Showing results for "Literary Lives" in Anthologies

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

In nine poignant stories spiked with humor and intelligence, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni captures lives at crossroad moments - caught between past and present, home and abroad, tradition, and fresh experience. A widow in California, recently arrived from India, struggles to adapt to a world in which neighbors are strangers and her domestic skills are deemed superfluous in the award-winning "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter".

From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume. No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and...

Shelby is struggling with parenthood, marriage, a passive-aggressive mother, and unemployment. But she also has a sweet escape in her beloved Hallmark movies. When a secret admirer promises to sweep her away into a world of those same romantic tropes, the temptation is so heady, Shelby can already smell the pumpkin spice. But this rom-com dream has a whiff of conspiracy....

In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together — and, no, she isn’t contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, to take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

In “The Pleasure of Her Company,” a lonely, single woman befriends the married couple next door, hoping to learn the secret of their happiness. In "Long Distance," a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned....

The stories in The Two of Us focus on pairs: intense one-on-one relationships and encounters. Characters undergo genetic testing, garden, overeat, starve themselves, consider suicide, travel, have their hair cut, fall pregnant, all while simultaneously driving each other towards moments where they - sometimes unwillingly - glimpse the meaning and shape of their lives and who they might become.

Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In “The Writer in the Family,” a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced...

Joe Fleming, a youth of twenty, earning his livelihood as a sailmaker and supporting his mother and sisters by his trade, augments his income by prize-fighting before so-called sporting clubs. On the eve of his marriage to Genevieve, an employe' in the Silversteins' candy shop, Joe is to fight his last bout before a club, having promised Genevieve to give up "the game," which, while it seems wrong to her, is to him a clean and manly as well as lucrative occupation.

This story, set in Texas, is about a mother, her troubled son, and the redemptive powers of love. When gentle-natured Margie Clammor meets motherhood, she's in for the fight of her life. Her charming, manipulative son Tommy has a genius for trouble, and Margie battles year after year to remain his advocate and convince the world to see the good in him. That is, until grown-up Tommy is accused of committing an act so horrific that Margie must either face the facts or surrender everything she holds dear.

During an eco-friendly cleanup at the beach, Ange finds something horrifying in the brush. The sickening, heartbreaking evidence of an irreversibly changing earth triggers dread about the future for her daughter. But as reasoned worries slide into paranoia, reality itself begins to untether. For Ange, there may be no stepping back from the destructive darkness of her sleepless nights.

In the chaos of a maternity ward, memories of tragedy and grief come rushing back for an anxious mother-to-be as she struggles to balance her child’s needs with her own healing. Rushed into an emergency cesarean section, a woman finds herself in the same hospital where her suicidal mother died. She’s buried the trauma of her mother’s last hours--and also the dread that she might be just as vulnerable to breaking. As the new mother relives one crisis in the midst of another, prize-winning author Julie Orringer turns the joyous event of birth into a harrowing, poignant short story.

A fantastic short story collection from critically acclaimed, and bestselling author, John Updike...

Pamela is a newly retired teacher with time on her hands. She’s finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for what’s ahead: exhausting postdivorce dating rituals and an uneasy relationship with her emotionally stunted, live-at-home son. But for Pamela, there’s a surprise in store that could challenge the status quo and, against all expectations, make life interesting again.