Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions PDF Download

Author: Robert Coover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608476
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
“A mixtape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master.… Familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor.” —Yu-Yun Hsieh, The New York Times Book Review Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as “a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America.” Here, in this selection of his best stories, you will find an invisible man tragically obsessed by an invisible woman; a cartoon man in a cartoon car who runs over a real man who is arrested by a real policeman with cartoon eyes; a stick man who reinvents the universe. While invading the dreams and nightmares of others, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works.

Author: Robert Coover
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 9780802136671
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.

Author: Robert Coover
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802136664
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A parody of the western novel featuring a hero who drifts into town to become both sheriff and outlaw. All the elements of the genre are present, from train robbery and runaway stagecoach, to cattle stampede. By the author of The Public Burning.

Author: Robert Coover
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802137432
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Originally published in 1969, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a peculiar man subject to religious visions, is adopted as a prophet and quickly gains a following. Rapidly disseminated through the magic of media exposure, the cult spreads across America, and as its members gather on the Mount of Redemption to await the apocalypse, Robert Coover lays bare the madness of religious frenzy and the sometimes greater madness of normal citizens. The Origin of the Brunists is vintage Coover -- comic, fearless, incisive, and brilliantly executed.

Author: Lisa Moore
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1770892559
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Collects short stories from the author's first two books, "Open" and "Degrees of Nakedness," as well as previously unpublished works.

Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141936932
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This witty and amusing collection of short pieces shows Dickens liberated from the more formal and sustained demands of the novel and experimenting with a diverse range of fictional techniques. In his tales of the supernatural, he creates frighteningly believable, spine-tingling stories of prophetic dreams and visions, as well as more fantastical adventures with goblins and apparitions. Impressionistic sketches combine imaginatively heightened travel journals with wry observations of home and abroad, while in his dramatic monologues, Dickens demonstrates his talent for exploring the secret workings of the human mind. These short works display Dickens's exuberant sense of comedy and character as his imagination is given free rein.

Author: Ted Chiang
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1931520895
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
From the author of Exhalation, an award-winning short story collection that blends "absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space ... raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human" (The New York Times). Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic. Includes “Story of Your Life”—the basis for the major motion picture Arrival

Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486810763
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Known and loved around the world for his vast and sprawling novels, Charles Dickens relished the opportunity to experiment with his shorter writings, investigating hitherto unexplored themes and engaging in uncharacteristic narrative techniques. This anthology presents some of the beloved storyteller's lesser-known works, focusing on tales that reflect his fascination with the supernatural as well as his impressionistic sketches and dramatic monologues. The collection opens with "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," in which a gravedigger learns a lesson from mischievous spirits. Other ghostly tales include "The Baron of Grogzwig," "To Be Read at Dusk," and more. A selection of brief, atmospheric essays, most of them written for newspapers and magazines, recaptures vibrant scenes from Victorian London — its prisons, churches, schools, and street life — as well as episodes from the author's extensive travels. The book concludes with a series of dramatic monologues from Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions and other stories, all of them abounding in Dickens' distinctive wit and imaginative power.

Author: T.C. Boyle
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062673408
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
While T.C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story and is perhaps at his funniest, his most moving, and his most surprising in the short form. In The Relive Box, Boyle's sharp wit and rich imagination combine with a penetrating social consciousness to produce raucous, poignant, and expansive short stories defined by an inimitable voice. From the collection's title story, featuring a Halcom X1520 Relive Box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past to "The Five-Pound Burrito," the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the twelve stories in this collection speak to the humor, the pathos, and the struggle that is part of being human while relishing the whimsy of wordplay and the power of a story well told. In stories that span a variety of styles and genres, Boyle addresses the enduring concerns of the human mind and heart while taking on timely social concerns. The Relive Box is an exuberant, linguistically dazzling effort from a "vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society." (The New York Times)

Author: Kevin Barry
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970826
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
An award-winning collection from the author of City of Bohane, which was hailed by Pete Hamill as "full of marvels" (The New York Times Book Review) * Short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award * Winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award * One of last year's most critically acclaimed books in the UK * A Guernica Best Book of the Year * A Library Journal "Best Indie Fiction of 2013" * Dark Lies the Island is a wickedly funny and hugely original collection of stories about misspent love and crimes gone horribly wrong. In the Sunday Times Short Story Award–winning "Beer Trip to Llandudno," a pack of middle-aged ale fanatics seeking the perfect pint find more than they bargained for. A pair of sinister old ladies prowl the countryside for a child to make their own. And a poet looking for inner calm buys an ancient inn on the west coast of Ireland but finds instead rancorous locals and catastrophic floodwaters. Kevin Barry's dazzling language, razor-sharp ear for the vernacular, and keen eye for the tragedies and comedies of daily life invest these tales with a startling vitality. Dark Lies the Island was short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and as one of the most acclaimed collections in Europe in many years, it heralds the arrival of a new master of the short story.