The Friend of Women and Other Stories

The Friend of Women and Other Stories PDF

Author: Louis Auchincloss

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2012-09-24

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0544109007

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Short fiction examining the mysteries of human character, from a New York Times–bestselling author acclaimed as “among the best in American literature” (Kirkus Reviews). In the title story, a teacher at a private girls’ school ruminates on a long career, wondering if he was right to encourage his students to find a life less constrained than the conventional one prescribed to them—or if he cruelly raised unrealistic expectations. In “The Country Cousin,” a delightful one-act play, a wealthy woman’s dependent niece unwittingly serves as the vehicle that reveals her rich relatives’ self-involvement. Ranging from a boyhood friendship tested by the fabrications of the McCarthy era to an Episcopal priest tormented by an autocratic headmaster, Louis Auchincloss’s fiction illuminates the complications that ensue when our perceptions of other people’s natures—as well as our own—are upended. Praised by the Los Angeles Times as a writer “committed to examining the complicated layers of character, psychology, and society,” Louis Auchincloss presents a treasure trove of short fiction that showcases both his insight and his literary talent.

Falling Women and Other Stories

Falling Women and Other Stories PDF

Author: Ellen Herbert

Publisher:

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9781619720008

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Award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. "The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.

Virgin and Other Stories

Virgin and Other Stories PDF

Author: April Ayers Lawson

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0865478708

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A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host. Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.

The Exiles, and Other Stories

The Exiles, and Other Stories PDF

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2014-10-29

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1473396476

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This early work by Richard Harding Davis was originally published in 1894 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Exiles, and Other Stories' is a collection of short stories that include 'The Reporter Who Made Himself King', 'The Other Woman', 'Miss Delamar's Understudy', and several others. Davis attended Lehigh University and Johns Hopkins University, but was asked to leave both due to neglecting his studies in favour socialising. During the Second Boer War in South Africa, Davis was a leading correspondent of the conflict. He saw the war first-hand from both parties perspectives and documented it in his publication 'With Both Armies' (1900). He wrote widely from locations such as the Caribbean, Central America, and even from the perspective of the Japanese forces during the Russo-Japanese War. Davis died following a heart attack on 11th April, 1916, at the age of 51.

The Amber Gods, and Other Stories

The Amber Gods, and Other Stories PDF

Author: Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780813514017

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This collection contains ten tales -- including five that have never before appeared in book form -- by Hamet Prescott Spofford, the only woman writer to master the mode of the symbolic romance, which is often clamed to represent the mainstream of American fiction. Spofford dazzled readers in the early 1860s with a number of stories that seemed to enlarge the boundaries of romantic fiction. She established a reputation as the female heir to the literary tradition of Poe and Hawthorne with such works as the detective story "In a Cellar," the complex symbolic romance "The Amber Gods," and the frightening tale of frontier adventure. "Circumstance." These three stories provide the most important female counterpart to the works of the major male romantics and represent the final flowering of romantic fiction in New England.

Virgin and Other Stories

Virgin and Other Stories PDF

Author: April Ayers Lawson

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-11

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0865478694

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"Plimpton Prize winner April Ayers Lawson's debut collection, Virgin and Other Stories, set in the South at the crossroads of a world both secular and devoutly Christian, evoking the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings"--

Funerals for Friends and Other Stories

Funerals for Friends and Other Stories PDF

Author: Michael Martin

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2008-08-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1435742850

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A gritty collection of 35 stories, written with raw emotion and cool melancholy, told in a compelling narrative voice that will make you smile as it breaks your heart, FUNERALS FOR FRIENDS explores the extraordinary details of ordinary lives. A sobering downhill ride throughlove and loss, these exciting stories take place in the home, in the office, on the street corner, and within the often disturbing relationships between men and women. But more important, these stories come from a place within the heart that is familiar to all. From the author of Burning In The Heat and Other Stories.