American Literature Anthology

For more than fifty years, Wendell Berry has been telling us stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time. In A Place in Time, the stories dates range from 1864, when Rebecca Dawe finds herself in her own reflection at the end of the Civil War, to one from 1991 when Grover Gibbs's widow, Beulah, attends the auction as her home place is offered for sale.

From "one of the funniest writers in America" comes a collection of stories culled from the front lines of the millennial culture wars. Rife with failing rock bands, student loans, and participation trophies,

Spoiled Brats is about a generation of narcissists - and the well-meaning boomers who made them that way.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure - from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama - Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it - or perhaps because of it - they shine.

Terry Pratchett has earned a place in the hearts of listeners the world over with his best-selling Discworld series - but in recent years he has become equally well-known and respected as an outspoken campaigner for causes including Alzheimer's research and animal rights. A Slip of the Keyboard brings together for the first time the finest examples of Pratchett's nonfiction writing, both serious and surreal: from musings on mushrooms to what it means to be a writer (and why banana daiquiris are so important).

A vibrant debut story collection—poignant, unflinching, and immersive—masterfully moving between sharp wit and profound tenderness, Guatemalan Rhapsody offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of an ever-changing country, the people who claim it as home, and those who no longer do. Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simon, the patron saint of alcohol and cigarettes, the characters in these stories find themselves at defining moments in their lives, where sacrifices may be required of them, by them, or for them.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California.

As a 41-year-old man confronts his own mortality in this collection's title story, he recalls his Spokane Indian father's chilling death from alcoholism and diabetes. Another tale features an eccentric salesman pursuing a married woman from airport to airport. And then there's the film editor who sees nothing wrong with altering footage to fit preconceived views - until he becomes the target of media distortion.

Bigfoot encounters, they say, are transformative. Jump into Tracks and see what you will say about them! Here, you will meet a Sasquatch for every season. You may never get a chance to meet a Bigfoot in person, but don’t miss the chance to meet the Sasquatch in Tracks, a collection of engaging stories based on actual reports of encounters.

Millie Two Bears lives alone in a trailer in the heart of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Since her husband went to jail, she’s been on the outs with the reservation. And it’s not just people she has to contend with. Now the prairie dogs are moving in on her patch of land. When a strange woman comes into Millie’s life, and Millie’s rodent war escalates, a fateful confrontation with vengeance, secrets, and survival is just underfoot.

Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.

With heart-stopping stories by Zane, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, Joy M. Copeland, Robert Fleming, Terence Taylor, Francine Lewis, Brandon Massey, and 12 other established or up-and-coming writers, Dark Dreams is a must-have contemporary anthology for fans of the supernatural.

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.

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles.

101 Famous Poems, compiled by Roy J. Cook and first published in 1916, is a collection of one familiar poem each by the best-known poets in the English language, including Alfred Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Milton, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth. The anthology is indexed by title, author and first line.

“The People Could Fly,” the title story in Virginia Hamilton’s prize-winning American Black folktale collection, is a fantasy tale of the slaves who possessed the ancient magic words that enabled them to literally fly away to freedom. And it is a moving tale of those who did not have the opportunity to “fly” away, who remained slaves with only their imaginations to set them free as they told and retold this tale.

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean.

A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town ... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years ... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims. Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground,