American Literature Anthology

In these 14 unique stories, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm takes on complex and dangerous emotions, exploring the gamut of modern Anishinaabe experience. Through unforgettable characters, these stories - about love and lust, suicide and survival, illness and wholenes - illuminate the strange workings of the human heart.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. For America, as the century closes, she is becoming less isolated. Her industrial might, her rising military power are pulling her ever closer into the entangled globe of nations. Her authors flex ideas and lexicons with riveting tales of this astonishing society.

Katia, la primera en su tradicional familia mexicoestadounidense en terminar la secundaria, entra a la edad adulta en una época de cambios turbulentos. En todo el país, los jóvenes luchan por los derechos civiles y de las mujeres, y protestan contra la Guerra de Vietnam y las brutales dictaduras de América del Sur. Como muchos de su generación, Katia quiere hacer del mundo un lugar mejor y está decidida a seguir su propio camino.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering.

Following the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.

These rib-ticklers include Mark Twain's "The Story of the Old Ram" and "The Story of a Speech"; E. P. Butler's "Pigs Is Pigs"; W. A. Butler's "Nothing to Wear"; Charles Dudley Warner's "How I Killed a Bear"; Eugene Field's "Oon Criteek de Bernhardt", William Livingstone Alden's "Carrie's Comedy", and Edith Wharton's "The Pelican".

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate. Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact.

Set in the present, American Z is centered around a deeply rooted and disturbing evolution of the zombie in America, and the scientific T.S.O.M.B.I.E. [zom-bie] program. A powerful group of elitists, known as The Society, has been secretly controlling governments for years, and are now on the brink of being able to control humanity itself. One man believes he is destined to stop them and is willing to do whatever it takes, including betraying those closest to him. American Z is sure to slowly eat away at your conscious, long after putting it down.

Composed of several interconnected stories, each taking place in a year ending with the number six, ironically a number that in Chinese divination signifies “a smooth life,” Dear Chrysanthemums is a novel about the scourge of inhumanity, survival, and past trauma that never leaves. The women in these stories are cooks, musicians, dancers, protestors, mothers and daughters, friends and enemies, all inexplicably connected in one way or another.

In stories charged by the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, grief, exes, and the profundities of friendship, She Is Haunted features injured ballerinas, cloned dogs, and competitive call centers in settings as far ranging as future and present Australia, New York City’s Chinatown, and suburban California.

And what if in each universe there reigned other Black woman gods? One million versions of god, and one million saints to watch over us? And what if this Black woman god were placed here on earth? These are just a few of the questions Anastacia-Reneé asks in this daring and mind-bending hybrid collection. Hers is a universe of striking variety—monsters, nontraditional saints, witches, zombies, the couple in the apartment next door, the wise elders from down the block, and gods watching over us all—as well as community and connectedness.

The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands. Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone.

This is a selection of works by three famous Irishmen: Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker. It includes: the short story by Bram Stoker, "Dracula's Guest"; Oscar Wilde's poem "Humanitad" and three versions of his "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"; and finally, an early collection of poetry called The Rose by W. B. Yeats. There is a general introduction by the writer and actor Tim Dalgleish and other additional material.

The story is about a gossipy woman finding out that being a "good Christian" is indeed a 24 hour job.

Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires.

With its lush settings and a taste for the unknown, Another Time, Another Place is a treat for the adventurous soul. This delicious collection, featuring five of the hottest African-American authors today, brings whole new worlds to life. Led and edited by New York Times best-selling author Zane, Another Time, Another Place transports sensuous and steamy encounters across the world and through history.

"O Espelho" é um conto filosófico de Machado de Assis que explora a complexidade da identidade humana. A história é narrada por Jacobina, um homem que, em uma conversa com amigos, relata uma experiência extraordinária que vivenciou. Após receber um uniforme militar, Jacobina se isola em uma casa de campo onde, ao se olhar em um espelho, começa a perceber uma mudança inquietante: sua imagem refletida parece perder a substância à medida que sua vida social e exterior se distancia.

Despite Carlos' mundane life, killing weeds for his father's rich customers, is billions of miles from the stars he observes in the night sky, or from the kids who sit in the canteen with their healthy sandwiches and bottled water. His life is a billion miles from their reality, and the reality of a stable life in America as he dreams of becoming a citizen. While their families provide them with nice clothes, large houses and cars to travel to school in, Carlos makes do with gas-fumed rags of clothes and a gap between his front teeth. In order to cope, he immerses himself in thoughts of the universe, and learns of black holes, gravity and the beguiling Casimir Effect.

The 10th anniversary edition of The Best American Erotica includes the most esteemed and lascivious writers at work today. Dorothy Allison explores the wonderful, mysterious abilities of the human hand, and Zane's corporate tigress plays mind games that make other office shenanigans look like mere games of Candyland.

The opening story in this collection follows Vinny, Kevin, and a mourning family from Liverpool on a journey to Wales. What should be a simple trip turns into something much darker. A cross between Roddy Doyle and Ken Follett, this political storytelling meets you wherever you are on life’s journey, and stays with you.