Alongside writing poems and short stories, I am a clinical psychologist focusing on the psychology of men. People echo the vastness of the stellar expanse in which only 1% is matter like the planets and stars, our bodies, days in which we love and hate, moments we embody healthy intimacy or enact violence, the light that gives the face radiance. 19% of the universe is dark energy, and 80% dark matter-- less than 1% is light, and yet light is the foundation of life. "God is light," the ancient text intones, and though the words resound, what that light means in the despair of this world is a beloved mystery.
How do we overcome the most wild and unforgiving shadows of our personal and communal life together? If anyone can help us more closely understand our lack of understanding of one another, it is the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and short story writer, Richard Ford. The spare beauty of Wildlife(Ford’s homage to the dark force of lost love), is in close attunement with his cult classic of short story lore, Rock Springs. Ford’s subtlety and power as an artist are irrevocably tied to the uncommon life-giving capacity he shapes in us when we give ourselves to the ancient wisdom of this story collection.
Ten “beautifully imagined and crafted stories” of the American West by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day (Joyce Carol Oates).
In these ten exquisite stories, Richard Ford explores the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West and the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and girlfriend in a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; and two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck.
The title story of this collection is a miracle of human relations, ecstatic prose cut to perfection, and the multivalent understandings that arise when we give ourselves freely, openly, and yes brokenly to the will to love. There is nothing so sweet as the kind of development and shaping of humanity found in Davis’ short stories. An author whose work has appeared inBest American Short Storiesand won a Pushcart Prize, Davis is an author who has not received the kind of national following she deserves.
Claire Davis's novels have won acclaim from reviewers, readers, and booksellers alike. In "Labors of the Heart", she offers a stunning first collection of stories, some of which have been honoured by the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Adultery presents the quandary of a middle-aged man whose mother is cheating on her husband by keeping company with her ex-husband. In Grounded, a mother follows her teenage son as he attempts to run away along Montana's highways. And in Labors of the Heart, a lonely man - enormous and virginal - is literally struck by love for a woman…
Master of the novella (Legends of the Fall; Revenge; The Man Who Changed His Name), screenwriter, poet (The Theory and Practice of Rivers), and short story writer, Jim Harrison is unafraid to write with the kind of masculine energy that fills the world with a desire for life, freedom, autonomy, and intimacy. His powerful novella, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, the final movement in this collection, gathers the feminine and the masculine in a form of nonbinary exchange that results in deeper hope, and greater love.
Three novellas by the author of Legends of the Fall. “A brilliant tour de force . . . Jim Harrison at his peak: comic, erotic, and insightful” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren’t irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade…
There is great beauty to the concrete and close-space urban worlds generated by Edward P. Jones. We descend with him into an ever more compassionate world in which people love and hate one another, seek one another, find one another, and bring about uncommon transcendence of heart, mind, and spirit. An artist whose books never fail to forward the depths of American literary gravity, he is a wonder to read and his art a joy to behold. Lost in the City, his first book of short stories, garnered the PEN/Hemingway award. His second book, The Known World, was granted the Pulitzer Prize. The words of social philosopher bell hooks provide the same grounding found in reading Jones’ beautiful powerful stories, it’s “all about love.”
“Original and arresting….[Jones’s] stories will touch chords of empathy and recognition in all readers.” —Washington Post
“These 14 stories of African-American life…affirm humanity as only good literature can.” —Los Angeles Times
A magnificent collection of short fiction focusing on the lives of African-American men and women in Washington, D.C., Lost in the City is the book that first brought author Edward P. Jones to national attention. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honors for his novel The Known World, Jones made his literary debut with these powerful tales of ordinary people who…
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News, Annie Proulx is an engine of literary power with whom we engage in a breakneck ride to hell and back. In Close Range she follows traditional norms of Western masculinity and then deconstructs them and in fact explodes them so we can never see the American West in quite the same way again. Her stories set fire to a lone house on the plain. At night we watch the house burn with singular intensity until it burns down to nothing. Symbolic of how we must face and overcome our own individual and collective losses, after reading Close Range we are never the same again.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time.
Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain," the…
American Masculine envisions women and men in a new country of grace. Winner of the American Book Award, named by Esquire as a “Three Books Every Man Should Read” selection, and chosen by Kirkus Reviews as a Best Book, Best Short Story Collection, and Editor’s Choice selection, the book also won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize and two High Plains Book Awards, for Best Short Story Collection and Best First Book.With starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, the American Library Association, Kirkus, and Shelf-Awareness, American Masculinewas called a book of “elegance,” “muscularity,” and “astonishing power,” “prophetic,” “lyrical,” and “fiercely written,” forming a “true and pure depiction of sorrow and a primer for forgiveness.” “These stories are powerful literary stunners,” said Booklist.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
