Amidst the teeming tenements of 1970s Bombay (Mumbai), a hungry teenage boy struggles through life in a poverty-stricken family ruled by a domineering alcoholic father, when suddenly he faces another challenge: the affections of an upper middle-class girl. In this exploration of poverty and pleasure, patriarchy and tragedy, Fishhead’s titular narrator must search for ways to bridge the gap between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds: the life he longs to live, and the one chosen for him by Destiny.
The local bar¿the true, no-frills, nameless dive bar¿offers its patrons a refuge, a place to express their doubts, dreams, regrets, and failures. Here they can escape or celebrate life; tell tall tales and jokes, or rage against the inherent unfairness of the human condition. Chances are you've spent time in a place like this yourself¿but whether minutes or hours or years, you'll want to spend more in here. Lyrical and hypnotic, Ninety-Nine Bottles is a distillation of Joseph G. Peterson's considerable talents, and a powerful and emotional meditation on the repetitions and variations of life¿regular people searching for meaning in these sad and beautiful places. Why not stop in for a few?
Radio. It's almost as easy as marriage and motherhood.The excitement of a career on the air! Listeners asking for advice on dressing their girlfriends in leather bustiers; managers who believe every professional woman longs for a bouquet on Secretaries' Day; Saturday nights giving away free T-shirts and beer in country music bars; reporting on a day in the life of a dominatrix¿all while juggling two kids, rescue dogs, and one cross-country move after another. Live the dream with Turi Ryder, a music jock and talk host on major-market stations from Chicago to Los Angeles, with stops in Minneapolis, Portland, and San Francisco along the way. This darkly comical, bitingly accurate, and lovingly fictionalized memoir will ring true for anyone who has longed for both a creative life and a family to come home to.
American Sfumato consists of nine mesmerizing stories, each designed to function independently and form a unit with the rest. The action is set in several present-time locales (Chicago, the Balkans, New Orleans, Germany, Brazil), and the narrative revolves around a protagonist who's caught up in attempts to reassemble the fragments that constitute his life. By day, he's a neurobiologist who researches learning and memory, which then informs his acts of night-time self-examination.The Serbo-Croatian version was published in Montenegro and Serbia in 2015, and a Slovenian translation was released in 2016. In 2016, American Sfumato was nominated for the Mea Selimovi¿ Prize, the most prestigious award for a novel published in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, or Serbia, and in 2017, it was shortlisted as a Montenegrin entry for the European Union Prize for Literature.
A mysterious man appears suspended in the air above a major American city. A foul-mouthed posse of machete-wielding scoundrels wreak havoc on a small-town mayor. A cocaine-addled boxer starts a torrid affair with the wife of the Invisible Man-who just might be watching (and enjoying) all the freakiness.Darrin Doyle's latest collection of short stories is an electrifying look at men behaving badly-or just being weird. Hilarious, madly inventive, and compellingly readable, this unforgettable collection will leave the reader disturbed, dazzled, delirious-and begging for more.
The natural successor to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg collection, Caves of the Rust Belt: Ohio Stories travels to the Heart of It All, where drowned sailors reminisce over a hot meal, and the rules of the yard sale are law. In his stunning debut, Joe Kapitan captures the modern Midwest in devastating detail, often blurring the lines between reality and the surreal. The depth of each story leaves readers wanting more as they dig into the pages of this remarkable collection. Memories of another America encase families like a Cold War bunker, forcing characters to confront the pasts that haunt their future. A man tries to renovate the exterior of an old mansion, but even in the state where All Things Are Possible, it is impossible to remove the cracks in the foundation and exorcise the ghosts in the basement. A school shares a message of resilience and community, while masking terrifying truths that appear all-too-possible in our current age. Kapitan has created a fantastical representation of the post-recession Midwest, presenting an image of a world where sinkholes don't just swallow the neighborhood, but also unearth hidden hope lying beneath the surface.
After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped of so many places he used to know, while the town''s familiar streets, bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To convalesce, he sculpts from collected scrap metal, but his arrival in town soon rouses a young girl, Lita Avila, to curiosity. Could this reclusive and oddly quiet man, whose art is sensitive yet intense, truly be guilty of setting fire to his parents'' bungalow and burning them alive? At once an homage to the urban grit of Nelson Algren and the family sagas of Leo Tolstoy, The Fugue is a true epic that spans three generations and over fifty years, a major new achievement in the history of Chicago literature. It considers the effects of war and the silent, haunting traumas inherited by children of displaced refugees. Gint Aras''s lucid yet lyrical prose braids and weaves a tale where memory and imagination merge, time races and drags, and identity collapses and shifts without warning.
Like an arrowhead, the title story in this collection pierces through our tough skin and through to what's delicate within. It's the first piece in a triptych that elegantly holds together this stunning collection about love and loss and longing-our feeble human institutions and fragile relationships broken down and rusting; our tender hearts shot through with tragedy and dysfunction but still struggling to stay alive, to find wholeness and healing and rebirth in nature, or just to keep beating as long as possible in the face of overwhelming sorrow.
An unadulterated look inside the lives of those hardest hit by the Great Recession, Steve Passey shows with great clarity that when all else fails, it's our relationships that keep us afloat, even if we're drifting to nowhere. Narrators shaped by the generation decaying around them proclaim an era where the Business of Bad News is the norm, and the only escape is trying to find solace in the familiarity of everyday life. Relatable in their unique contentment with the bottom of the barrel, these characters form the most intimate bonds through conversations held in the marginal spaces of the American Dream.
Aging widower Russ Lanaker knows he doesn't know his neighbors-but when he finds out one of them was a witness to, and career expert on, the strange UFO phenomenon known as the Phoenix Lights, he realizes that's a situation he'd like to change. What follows is an odyssey out of his air-conditioned comfort zone, through the sun-baked Arizona suburbs, and onto the franchise-lined (and not-so-great) American road. In an existential style reminiscent of Don DeLillo, but with the humor and heart of a Coen Brothers film, Alex Higley takes us along as Russ strikes out in search of knowledge about an alien encounter, and perhaps something far more bizarre-genuine human connection.
This hard-hitting collection of creative essays explores the beauty and pain embedded in some of our favorite rough-and-tumble pastimes--roller derby, mixed martial arts, and teaching. Carlo Matos ties it all together with gusto, in a book that will send you reeling to the canvas again and again, and make you return every time for more.
Detective Art Topp has a wife…or rather, had a wife. It's really hard to tell. On one hand, he talks to her every day, and she talks back. On the other, he's still in shock from the day he walked into his Triple A Detective AAAgency office and found her lifeless body riddled with bullets, the catastrophic blowback from what should have been a simple investigation. Now he's promised his daughter he's going to figure out what happened. The only problem is, he's not much of a detective-just a washed-up middle-aged former telecom worker who went to the gun range too often, watched too many episodes of The Rockford Files, and suddenly decided it'd be fun to be a private eye. Or maybe there's another problem-he also knows it might have been his fault. And the cops are starting to wonder, too…Gunmetal Blue showcases Joseph G. Peterson at his inimitable best. It's delightfully absurd and horrifyingly plausible, a sad and funny look at what happens when our airy fantasies become gritty reality, and when that reality in turn falls apart into madness and nightmares.
In late December of 1941, two parachutists dropped into occupied Europe on a mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, an SS leader whom one contemporary called "the hidden pivot" of Nazi Germany.Six months later, they succeeded.This is the definitive telling of this oft-forgotten story--its fascinating background, its thrilling climax, and its tragic consequences. It draws on diverse resources and influences, including Plato's Republic, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the writings of Czechoslovakian president Tomáš Masaryk, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and even Camus' The Fall and Bukowski's Ham on Rye. In doing so, it creates something wholly unique--a powerful meditation on the subjective nature of history, and on the ways we distort the past in order to preserve it as memory.
October, 1967. Yuri Gagarin sits atop a Proton rocket, ready to launch. After several turbulent years in the public eye, he's been chosen in secrecy to captain the Soviet Union's latest space spectacular: the first manned flight around the moon. The second story in the Altered Space series, Public Loneliness is a detailed and imaginative look at a country and a space program with a curious schizophrenia regarding publicity and secrecy. Based on extensive research, it's also a lively and literary story that references familiar classics (like Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea) and forgotten landmarks of Soviet socialist realism, while also touching on universal themes of adventure, alcoholism, heroism and shame. It's a compelling look behind the massive posters at the all-too-real man who led the human race into space.
May, 1970. After a one-month launch delay, Apollo 13 lands in the Fra Mauro Highlands of the moon¿and then the trouble starts.The first in a series of what-if stories from the golden age of space exploration, Zero Phase was written based on meticulous research, and with assistance from two Apollo astronauts: Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who visited the Fra Mauro Highlands¿and Captain Jim Lovell, who was supposed to. Dramatic, detailed, and finely written, this novella is a must-read for space aficionados and literary enthusiasts alike.The titles in the Altered Space series are wholly separate narratives, but all deal with the mysteries of space and time, progress and circularity. Each one is an ens¿ of words in which orbits of spacecraft, moons, planets, and people allow us fresh perspectives on the cycles of our own lives.
A suburban lawyer obsessively searches for her out-of-work husband¿s sex doll; a grieving man buys a parrot for the stranger who saved his life; a retired Florida lineman discovers a power more vital than electricity. In his debut collection Adult Teeth, award-winning short story writer Jeremy T. Wilson skillfully presents a cast of compelling characters who grapple with life¿s big concerns: marriage, friendship, parenthood, death. With heartbreak and humor, these twelve stories explore the brutal truth that for all these characters, as for all of us, time is lying in wait, ready to punch us in the mouth.
Andy's a bartender on Chicago's West Side in the late 1970s. For years, he's been slinging beers to corrupt cops and fat Zenith employees, but given the neighborhood's ongoing decline, he's starting to wonder how long it can go on. He's serving workers from a dying factory in a dying neighborhood; he sees crime on the rise-and he decides to become a criminal himself."North and Central" perfectly evokes Chicago in the epic winter of '78-'79-the bleak season of blizzards and disco and John Wayne Gacy-capturing the city in microcosm through the denizens of one blue-collar watering hole. If Springsteen and Bukowski had teamed up to write a story about a Chicago bar, they'd have been hard pressed to do better than this; it's an anti-"Cheers", a bittersweet story about a place where everybody knows your nickname, and they're tired of you coming around because you're a degenerate. But it's more than just a static portrait; it's a gripping and moving story destined to earn its own place among the classics of Chicago literature.
This irresistible collection of stories brilliantly skewers the close-to-rich and not-so-famous of 21st century America. With keen yet kind perspective, Kaltman revels in the triumphs and travails of misfit trophy wives, psychic hotel maids, jilted bridegrooms, showtune-singing security guards, and assorted other oddballs. Always balancing her sharp eye with a soft heart, Kaltman ensures that this collection isn't just funny, but memorable and lovable as well.
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