Award Winner: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon...Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
These twelve stories are rooted in foreign places, cemeteries, violence, and strong women. The worlds the characters construct are unforgiving.Their paths cross in tangled and sometimes deadly ways. In the title novella, three women use wit, seduction, and weapons to master the men they meet. The ribald reverend in "The Second Coming" meets his match in nineteen-year-old Charity. In "Super Secrets," two women are neighbors and lovers, until one is betrayed and exacts revenge. On a darker note, a crazed horse and a storm at sea shatter a fragile love in "Slashing at the Nets." Then, in "Storm Painter," an artist moves in with a writer,but their past destroys his third novel. Place is important. No one other than an Italian detective would find a clue in a singular tortellini. The New York sniper could only be trained by the Israeli Defense Force.
3 Women, 4 Towns, 5 Bodies is a short story collection spanning centuries, where nothing is as it seems and twists are as abundant as they are deadly.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
Beauty and terror collide in Doug Lawson’s Bigfoots in Paradise, a wild new collection of stories set largely in and around Santa Cruz, California and the surrounding mountains. It’s a land tucked between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean, one that’s populated by aging hippies and venture capitalist sharks, pot farmers and surfers, child prodigies and roaming herds of wild boar. Earthquakes rumble, meth labs explode, helicopters search overhead for drug farms while wildfires ravage the hillsides. Blimps crash, mushrooms dream, dogfights erupt, trustafarians pontificate while pneumatic ostriches walk the streets and sons and fathers and lovers try desperately to find some way to connect with the past, with themselves, before it’s too late. Doug’s prize-winning prose is as nimble and touching as it is lyric, and he plunges headlong into this astonishing country at a fine-tuned, white-knuckled pace that will leave you both gasping for breath and holding your heart in your hands. His characters are awkward, ungainly, and great at hiding and they shamble through the beautiful wilderness of their lives, searching for meaning, searching for themselves.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
From the unforgiving surf of Costa Rica to hidden vineyards in the South of France, the stories in Perfect Conditions span the globe, and the characters often struggle to find control in unrelenting circumstances: a deep sea fisherman discovers he may not be allowed to return home when his contract expires; a young woman mourns the death of a dear friend she cannot save; a newlywed couple embark on a disastrous honeymoon. Unflinching stories from an award-winning writer.
Vanessa Blakeslee's writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Globe and Mail, Kenyon Review Online, among many others. Her novel Juventud won the 2015 Bronze Medal, was a finalist for Foreword Review's Book of the Year, and a runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her short story collection Train Shots won the 2014 IPPY Gold Medal in Short Fiction.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
In his previous collection, Not Quite so Stories, David S. Atkinson twisted reality with small absurdities. Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep leaves sanity completely behind, pondering modern life through surreal humorous flash fiction involving Margaret Thatcher, jam appearing in boxers overnight, Gene Roddenberry, and more.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
This collection of "linked, rural-noir" stories depicts endangered humans in endangered environment. Jaimee Wriston Colbert has given us a story collection for our times. In WILD THINGS, Colbert's human characters face displacement, just like the tropical alligator who appears in New York's Susquehanna River. They face sheer desperation, like that of an ohia tree clinging to solid lava on a Hawaiian volcano. In an environment where good-paying factory jobs are an endangered species, Colbert's protagonists confront such post- industrial predations as meth, homelessness, and the ghosts of lost dreams. Their survival is their triumph.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Short Story
Praised by The New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki for delivering "astute portrayals of people who desire connection, hope, and renewal," World Gone Missing offers a page-turning collection of haunting and emotional stories about the many ways people can vanish from life. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who disappeared into thin air without warning, to the San Francisco businesswoman who becomes increasingly obsessed with a high school friend whose mother drove them apart years before, to the insurance clerk on her way to meet her son's mystery birth mother, Doyle's writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring.
Patterns is a collection of short stories that takes the reader into the lives of a wife who can’t stop herself from washing and cleaning, to a grocery store check-out clerk who attempts to find her life’s meaning in selling cosmetics, to a woman who buries a letter from her daughter-in-law in her garden, to a teenage girl who falls in love with her teacher. Mining the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, the author unravels a tapestry of real people who live their lives the best they can, while rising above the mundane to find grace.
“Sandra Worsham’s humor and clear-eyed honesty stitch this amazing quilt of meaning and experience together in a wonderful way.”—Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life after Life and Going Away Shoes.
“I was deeply moved by Sandra’s book, engaged by her voice, her mind, her heart. I think many will find their very human story here in the hands of a wise and compelling woman.”—George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville.
“Such an honest and moving account, filled with loving detail, of one brave, passionate, and determined woman.”—Sheila Kohler, New York Times bestselling author of Once We Were Sisters and Becoming Jane Eyre.
“Worsham writes in a way that captures the reader from the beginning page. She inspires us with her unflinching look at the hard task of living the truth, and the courage she shows in the face of loss.”—Elizabeth Cox, author of A Question of Mercy and Night Talk.
Based totally on satire, Human Blight weaves four separate stories of the failed social experiment. The individuals characterized in these stories are some of the most repulsive, repugnant, and reprehensible people. Yet every one of their traits, actions, and methodologies is on display today in social media, news, and in print. Beginning with Al, the Racist, caught up in his past with the inability to change, he struggles with the world that has passed him by, and he knows not why or how. To Rod, the Opportunist, he’s driven by an insatiable need to dominate. If the world does not give him his oyster, he will concoct a way to get it himself. Followed by Kyle, the Activist, misguided and oblivious to the cause. Believing in what he does, but not understanding what it is that he is doing. And finally, Dodge, the Entitled, given all the advantages of wealth, privilege, and prominence, he is led by the basest of urges. Like a spoiled crying child in a crowded movie theater, he can only understand his need for satisfaction. All four men move through life with a narcissistic grace and an intolerance for rules that they believe do not apply to them. This allows them only to see the world through the lenses that they have created; lenses that reflect back their own warped and misshaped desires.
Raman reveals the struggle involved in changing nations and keeping heart; she shows us that no culture is isolated from the universal truths of love and loss.—Sylvia E. Halloran, editor, poet, and winner of Barnes and Noble’s Independent Thinking Essay Contest
In this heartfelt collection of twenty-two stories, a mother and daughter slowly begin to understand their different perspectives on life, love, and happiness.
Maya has sacrificed much happiness for her daughter, Jeena. She left India to immigrate to America with her diplomat husband and tried to embrace her new country with open arms. And when tragedy strikes, she strives to make a stable life for her daughter.
Jeena, who straddles the divide of cultural displacement, struggles to reconcile the more common American displays of affection with her traditional mother’s seemingly strict and cold nature. Maybe, Jeena stubbornly thinks, if her mother had kissed her father more, he wouldn’t have left for dangerous places. But Jeena eventually begins to recognize the small, subtle ways her mother made her affection known.
Journey forward and back through the years as Maya and Jeena navigate love, loss, and resolution. It will take two open hearts for these women to close the gap wrought by heritage.
Weaving together the real and the fantastic, the linked stories in this collection introduce a diverse group of characters living in an urban neighborhood surrounding Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard. A once middle-class, predominantly African American area, the neighborhood became riddled with poverty but is now in the midst of gentrification.
In the 15 stories in this collection, faith plays a key role, either through traditional religion, spirituality linked to nature or belief in the promise of a better life. The stories also present a microcosm of many neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, in which people of different races, ethnicities, class and sexual orientation are living in close proximity to one another, with neighbors being both strangers and friends.
This is PART THREE of Struggles of the Women Folk. Follow TM as she shares the experiences of characters that you’ve come to love and hate. Continue the emotional roller ride that spans several generations, weaving through the pain and uncertainty that consumes their lives.
These are stories about the adventures and misadventures of middle-aged men, looking for a new intimate relationship with a woman. Serious, thoughtful, at times hilarious, and even erotic, a look at what occurs - or might not - when attraction happens. Both men and women will relate to aspects of these stories and perhaps recognise themselves in them...or maybe wish they did. What and how do men and women think at that first meeting, what actions do they take or leave, how honestly do they present themselves?
Meet Tim, the narrator of these stories..."As for me, I am 50-something, recently single again after a long marriage. What to do now? Get on the net? Go to bars, the tennis club, singles parties, ask friends, write a book, who knows? I already know that love will not fix it all, that women are neither the solution nor the enemy-not the problem or the salvation- but being loved and loving, helps and is most important to any human being. One cute curiosity is in the word 'relationship'. The word neatly breaks up into relation and ship. Relating means connecting, being able to understand another person. But Ship? Well there is romance about and on ships, a certain mystery and obviously a way of travelling, usually to exotic destinations, often for fun, or for serious business. But travelling on a ship is also a touch out of control, for we are not directing the ships movements...others do. So we are on a journey indeed often to shores we have not been to. It may be a bit risky, but we have decided to take the trip or else we have been hijacked to do so, but we are certainly on a new relating expedition."
Curve balls have many forms, and so do the ways we handle the ones that life pitches at us.
"Caroline Taylor's stories are taut, pointed, and consistently intriguing--not to mention potent reminders of the dramatic arcs that shape even the most ordinary lives."--Louis Bayard, author of Lucky Strike.
"Attention is the rare and pure form of generosity. In ENOUGH!, Caroline Taylor pays attention to the small heroes of our everyday lives: those important cogs that surround us. She presents them with both wit and grace."--Ruth Moose, professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of Carolina, and author of Neighbors and Other Strangers as well as two other short story collections and two mystery novels
In Enough! Thirty Stories of Fielding Life's Little Curve Balls, Caroline Taylor has compiled some of the best of her short stories into one captivating, memorable volume.--Colorado Book Review
