Reality, and Other Stories

Reality, and Other Stories
Author: John Lanchester
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571363024

Download Reality, and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Household gizmos with a mind of their own.Constant cold calls from unknown numbers.And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real.Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments - stories to be read as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by all the ghastly schlock, uncanny technologies and absurd horrors of modern life.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
Author: Ken Liu
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982134038

Download The Hidden Girl and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Guest of Reality

Guest of Reality
Author: Pär Lagerkvist
Publisher:
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1989
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Download Guest of Reality Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Soul

Soul
Author: Andrey Platonov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007-12-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781590172544

Download Soul Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A New York Review Books Original The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.” Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka. This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,” about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”; “The River Potudan,” a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech. This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.

To the Stars and Other Stories

To the Stars and Other Stories
Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0231553404

Download To the Stars and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane. Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.

Fado and Other Stories

Fado and Other Stories
Author: Katherine Vaz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2013-11-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0822978849

Download Fado and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

Skin and Other Stories

Skin and Other Stories
Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2013-05-30
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1101636300

Download Skin and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

How would you get rid of a murder weapon without causing suspicion? Where would you hide a diamond where no one else would think of looking? What if you found out that the tattoo on your back was worth over a million dollars? You will discover that just about anything is possible in a Roald Dahl story, and here are eleven of his very best.

Like Water and Other Stories

Like Water and Other Stories
Author: Olga Zilberbourg
Publisher: Wtaw Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Emigration and immigration
ISBN: 9780998801490

Download Like Water and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In "Dandelion," a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In "Doctor Sveta," a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In "Companionship," a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER "A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope," and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they "cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now."

Karma and Other Stories

Karma and Other Stories
Author: Rishi Reddi
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061865532

Download Karma and Other Stories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

“Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of detail give her revelations a quiet power.” — The New Yorker “[A]mong such time-tested topics of immigrant fiction, Reddi suddenly soars.” — San Francisco Chronicle “While many of the stories seem simple, characters and plots linger long after you turn the page.” — Washington Post “...reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri... The immigrant experience...is rendered with the starkest honesty... substance and depth.” — Philadelphia Inquirer “Reddi has produced a piece of writing that masterfully contrasts the assumed with the experienced, myth with reality.” — India Currents “...superb debut collection... much like Jhumpa Lahiri...a gem of a book...characters remain etched in memory...” — Indian Express “In deceptively simple prose...a compassionate look at what happens when the insular world of the Indian immigrant is breached.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch “...Reddi deftly employs images to crystallize... the isolation and occasional bewilderment shared by her sympathetic characters.” — Publishers Weekly “This excellent debut collection... [offers] elegant studies of a culture that is both familiar and foreign.” — Booklist “Reddi’s voice is gentle and her eye watchful...A soft-spoken, sympathetic collection.” — Kirkus Reviews “Sad, sweet, tender--a truly lovely book.” — Kiran Desai, Man Book Prize-winning author of THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS “Only the finest writers can craft short stories with the richness of a novel...[an] exceptional debut collection.” — Arthur Golden, bestselling author of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA “Rishi Reddi has written a unique and beautiful book with the power to both entertain and educate.” — Judith Guest, bestselling author of ORDINARY PEOPLE “Reddi’s characters are complicated people...and, as are the stories they inhabit, memorable and very worthy of our attention. Exquisite.” — Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of AN ALMOST PERFECT MOMENT “Reddi is the brightest light in Boston’s latest literary constellation.” — Boston magazine

True Story

True Story
Author: Danielle J. Lindemann, PhD
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0374720967

Download True Story Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research—including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance—to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are. By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives—and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we’re watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these “guilty pleasures” underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or “real.” At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty—but we can’t look away.