American Reader Series - Böcker

William Heyen was the first poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace on Long Island.

Committed to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides new, expanded versions of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry. Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

"These are funny, bizarre, moving stories-a pleasure to read."-Lydia Davis "Grandbois is a master of the double-edged word, of stories that both cut through the world like butter and double-back to saw themselves to bits."-Brian Evenson "Grandbois' trembling leaflets bring to life all the rejecta and detritus scattered in such silent and secretive array around us, recovering all we thought lost or dead."-Eleni Sikelianos "Animated by a wonderfully droll and fantastical imagination, these little stories are delicious."-Rikki Ducornet Praise for The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir): "[A] collage of satire and slapstick, allegory and hallucination...an "art novel" in the fullest sense."-Marguerite Feitlowitz "A modern space-time set of interconnected myths and stories ...startling sets of shape shiftings and melting tableaus ...elegantly precise ...graceful ...a work of art."-Ed Sanders Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, these seventy-three tales of our Unlucky Lucky Days might well be termed Dr. Seuss for adults.They call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, absurdists, surrealists and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham. Daniel Grandbois' other book, The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir), with forty original woodcuts by Argentine printmaker Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya, is forthcoming from Green Integer in fall 2008. Grandbois' writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction, Boulevard, Sentence, Del Sol Review, and the anthologies Freak Lightning and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, among many others. Also a musician, Daniel plays or has played in three of the pioneering bands of "The Denver Sound:" Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.

Jessica Treat's stories invite readers in, only to make them complicit in transgressive acts, real or imagined: adultery, trespassing , sexual jealousy. Her dark humor and portrayal of consciousness recall authors as diverse as Amy Hempel, Mary Caponegro, and Lydia Davis. Comic, skillful, and menacing, the stories in Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters haunt us long after we've fallen under their spell. Jessica Treat is author of two story collections: A Robber in the House (Coffee House Press) and Not a Chance (FC2). Her stories appear in anthologies and journals, including Ms. Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and American Literary Review.

"Howard (In the Colorless Round) upends some traditional literary conventions in these 14 tales of startling description and beauty. Her settings are bucolic, such as an abandoned farm house, a hilltop mansion and the ruins of a cider mill, each depicted in romantic language ('in a lavender twilight'). In the first story, 'Light Carried on Air Moves Less,' a waiflike beauty stumbles upon an erotic book and apes the illustrations, all the while being watched by a curious 'specter.' In 'Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen,' the author plays on the 19th-century captive narrative, while 'Seascape' tinkers with the maritime ghost story by featuring a widow who gradually comes to love the captain depicted in a painting. Many of the stories simply showcase lush, serene description, such as 'The Scent of Apples,' in which a recluse tends to his apple orchard, spied on adoringly by his orphan ward. The last story, 'The Tartan Detective,' features all the necessary accoutrements of detective fiction (even 'the listening mechanism concealed in a potted fern!'). Howard's sensuous prose is to be savored for its own sake."-Publishers Weekly "Joanna Howard's short stories flit about like phantoms-just as her characters are ethereal and haunting, her stories are framed by an aura of mystery and romance, with fleeting peaks of action. The 14 stories in On the Winding Stair range from a vignette of an encounter to a 'novel in shorts' that encompasses several generations. Howard imbues all her tales with dream-like action and sidelong description, which creates a haze around the narrative that, rather than disorient, lulls the reader into her sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic world. Her careful and practiced dismissal of the concrete allows the reader release from conventional concerns of plot and conflict, and ultimately celebrates the unknowable."-Verse In her debut short story collection, Joanna Howard bends the expectations and cliches of mainstream mystery and paranormal writing to bring new surprises and intelligence to the genre. Rebecca Brown says, "These words are dreams or visions, fantasies, letters of things that are not quite love, buffooneries and comedies, scenarios from horror films you are afraid you'll one day see."Howard joins Kelly Link and Shelley Jackson in redefining genre writing for a new audience. Joanna Howard holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver and an MFA from Bowling Green State University. She teaches fiction writing at Brown University.

She admits she is pleased when the new placard is raised, "Madame Tussaud's House of Wax." She stands in the crowd with Francois at her side. He leans close enough to touch her ear with the fringe of his mustache and whispers, "What part of the museum would the famous Madame Tussaud like to survey on her inaugural visit?" "The Chamber of Horrors, I think," she says softly. "Really, my dear? All that grim fantasy and blood?" "There is no fantasy about it, Francois. It is an embryo, a showing of what is to come." Blending historical fiction with fantasy and the macabre, Adam McOmber's debut short story collection brings the influence of Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allan Poe to the next generation. In "The Automatic Garden," a solitary architect from the court at Versailles builds a water-powered pleasure garden; in "There Are No Bodies Such as This," we read a haunted and romantic fiction about the creation of Madame Tussaud's wax museum; in "Fall, Orpheum," a small town movie palace becomes the temple for an entire town's devotion and sacrifice.McOmber seamlessly blends history, artifice, and desire to create a dream of the past that intertwines with our own notions of modern life. Adam McOmber's stories appear in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Third Coast, The Greensboro Review, Arts & Letters, and Quarterly West. He is assistant director of creative nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago and associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.

A body-pierced goth girl cage-dances for a living while putting herself through school. A New York City academic reevaluates her closest relationships while considering breast-reduction surgery. A chatty Gulf War veteran is plagued by a sexual identity crisis. The characters in this debut short story collection search for meaning through the crucible of sex. Joseph Salvatore's top-notch literary writing coaxes readers into murky territories as characters spiral deeper into existential rabbit holes. Joseph Salvatore reviews fiction for The New York Times Book Review. He teaches at The New School where he founded their literary journal LIT. He lives in New York.

Passwords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry "schools" and "movements" to cut to the art of the matter. Tony Leuzzi's astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martin Espada. These new interviews provide insights into the poets and their poems without compromising any of their mystery. Whether you're looking for deeper understanding of your favorite poets or are simply interested in the lives of contemporary artists, Passwords Primeval reveals the interconnectedness of these masters whose voices echo each other from opposite ends of the same canyon. A Best Book for Writers by Poets and Writers Magazine

"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."--Edward Hirsch Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister.This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey. Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Douglas Watson's debut story collection is chock-a-block with deaths, births, sea and land voyages, excursions to the library, philosophical asides, and things like wolves. People fall in and out of love, walk in and out of buildings, take two steps forward and two steps back. Futility is a theme of the book, but so is the necessity of trying. "Watson lards his metaphors with specifics." --Kyle Minor, The Missouri Review Douglas Watson holds an MFA from Ohio State University, an MA from Brown University, and works at Time magazine. His stories have appeared in Tin House (online), Sou'Wester, and Fifty-Two Stories. His second book, a novel called A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies, is due out in 2014 from Outpost19.

The sixty-eight short works in this collection (some only a paragraph, others a few pages) straddle memoir and fiction, exploring the nuances of sexuality, motherhood, love, and ambition. Like Lydia Davis, Aurelie Sheehan's stories are potent miniatures that blossom out from seemingly insignificant encounters and objects. Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate renderings of the life that surrounds us, just under the surface. Aurelie Sheehan is author of two novels, History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, and the story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014 Best New Fiction of May 2014, Typographical Era Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman. Writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College, Lee Upton is author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

WINNER OF THE BOA SHORT FICTION PRIZEON THE WASHINGTON POST'S 2017 'A SUMMER BOOK LIST LIKE NO OTHER'Gravity Changes is a collection of fantastical, off-beat stories that view the quotidian world through the lens of the absurd. Set in a surreal, fictional world that is populated by strange, fascinating characters—children who defy gravity, a man who marries a light bulb, the Devil and his ex-wife—these stories take wide steps outside of reality, finding new ways to illuminate truth.Zach Powers lives and writes in Savannah, Georgia. The co-founder of the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, his promotional writing for television has won an Emmy Award, and he is currently a columnist for Savannah Morning News.

Adam McOmber's lush, hallucinatory stories are both familiar and wholly original. Drawn from the historical record, Biblical lore, fairy tales, science fiction, and nightmares, these offbeat and fantastical works explore gender and sexuality in their darkest and most beautiful manifestations. In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, My House Gathers Desires is covertly funny and haunting, seeking fresh ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history.In "Sodom and Gomorrah," readers encounter a subversive, ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story. In "The Re'em," a medieval monk's search for a mythic beast conjures forbidden desire. And in "Notes on Inversion," the German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing receives a surreal retort to his clinical descriptions of same-sex desire.From "Sodom and Gomorrah":The strangers then are no longer like two men at all. They have undressed themselves, giving up the pretense of skin and becoming a denser part of the air. We are hungry for them. Ours is a sacred desire that was buried too long in our chests, like some city beneath the sand.Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest (Touchstone, 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA, 2011), from which he had stories nominated for two 2012 Pushcart Prizes. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Fairy Tale Review. He served as the managing and associate editor of Hotel America at Columbia College Chicago from 2007-2015. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches at Loyola Marymount University.

This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings—city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court—as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience—the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.

The Science of Lost Futures is a prize-winning collection full of quirky humor and intelligent absurdity. Ryan Habermeyer is a yarn spinner of the first order. Drawing on urban legends, internet hoaxes, and ancient medical folklore, these stories go beyond science fiction and magical realism to create a captivating collection of fabulist stories that revel in the alien and the absurd.

“Thought-provoking, unthinkable, and fun, Reid’s debut is perfect for fans of David Lynch, Alissa Nutting, and George Saunders.”—BooklistLoosely based on the medieval bestiary, The Rapture Index examines the relationship between animals, humans, and storytelling. Harnessing the bestiary’s combination of religious parable, encyclopedia, and artifice, Molly Reid journeys deep into suburbia to reveal characters struggling to fulfill the expectations of society and family while indulging their baser desires. Filled with moments of curiosity, misunderstanding, fervor, and heart, these stories offer a new twist on familiar landscapes where the wilderness has been tamed (sometimes just barely) but our own animal nature cannot be.

Winner of the BOA Short Fiction PrizeFinalist for the the Big Other Award for FictionThe Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone is a Midwestern mythology that celebrates facts, fiction, and the impermanence of art. Inspired by the real-life pioneer of early aviation who invented the art of skywriting, the brief stories in this collection by “editor” Michael Martone follow the adventures of Art Smith and his authorship in the sky. In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut and Hayao Miyazaki, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone recreates the wonder of the early flying machines as it reimagines the unwritten stories we tell about the daredevils who flew them.

“A vital voice in the short story, telling us new truths with deep humanity."–George SaundersCelebrated Nigerian-born writer E.C. Osondu delivers a short-story collection of nimble dexterity and startling originality in his BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning Alien Stories. These eighteen startling stories, each centered around an encounter with the unexpected, explore what it means to be an alien. With a nod to the dual meaning of alien as both foreigner and extraterrestrial, Osondu turns familiar science-fiction tropes and immigration narratives on their heads, blending one with the other to call forth a whirlwind of otherness. With wry observations about society and human nature, in shifting landscapes from Africa to America to outer space and back again, Alien Stories breaks down the concept of foreignness to reveal what unites us all as ‘aliens’ within a complex and interconnected universe.

Moving between Cuba and the U.S., the stories in Are We Ever Our Own trace the paths of the women of the far-flung Armando Castell family.Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. The owner of a professional mourning service investigates the disappearance of her employees. On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a young woman breaks into the mansion where she was once a servant to help the rebels and free herself. A musician in a traveling troupe recounts the last day she saw her father.Linked by theme and complex familial bonds, these stories shift across genres and forms to excavate the violence wreaked on women’s bodies and document the attempt to create something meaningful in the face of loss. They ask: who do we belong to? What, if anything, belongs to us?

From poet George Looney comes a new short story collection that explores the essential nature of faith while plumbing the gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man’s actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on. Dripping with Southern gothic, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the obscure and obscene. Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.