The Prize Winner and Other Stories


Book Description

Five-year-old Lulu and her friend Tubby go to summer camp. Then, Lulu and the gang have a little Halloween fun, including stories of Ol' Witch Hazel, costume parties, and some tricky trick-or-treating.




The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio


Book Description

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom's winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board. By entering contests wherever she found them -- TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads -- Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn't just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest -- and had won enough to pay the bank. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree -- worth $3,000 today -- to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.




Slip of a Fish


Book Description




The Best Short Stories 2022


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The prestigious annual story anthology includes prize-winning stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lorrie Moore, Olga Tokarczuk, Joseph O'Neill, and Samanta Schweblin. "Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Valeria Luiselli has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices and including stories in translation from Bengali, Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Luiselli, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL. THE WINNING STORIES: “Screen Time,” by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell “The Wolves of Circassia,” by Daniel Mason “Mercedes’s Special Talent,” by Tere Dávila, translated from the Spanish by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed “Rainbows,” by Joseph O’Neill “A Way with Bea,” by Shanteka Sigers “Seams,” by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft “The Little Widow from the Capital,” by Yohanca Delgado “Lemonade,” by Eshkol Nevo, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston “Breastmilk,” by ‘Pemi Aguda “The Old Man of Kusumpur,” by Amar Mitra, translated from the Bengali by Anish Gupta “Where They Always Meet,” by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich “Fish Stories,” by Janika Oza “Horse Soup,” by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton “Clean Teen,” by Francisco González “Dengue Boy,” by Michel Nieva, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer “Zikora,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “Apples,” by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson “Warp and Weft,” by David Ryan “Face Time,” by Lorrie Moore “An Unlucky Man,” by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell




A Scrap of Time and Other Stories


Book Description

Named a New York Times Notable Book Winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize Winner of the Anne Frank Prize These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.




Jump and Other Stories


Book Description

In this collection of sixteen stories, Gordimer brings unforgettable characters from every corner of society to life: a child refugee fleeing civil war in Mozambique; a black activist's deserted wife longing for better times; a rich safari party indulging themselves while lionesses circle their lodge. Jump is a vivid, disturbing and rewarding portrait of life in South Africa under apartheid.




Fado and Other Stories


Book Description

• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.




Fit


Book Description

A tender hearted debut about class and adolescence that follows a young girl's abrupt move from a squalid foster home to a dazzling new life in London.




Lusaka Punk and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2015


Book Description

Now in its sixteenth year, the Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa’s leading literary prize, and is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This collection collects the five 2015 shortlisted stories, along with stories written at the Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, which took place in April 2015.




Aftermath


Book Description

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offences at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education programme he participated in. On 29 November 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the bathroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. 'It is the immediate aftermath,' Taneja writes. 'I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh. The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.' In this searching lament Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.