Yellow Shoe Fiction – serie

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.An expectant father and university teacher on summer break, Abbott tackles the agonizing chores of each day, laboring for peace in his household and struggling to keep his daughter clean and happy, all while staving off a fear of failure as a parent, and even as a human being. As he cleans car seats, forgets to apply sun block, clips his dog's nails, dresses his daughter out of season, and makes unsuccessful furniture-buying trips with his wife, his mind plays out an unrelenting series of paradoxical reflections. Abbott's pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day in late June as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter's car seat and realises: ""The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.""Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror, Abbott Awaits is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the everyday battles and triumphs of parenthood.

If the Sky Falls is the debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano ""an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams.""Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family's violent history (""Note to Future Self""); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy to a strip club (""The Usual Human Disabilities""); a man has a breakdown years after witnessing a brutal murder and doing nothing to help the victim (""The Other Man""). In ""The November Fifteen,"" a man is taken from his home and tortured, though he has no idea why; when he returns home he finds a different kind of torture awaiting him.Two of the stories - ""Shift"" and the Pushcart Prize-winning ""The Worst Degree of Unforgivable"" - are stylistic tours de force. But style in this collection is always at the service of story. Montemarano's fiction maintains that rare balance between traditional storytelling and experimentation: his work is innovative without being flashy, sincere without being sentimental. In an age of hype, If the Sky Falls truly is the real thing - an original and important achievement in the short-story form.

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts. A Confederate reenactor receives a message from the beyond to lay to rest the remains of Stonewall Jackson's horse. A docent at Washington and Lee University's Lee Chapel offers prim instruction on the facts and legends about ""the General"" with both reverence and irony. The young son of a lewd, alcoholic, self-dubbed evangelist acquires the wits - and the will - for survival by protecting the family's sunflower crops. A midget ukulele virtuoso is so surprised by his own eruption into violence that he can attribute it only to genetics. One of Jeff Davis's fellow cross-dressers; the killer of John Wilkes Booth; a Rebel deserter whose superior exacts his pound of flesh - all these characters and more, through their twisted and torn vernaculars, seek understanding and revival in R. T. Smith's superb collection.

The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In ""Chestnut Season,"" a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked beside her; in ""Boyfriends,"" the recently deceased protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands; in ""Mrs. Fargo,"" a young man faces a reckoning with his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes. The short-short ""Buoyant"" introduces Elise, nine months pregnant, as she drifts down the Santa Fe River, trying to jettison her suddenly circumscribed existence. Desperate to impress upon his students the seriousness of life, the professor in ""Pedagogy'"" boils his head, discovering in the end a lesson learned too late.Other stories touch upon issues of identity, following characters who find themselves in the wrong places, or who find themselves too late. At the advice of their marriage counselor, the couple in ""What Nina Wants"" take on the personas of Charles Mingus and Nina Simone, speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented MG, with a loaded gun and an electric bass. In a small town in 1970s New Jersey, the protagonist of ""Embankment"" can't decide if she's on a date or has been abducted. ""Do That Everywhere"" finds the teen-aged Cami on the verge of becoming her mother - promiscuous and bitter. In ""Glen Echo,"" a badass womanizer wonders who he is now that he's married an Italian-American Bridezilla. Through compact, tightly woven prose, vivid imagery, and a variety of arresting narrative techniques, If the Heart Is Lean zeroes in on the humorous and painful lives of people who are mysteries to themselves.

Oklahoma is a forgotten territory of ""Indians, outlaws, and immigrants"" when its first Jewish settler, Boggy Haurowitz, arrives in 1859. Full of expectations, he finds the untamed region a formidable foe, its landscape rugged, its resources strained. In Stations West, four generations of Haurowitzes, intertwined with a family of Swedish immigrants, struggle against the Territory's ""insatiable appetite."" The challenges of creating a home amid betrayals, nature's vagaries, and burgeoning statehood prove too great. Each generation in turn succumbs to the overwhelming lure of the transcontinental railroad, and each returns home to find the landscape of their youth, like themselves, changed beyond recognition, their family utterly transformed. Dramatic and lyrical, Allison Amend's first novel, steeped in the history and lore of the Oklahoma Territory, tells an unforgettable multigenerational - and very American - story of Jewish pioneers, their adopted family, and the challenges they face. Amid the founding of the West, Stations West's generations struggle to forge and maintain their identities as Jews, as immigrants, and as Americans.

Walter Schmidt's life isn't simple: His wife Nadine wants to live next door to her dead first husband's mother, the Mississippi River is three blocks down the street and rising dangerously, FDR is dead, and the war seems like it will never end - but for the most part, things are going Walter's way. Then one bright April morning in 1945, Walter comes home early from work to find Nadine in bed with his best friend, Sammy. Shocked into silence, when she then calls him a ""kraut,"" Walter becomes even more confused. True, he's a German immigrant, but he's lived in New Orleans for almost twenty years, and an hour before, he thought he was a happy American--baseball fan, reader of pulp novels, lover of gangster movies. Suddenly Walter wonders if Nadine's right, if he's more German than American, more enemy than friend. When Sammy later offers him $1,000 as an apology for sleeping with his wife, Walter accepts, desperately hoping to hurt his friend, but instead setting in motion a series of events more dangerous than betrayal and petty revenge. Set against a backdrop of a nation exhausted by war, in a decadent city that for years has been denied its butter, sugar, and Mardi Gras, My Bright Midnight is a novel about the complications of loyalties to country, to friends, and to those we love.

Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of a disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies. In the opening story, Ania Liszak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy, to the matinee. The fire nearly kills both and leaves them scarred in different ways: Teddy's mother enjoys the beautiful strangeness of the scar on her face, but the patches across Teddy's body inspire cruel schoolmates to call him ""Lizard Liszak."" Over time, his mother transforms her pain into drama, while Teddy, having no memory of that day, seeks ways to return to it.These and other captivating characters appear throughout the book, creating a portrait of an American city and its people over five decades, raising questions about wounds and healing, memory and forgetting, and about the human capacity for kindness - with all its futility and power - in the midst of great loss.

In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerising and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.

A darkly insightful evocation of the post-industrial era, Joy, PA tells the story of a family teetering on the precipice of ruin. The Augenbaughs live in a broken and decaying town where the last vestiges of country-club wealth run up against the terrible realities of working-class poverty. Abigail, a fervent believer in the apocalyptic teachings of a radio preacher, is desperate to save her son from Judgment Day as she readies herself for the Rapture-due to arrive in just a few days. Her husband, Burns, has moved to the basement to live out his days in a medicated stupor, unable to cope with memories of his service in Iraq. Caught between the suffering of his mother and father, ten-year-old Willie fights the inherited demons that have savaged his parents' tenuous grasp on reality. The somber drama surrounding the Augenbaughs plays out with a piercing and commanding lyrical beauty. Both transfixing and disconcerting, Steven Sherrill's empathetic portrait of alienation elicits hope and sympathy amidst shattered but no-less-dignified lives.

The insightful and provocative stories in Tom Paine's collection spring from a series of seismic events that rocked the post-millennium world. News headlines from the last decade - the fall of Baghdad, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the BP oil spill - not only inspire the settings but also raise ethical questions that percolate throughout this ominous and timely work.A stark reminder of the challenges and resultant anxiety facing a global society, A Boy's Book of Nervous Breakdowns depicts the simultaneously dreamlike and brutally real experience of witnessing contemporary political and environmental catastrophes. Paine approaches the second U.S. invasion of Iraq through the eyes of a CBS radio journalist and her desperate Iraqi translator as they report the opening months of the attack and dodge dan- ger with a newborn in tow. In other stories, a father blames global warming for the drowning death of his daughter and journeys by horseback across the last of the Montana glaciers; a Japanese reggae band struggles under the radioactive umbrella of the Fukushima nuclear disaster; and a genius at Goldman Sachs invents a money-making algorithm, then ends his days with a tribe of headhunters in the Amazon. Paine masterfully orchestrates these episodic depictions of a failing civilisation, however unnerving, through a wide array of perspectives, each tied to the other by Cassandra-like prophecies. Immediately compelling, A Boy's Book of Nervous Breakdowns confronts the harsh realities of our time with imaginative and moving vignettes that reinforce the fragility, greed, and heartache of the human condition.

The stories in History of Art examine the definitive, yet paradoxical, preoccupations of humankind - namely art-making and war - and the emotions that underpin both: passion and sentimentality, obsession and delusion, ambition and insecurity, fear and envy. Luongo casts the infamous, famous, and unknown in these sublime vignettes, from Marie Antoinette and John Lennon to the designers of fictional typefaces and the painted soldiers in Stanley Spencer's Great War Memorial. Drawing each work together through the dichotomy of art and war, Luongo also presents a mother who leaves her family so that she can illustrate the war for civilians who have no understanding of it; a Canadian artist who sketches the beach at Normandy while a German sniper observes him; and the daughter of a World War II veteran who struggles with his troubling legacy.In addition to the collection's subjective focus, the structure of History of Art works to build creative tension. Luongo's use of nontraditional forms - flash-fiction sequences, a bird-watching guide, a word problem - are expertly deployed to heighten the sense of trauma and inventiveness found in these stories. In both content and construction, Luongo approaches the ageless themes of creation and destruction with striking novelty, humor, and mastery.

For as long Daniella has been married to Joel, they've received phone calls at odd hours, and late at night. Daniella knows the caller as Liesel, Joel's first wife, a woman whose sudden departure devastated her husband. After years of disruptive, long-distance phone calls, Liesel rings to tell Joel she's letting Idzia, the seventeen-year-old daughter he has never met, visit for the summer. Daniella and Joel prepare for Idzia's arrival, but when Joel goes to pick her up from the airport, Idzia isn't there. Back at home, the phone calls suddenly stop, and Joel and Daniella become haunted by the absence of someone who was never part of their life to begin with.Debra Spark's fourth novel, Unknown Caller, tells the story of a brief, failed marriage and its complicated aftermath. Leaping effortlessly across decades and continents, it works to uncover the reasons for Idzia and Liesel's disappearance and the deeper puzzle of Liesel's identity.Spark's candid, intricate novel highlights the near-impossibility of truly knowing another person, the pain in failing relationships, and the joy in successful ones.

Meghan Kenny's debut collection, Love Is No Small Thing, gives readers an assembly of keenly drawn characters each navigating the world looking for an understanding of love in its many forms and complexities, be it romantic, parental, elusive, or eternal. A father may teach his teenage son ""Hearts break easy,"" but as Kenny's characters discover, knowing an important truth about love is no substitute for experiencing it.In the title story, a woman learns of her boyfriend's infidelity on Halloween night and contemplates lost years, concealments, and the difficulty of walking away. An Idaho cameraman and his cross-dressing, sky-diving son try to find common ground in ""All These Lovely Boys."" A first date at the Corkscrew Swamp Bird Sanctuary becomes something else altogether in ""Sanctuary,"" and in ""Heartbreak Hotel,"" a father swaps stories of disappointments and losses with his daughter and an unwanted passenger on a cross-country road trip. Throughout this collection, Kenny's characters try to bridge the gap between what they expected of their lives and what they have received. They struggle to understand their own identities and the value of the relationships they have or want, with results that are funny and poignant in equal measure.Employing minimalist language and character-driven storytelling, Meghan Kenny grapples with love in all its messiness and uncertainty, revealing vital truths about the vagaries of the human heart and establishing Kenny as a vibrant new voice in the American literary landscape.

Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty - Kirkus Review (Starred Review)""People, the species defies logic!"" reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the story's narrator has wronged or been wronged by.Upton's stories frequently draw inspiration from books, books as art objects or lost objects, as inspiration or points of contention. ""Night Walkers"" tells the story of the world's laziest book club, while ""A Story's End"" follows a woman's search for the last book read by her mother before her sudden death. Elsewhere, the ghosts of literature and writers past haunt the characters' present: ""The Tell-All Heart"" sees a woman falling in love with Edgar Allan Poe's discarded suit, and an unruly, unpredictable shadow creeps in a child's window to demand that he cut off the other hand of Captain Hook in ""A Shadow.""In the surreal yet playful tradition of Karen Russell and George Saunders, Visitations brings together seventeen incandescent short stories from a writer at the height of her powers.

Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker's sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection: an amateur hacker attempts to track down his vanished mentor; a math prodigy, the child of divorced parents, struggles with being torn between his two families; a composer takes a spontaneous trip to Nashville while mourning his husband's death and gets trapped on a hotel rooftop with a hipster; and a wayward philosopher accepts a job working for an industrial farming corporation. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person. Pairing the emotional pursuit of connection with multiple forms of communication, Baker weaves the languages of HTML, mathematics, mu-sical notations, and propositional logic into his storytelling in order to unveil nuances of experiences and emotions. This poignant formal invention articulates loneliness, grief, doubt, and comfort in ways that are inaccessible through traditional language alone.In both form and content, Baker captures the complexities of breaking and forming connections with other people, and the various lan-guages we use to navigate this inescapable human need, resulting in a moving exploration of interpersonal bonds.

Bed is where we sleep and dream, where we make love and give ourselves nightmares. The thirteen stories in Wendy Rawlings's Time for Bed traverse the complicated terrain of bedtime activity, from adulterous couplings to nightmares that come to life, in terms that can feel lurid, unsettling, or disturbingly funny. A college student struggles with her mother leaving her father for a ""cafeteria lady"" at her high school. A woman loses her only daughter in a mass school shooting and goes on a road trip to buy a custom coffin, then decides to take a side trip to NRA headquarters. A daughter decides she should be born again, literally. Social, cultural, and familial disruptions haunt these characters in their waking lives as they look to grab something or someone for stability.A collection of comic stories that confront difficult and tragic events, Time for Bed crafts dreamscapes and bizarre encounters into bedtime stories for adults.

Penelope Lemon is back for more madcap mom adventures in Inman Majors's hilariously unruly Operation Dimwit.It's summertime, and son Theo is away at camp. Feeling frisky, free, and tired of living vicariously through nighttime trysts with erotic novels, Penelope can begin phase two of her postdivorce life. First on the agenda is a date with the mysterious Fitzwilliam Darcy, who lives in a mansion with his snobbish cat, Algernon, and who spends his spare time painting massive nude portraits.Meanwhile, back at the trailer-park office, Penelope's boss, Missy, has become obsessed with getting rid of Dimwit, the backwoods interloper who may be stealing personal items from female residents. A sting operation to catch him in the act is planned, something so kooky and ill-advised that only a legendary goofball such as Missy could set it into motion.Throw in a bully trainer at Penelope's new gym, plus an infestation of skunks that requires the services of a wildlife expert and homespun mystic known as the Critter Catcher, and it becomes clear that Penelope's two weeks off from parenting won't be as relaxing and incident-free as she hoped.Building on the comedic hijinks of Penelope Lemon: Game On!, Operation Dimwit is a warmhearted look at the challenges of being a single working mom trying to stay afloat in the middle class after a divorce. Zany, stylish, and uproariously funny, this southern comedy will have readers laughing out loud at familiar absurdities of life in the twenty-first-century USA.

The innovative and dazzling short stories collected in Josh Russell's King of the Animals explore love and heartbreak, growing up and growing old, cities and suburbs, the fantastic and the everyday.A teenager and his family seek asylum in an Atlanta IKEA after their split-level is burned down because his father made fun of an autocrat's bad grammar. A man remembers how seeing a snapshot of his sister naked changed his life-and hers too. A talking doll fails her spelling test, and a king made of sugar and flour watches Fox News and smokes dope with the neighbor kid. A college student ponders the philosophical implications of a poetry-fueled one-night stand, and a father worries he's the reason his adult child hoards dogs. Ranging from pithy flash fiction to slow-burn stories meant to be savored, King of the Animals entwines the extraordinary with the commonplace, leaving us to wonder why we ever thought them separate.