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I’m a fiction and humor writer whose imagination was initially sparked by superheroes and comic books. The idea of an otherwise average person who could turn themselves into a superbeing was transformative and powerful. As a teenager, these early heroes faded, and I became fascinated by The Twilight Zone’s compact and poignant storytelling that contained moral messages. This eventually led me to the fiction of Stephen King where the idea of average people encountering the supernatural and overcoming obstacles was a recurring theme. In my own work, I have tried to carry forward the idea that our everyday lives are more absurd, complex, and magical than they appear.
A master class on “less is more,” the stories in this collection are set in everyday, locations: a suburban front yard, an airport lounge, a kitchen, and are populated by working-class people in the midst of one or more traumas such as alcoholism, divorce, or financial trouble.
Though Carver doesn’t employ fantasy, the tight, accessible writing lures you in and immerses you in a comic-tragic world that is uniquely his own. This collection taught me the power of economical prose and that writing about the kinds of people you encounter at the supermarket can be just as transportive and resonant as stories that involve characters who live in exotic places, or universes.
This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.
I’m a fiction and humor writer whose imagination was initially sparked by superheroes and comic books. The idea of an otherwise average person who could turn themselves into a superbeing was transformative and powerful. As a teenager, these early heroes faded, and I became fascinated by The Twilight Zone’s compact and poignant storytelling that contained moral messages. This eventually led me to the fiction of Stephen King where the idea of average people encountering the supernatural and overcoming obstacles was a recurring theme. In my own work, I have tried to carry forward the idea that our everyday lives are more absurd, complex, and magical than they appear.
What I love about this collection is the elastic nature of the stories. Though most of the entries in this collection are dark, most contain a lighthearted energy and playfulness. They are quirky, loose, and not afraid to turn the stereo up and dance. This book taught me that fiction can be fun and still pack a powerful punch. It also encouraged me to try out experimental story ideas that may seem absurd at first. The story may not work out, but when it does, you can end up in surprising places. “The Ape Lady in Retirement” is a perfect example of this.
In sixteen stories, T.C. Boyle tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific. Boyle introduces us to a death-defying stuntman who rides across the country strapped to the axle of a Peterbilt, and to a retired primatologist who can’t adjust to the “civilized” world. He chronicles the state of romance that requires full-body protection in a disease-conscious age and depicts with aching tenderness the relationship between a young boy and his alcoholic father. These magical and provocative stories mark yet another virtuoso performance from one of America’s most supple…
I’m a fiction and humor writer whose imagination was initially sparked by superheroes and comic books. The idea of an otherwise average person who could turn themselves into a superbeing was transformative and powerful. As a teenager, these early heroes faded, and I became fascinated by The Twilight Zone’s compact and poignant storytelling that contained moral messages. This eventually led me to the fiction of Stephen King where the idea of average people encountering the supernatural and overcoming obstacles was a recurring theme. In my own work, I have tried to carry forward the idea that our everyday lives are more absurd, complex, and magical than they appear.
Stephen King has arguably perfected creating stories in which supernatural things happen to ordinary people. This set-up—what I loved so much about Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone TV series—is irresistible. Across fourteen tales, King delivers mind-bending tales that draw you in. “1408” a story about a ghost skeptic/writer who stays in a haunted New York hotel room is especially gripping. King was a big, early influence on me and though I didn’t keep up with his work much past Misery, whenever I do dive into his later work, I invariably find him as good as ever.
A spine-tingling collection of stories from the No. 1 bestselling master of horror - now with a stunning new cover look.
Nothing is quite as it seems.
Expect the unexpected in this veritable treasure trove of enthralling, witty, dark tales that could only come from the imagination of the greatest storyteller of our time.
In this eerie, enchanting compilation, Stephen King takes readers down a road less travelled (for good reason) in the blockbuster e-book 'Riding the Bullet'. Terror becomes deja vu all over again when you get 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French'. 'LT's…
I’m a fiction and humor writer whose imagination was initially sparked by superheroes and comic books. The idea of an otherwise average person who could turn themselves into a superbeing was transformative and powerful. As a teenager, these early heroes faded, and I became fascinated by The Twilight Zone’s compact and poignant storytelling that contained moral messages. This eventually led me to the fiction of Stephen King where the idea of average people encountering the supernatural and overcoming obstacles was a recurring theme. In my own work, I have tried to carry forward the idea that our everyday lives are more absurd, complex, and magical than they appear.
My favorite of Miller’s books, Tropic of Capricornis based on Miller’s life in Brooklyn in the 1920s. It’s a dizzying stream-of-consciousness array that sweeps you along. Miller’s occasional poignant reminiscences about the magic of his boyhood and friendships contrast with the soul-sucking realities of adulthood and workplace bureaucracy that try to stamp out the embers of wonder and passion like a boot heel. Like most of his books, Capricorncelebrates the absurd miracle of consciousness. Miller’s influence on my education as a writer was indispensable. His books didn’t serve so much as a template as how to write, as how to be a writer, specifically how to observe and appreciate the vast madness of the world, reject conformity, and the embrace the anarchist spirit of artistic creation.
A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin
A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers when it was published in 1939. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller who works for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in New York in the 1920s and tries to write the most important work of literature that was ever published. Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of…
I’m Mary Sisson, award-winning writer blah-blah-blah, and when I need to pry myself off the feeds before my head explodes, I reach for a particular sort of book: story-driven with a lot of adventure, a dash of humor, another of romance, andset in a well-developed, immersive fictional world. While all of these titles can be read alone (I hate books that were clearly written to sell a sequel—600 pages of filler ending with a cliffhanger? No thank you!)they all also form parts of series, because when my head is about to shoot right off my neck, it helps me to know that I have the remedy at hand. Enjoy!
Katie Chandler has moved to New York City hoping for a life of glamour and excitement, only to find herself lonely, frustrated, and deeply baffled that those jaded New Yorkers keep ignoring all the weird things that keep happening. Then she discovers that the average New Yorker can’t see what she sees—she is the rare true mundane, completely unaffected by all magic, including magical camouflage. Her special abilities lead her to a new job for a magical company, and the book leads the reader into a delightful series of adventures that hilariously combine wizardry and enchantment with corporate intrigue and the tropes of Chick Lit.
“A totally captivating, hilarious, and clever look on the magical kingdom of Manhattan, where kissing frogs has never been this fun.”—Melissa de la Cruz, author of The Au Pairs
Katie Chandler had always heard that New York is a weird and wonderful place, but this small-town Texas gal had no idea how weird until she moved there. Everywhere she goes, she sees something worth gawking at and Katie is afraid she’s a little too normal to make a splash in the big city. Working for an ogre of a boss doesn’t help.
I became interested in cities through my research on culture in Asia. I came to appreciate how much cities generate culture - and are the exchange points for different ideas. I’ve hosted a podcast on urban history, edited a book (Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience), and written about urban space for various magazines and websites.
While this book is about New York, it offers great insights into the role of women in urban spaces that are relevant across the world. Stansell weaves together statistical and official records, court reports, press stories, and paints detailed pictures of the lives of women in the nineteenth-century city. This includes the range of employment women took, and their various strategies to resolve disputes, run businesses, and manage their lives. In a city as diverse as New York, this included women from all over the world.
Before the Civil War, a new idea of womanhood took shape in America in general and in the Northeast in particular. Women of the propertied classes assumed the mantle of moral guardians of their families and the nation. Laboring women, by contrast, continued to suffer from the oppressions of sex and class. In fact, their very existence troubled their more prosperous sisters, for the impoverished female worker violated dearly held genteel precepts of 'woman's nature' and 'woman's place.'
City of Women delves into the misfortunes that New York City's laboring women suffered and the problems that resulted. Looking at how…
We are the Paper Lantern Writers, an author collective focused on historical fiction of all eras. From Medieval Europe to the Gilded Age (and beyond), in locales around the world, from romantic to tragic and back again, our books will take you on the journeys of a lifetime. There’s a story to be told every where you look and we'd love to be your tour guide. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and join our Facebook group SHINE.
The stories in this book all take place on the same day in 1915, when over a million women marched in New York for the right to vote. Stories like this appeal to me because so many of the women who worked tirelessly for this achievement are not familiar names. These stories give them a voice. One of my own ancestors was a suffragette. Maybe she was part of this march!
Stories From Suffragette City is a collection of short stories from the leading voices in historical fiction that all take place on a single day. The day one million women marched for the right to vote in New York City in 1915. A day filled with a million different stories, and a million different voices longing to be heard. Taken together, these stories from writers at the top of their bestselling game become a chorus, stitching together a portrait of a country looking for a fight, and echo into a resounding force strong enough to break even the most stubborn…
I’m a communication professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a social media user, and a mom. After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I wrote an op-ed for CNN arguing that he’d won the election on social media, and I just never stopped writing. A few hundred op-eds and a book later, I’m still interested in what social media is doing to us all and the issues women are up against in our society. My book allowed me to explore how social media is impacting every single aspect of the lives of women and girls and exactly what we can do about it. I wrote it as a call to arms.
I loved that, in addition to telling stories of her clients, Goldberg (an attorney) writes about how she herself became the victim of cyber abuse by a former boyfriend. I think hearing this from a smart, successful woman can help other victims overcome the tendency to blame themselves.
The stories Goldberg tells in her book make clear how life-destroying it is when nude images of a woman are posted online, whether because of so-called “revenge porn” or sextortion. I think this is only going to become a bigger problem because now, thanks to AI, it’s so easy to create nude deepfakes.
Accounts like Goldberg’s can help galvanize the laws we need to criminalize the sharing of nude images without consent.
Nobody's Victim is an unflinching look at a hidden world most people don't know exists-one of stalking, blackmail, and sexual violence, online and off-and the incredible story of how one lawyer, determined to fight back, turned her own hell into a revolution.
"We are all a moment away from having our life overtaken by somebody hell-bent on our destruction." That grim reality-gleaned from personal experience and twenty years of trauma work-is a fundamental principle of Carrie Goldberg's cutting-edge victims' rights law firm.
Riveting and an essential timely conversation-starter, Nobody's Victim invites readers to join Carrie on the front lines of…
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!
More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway.
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…
I’m an American-born cartoonist who’s been living and working in Montreal since 2015. My mother is from Quebec, and when I immigrated here I was looking to reconnect with my cultural roots. Reading graphic novels from here was a huge part of how I got to know my adopted community. I might be a bit biased, but I have to say Quebec has one of the world’s most vibrant comic arts scenes; a blend of American comic books mixed with Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. With more and more graphic novels from Quebec getting translated into English you’re sure to find something you’ll dig, whether you’re looking for slice-of-life or science fiction.
This slim but dense book chronicles the ups and (mostly) downs of a young woman’s life in Montréal and New York in the 80s and early 90s, a scuzzy time capsule full of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Doucet’s maximalist, punk-inflected art packs each and every claustrophobic panel to bursting, a perfect fit for this tale of a suffocating, toxic relationship playing out in the shadow of the Cold War. It’s no exaggeration to say that Doucet, who recently won the Angouléme Festival's Grand Prix, is one of the most important figures in modern comics, she was one of the first women to break into the boys’ club of the alt comix scene and rewrote the rules of the medium. She remains not only a giant in the history of Quebec comics but of the entire graphic novel art form.
'My New York Diary' documents the events in Doucet's life during a six-month period in 1991. At that time, she packed her bags and moved to New York and waiting for her was her new boyfriend, an aspiring cartoonist himself who took Julie to his apartment.
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