American Literature Anthology

"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.

NOW AN AMAZON #1 BEST SELLER! A New Beginning/The Smoke of One Thousand Lodge Fires, Little Creek Publishing Co. All rights reserved To My Readers, Our Heroine, Topusana (Prairie Flower) awakens in a hidden cavern in the Texas Hill Country after having survived an attack on her Home Camp. During that battle Topusana is herself rescued from captivity by her husband Tabbananica (Voice of the Sun). The year is 1844. The Native American couple, along with a handful of survivors, escapes not into hiding, or a secret land, but into the “Dream Time.” Topusana, after seemingly sleeping in the ...

Originally published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas, was the first book from Richard Wright, who would go on to win international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the Black experience. Set in the American Deep South, each of the powerful and devastating stories in Uncle Tom's Children concerns an aspect of the lives of Black people in the post-slavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. The collection also includes a personal essay by Wright titled "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

Charles thought he had it all - until a devastating betrayal and the shattering loss of his family drove him to living on the streets. Beatrice is the first person who's truly cared about him in a long time. Little by little, he's finding reasons to care about rebuilding his life. Drawn to Charles and the temptation of a second chance, Beatrice is faced with the hardest of decisions. But his insight, secrets - and the reminder of a profound past encounter - will give her unexpected inspiration, gratitude, and the strength she needs to find her way - perhaps in time for Christmas.

Award-winning environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in the previous year. ” The selections in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 reveal a trying year for our planet—from the Lahaina wildfire tragedy to the lush Amazon jungle slowly turning to savanna—while also celebrating the earth’s beautiful and mysterious ways—from the largest beaver dam on earth to the heroic innovation to prevent birds from crashing into Chicago’s expanse of glass buildings.

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights listeners with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker", a torturer, a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.

In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this collection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong.

The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California, in the 1970s.

A grieving mother calls out to her faraway son. A student forgoes the lurid appeal of dating apps in exchange for a painter’s love. The anonymous voices of queer native men converge amid violent eroticism. A man just out of prison balances the uneasy weight of family and freedom, while a professor returns home to conduct research only to be haunted by a dark specter. The stories and voices in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut story collection are buoyed by philosophical undergirding, poetic demand, and the complex relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena a su perro para llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica. En Ginebra, el conductor de una ambulancia y su esposa acogen al abandonado y aparentemente moribundo ex presidente de un país caribeño, solo para descubrir que sus ambiciones políticas siguen intactas.

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.

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.

In Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These fifteen original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth. Full of both sorrow and joy, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is an essential celebration of this rich and diverse community.

In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this—moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language.

The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through - "the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying" - to try to mend what we've broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care.

Critics have compared her work to that of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, but J. California Cooper has a warm, witty style that’s definitely her own. Each of her short stories is a gem of downhome wisdom, polished with a bit of gossip, some heartbreak, and lots of humor.

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the 75-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of 44 of its best stories from (so to speak) home.

Louis L'Amour's world is built on those dramatic moments when men and women cast their fears, doubts, and pasts behind them and plunge into the unknown. Nowhere is that more evident than in this latest collection of stories set on the American frontier. These selections include "The Nester and the Piute"; "Big Man"; "Waltz Him Around Again"; "Shadow"; "Barney Takes a Hand"; "When a Texan Takes Over"; and "No Trouble for the Cactus Kid".

An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful artistry in short fiction.