerable gardens.” And in “The Loneliness of the Midwestern Vampire,” the undead descend upon the heartland of the country and become accustomed to its friendlier way of life, attending barn raisings and feasting on cattle in an attempt to normalize their darker passions.These are vibrant, compelling stories that examine the distance between imagination and reality, and how characters bridge that gap in their attempt to reach one another.
Banjo Grease
There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?
Sex and Taipei City
Sex in Taipei City is not what one expects: it is repressed, traded for cash, vengeful, sometimes awkward and almost always secretive. A young Taiwanese man goes on his first real date with a British man he meets online, a uniformed schoolgirl sells her body for cash in an odd form of revenge, a grandfather becomes obsessed with Japanese porn, and a pregnant mistress offers her lover's wife five million NT in exchange for her to divorce her husband.
Norwegian Folk Tales
Asbjornsen and Moe were inspired by the German folklore collectors, the Brothers Grimm, and followed their approach to preserving these ancient tales. Asbjornsen and Moe collected and published numerous volumes of folk tales in Norwegian from 1841 to 1859 and their work became a source of great pride for the recently independent Norway. The tales were first translated into English in 1859 which helped to make Norwegian folklore popular all over the world. In this entertaining collection, the reader will find ogres, trolls, princesses in need of rescue, magical creatures, thrilling sword fights, and dangerous quests. “Norwegian Folk Tales” also provides a fascinating window into Norwegian culture, history, and religion as the deities and mythical creatures of their ancient history appear in many of the tales. This important and influential collection of folk tales will entertain and educate children and adults alike. Collected together here are all the tales translated by George Webbe Dasent, which originally appeared in two volumes.