American Literature Anthology

In this eye-opening short story, a tech reporter’s mistake unites two women eight thousand miles apart. One in New Jersey, one in the Philippines. Same name: Sandra Guzman. Same job: content moderators for a mega social media website. What transpires between them is a friendship that changes their perceptions of each other’s privilege and challenges the power of the very industry they work for.

A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North. Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African-American writers.

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in this collection dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun.

Here are four unforgettable stories by Yann Martel, the New York Times best-selling author of Life of Pi. In the exquisite title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the 20th century.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard, on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a “virtuosic” (Vanity Fair) collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters.

In his collection of poems, Musings of a Hermit, Charles (Chuck) Kausalik-Boe explores seeking the divine through the natural world, cats and chance encounters with others. From the solitude of his tiny inner city home, he watches and reflects on what passes by his porch windows. He also goes within to experience the magic that dwells in his heart and soul. From Chuck’s pen flows poetry that is both prayerful and filled with whimsy. Musings of a Hermit is a love song to the divine, the world around us, and to the magic that is possible.

Meet the women of American Housewife: They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These 12 irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam.

The stories in this collection are drawn mainly from those tribes which lived in the northern and central areas of North America. These represent the linguistic groups gerneally referred to as Algonquian, Iroquois, and Sioux. A final chapter covers the tales of the northwest Pacific Coast.

Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-19th century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations - like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.

An incident at a TSA security check point sows chaos and rumors, creating a chain of events that impacts twelve young Asian Americans in a crowded and restless airport. As their disrupted journeys crisscross and collide, they encounter fellow travelers—some helpful, some hostile—as they discover the challenges of friendship, the power of courage, the importance of the right word at the right time, and the unexpected significance of a blue Stratocaster electric guitar.

Kyron Santos, Kaylin's older brother, was used by Tasha Macklin to get back at Trae for his infidelities, a relationship that ultimately ended in pregnancy, murder, broken relationships, and mistrust. No one knew about the court-ordered sessions that Kyron was forced to attend. At least not until Mari, his woman who stuck by him throughout the majority of his prison bid, dropped the recordings off to Trae Macklin, Tasha's husband.

What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart? These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically.

Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.

A young Black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than 70 years ago, yet in them, contemporary listeners recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again.

Justin C. Key has long been obsessed with monsters. Reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps as a kid, he imagined himself battling monsters and mayhem to a triumphant end. But when watching Scream 2, in which the movie’s only Black couple is promptly killed off, he realized that the Black and Brown characters in his favorite genre were almost always the victim or villain—if they were portrayed at all.

Even the saved struggle when navigating their way through love. This much could definitely be said for the Fold family's youngest child and only son, Chadwick. Looking for love was never on Chad's list of things to do, until he held Taya in his arms on a dance floor and watched God laugh at his plans. She was beautiful in a way that caught his eyes and his heart. Foreign feelings that wouldn't fade had him questioning his sanity.

Daughters of Latin America collects the intergenerational voices of Latine women across time and space, capturing the power, strength, and creativity of these visionary writers, leaders, scholars, and activists—including 24 Indigenous voices. Several authors featured are translated into English for the first time. Grammy, National Book Award, Cervantes, and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as a Nobel Laureate and the next generation of literary voices are among the stars of this essential collection, women whose work inspires and transforms us.

Cleis Press's Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Women's Erotica series top bestseller lists, raising and exceeding the standards and expectations of readers of erotic fiction with each new edition. Now the African-American women's erotica market will discover the same level of literate, provocative sex writing in this debut collection of a new series. Best Black Women's Erotica showcases the hottest, most arousing, and most surprising erotic literature by African-American women writers.

At the dawn of human civilization, a blind prophet foretold the coming of one who would transform American literature forever, thrilling millions with his prose and debauching thousands with the meltingly seductive rhythm of his poetry. Now he has arrived. His name is Neal Pollack, the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, and he walks among us.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.