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| amy hempel short stories: Sing to It Amy Hempel, 2019-03-26 LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKER AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “All the tawdry details I’m dying for are in these stories, but they’re given out like old sweaters—without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way—hiding, alone, obsessed—and that’s ok.” —Miranda July From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a decade. Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event. These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel Amy Hempel, 2007-09-18 With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America. |
| amy hempel short stories: Reasons to Live Amy Hempel, 1995-07-20 Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit. |
| amy hempel short stories: Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules David Sedaris, 2010-04-01 'When apple-picking season ended, I got a Job in a packing plant and gravitated towards short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit . . . Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories can save you'. |
| amy hempel short stories: At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom Amy Hempel, 1991 A collection of 16 poignant stories about the rogue stresses that threaten the stability of modern women, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom presents tales that are witty, absurd, and beautiful, about coming together, making do, and learning to live with the scars of life. ...One of the great delights of these stories is that they approach the usual cliches of real life and fiction at an unexpectedly oblique angle. And they do so with surprising emotional force.--The Wall Street Journal. |
| amy hempel short stories: Unleashed Amy Hempel, Jim Shepard, 2007-12-18 Now in paperback, an irresistible gift for dog lovers: poems from the dogs' point of view, written by the well known writers and poets who love them. List of contributors: Edward Albee, Jennifer Allen, Danny Anderson, Lynda Barry, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Robert Benson, Roy Blount, Jr., Ron Carlson, Jill Ciment, Bernard Cooper, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Stephen Dunn, Anderson Ferrell, Amy Gerstler, Matthew Graham, Ron Hansen, Brooks Haxton, Cynthia Heimel, Amy Hempel, Noy Hollan, Andrew Hudgins, John Irving, Denis Johnson, R.S. Jones, Walter Kirn, Sheila Kohler, Maxine Kumin, Natalie Kusz, Anne Lamott, Gordon Lish, Ralph Lombreglia, Merrill Markoe, Pearson Marx, Erin McGraw, Heather McHugh, Arthur Miller, George Minot, Susan Minot, Honor Moore, Mary Morris, Alicia Muñoz, Elise Paschen, Padgett Powell, Wyatt Prunty, Lawrence Raab, Mark Richard, John Rybicki, Jeanne Schinto, Bob Shacochis, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Lee Smith, Ben Sonnenberg, Kate Clark Spencer, Gerald Stern, Terese Svoboda, William Tester, Abigail Thomas, Lily Tuck, Sidney Wade, Kathryn Walker, William Wegman |
| amy hempel short stories: Jokes for the Gunmen Mazen Maarouf, 2019-01-03 LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019 A brilliant collection of fictions in the vein of Roald Dahl, Etgar Keret and Amy Hempel. These are stories of what the world looks like from a child's pure but sometimes vengeful or muddled perspective. These are stories of life in a war zone, life peppered by surreal mistakes, tragic accidents and painful encounters. These are stories of fantasist matadors, lost limbs and perplexed voyeurs. This is a collection about sex, death and the all-important skill of making life into a joke. These are unexpected stories by a very fresh voice. These stories are unforgettable. |
| amy hempel short stories: Wittgenstein's Mistress David Markson, 2023-11-14 Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state—obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness—so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.” |
| amy hempel short stories: Knocked Down Aileen Weintraub, 2022-03 A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids. Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months. As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all? Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Hand That Feeds You A.J. Rich, 2015-07-07 “An unnerving, elegant page-turner” (Vanity Fair) of psychological suspense about a woman in an intense sexual relationship with a man who turns out to be a predator—by celebrated writers Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment writing as A.J. Rich. Morgan, thirty, is completing her thesis on victim psychology and newly engaged to Bennett, a man more possessive than those she has dated in the past, but also more chivalrous—and the sex is hot. She returns from class one day to find Bennett brutally mauled to death, and her beloved dogs covered in blood. When Morgan tries to locate Bennett’s parents to tell them about their son’s hideous death, she discovers that everything he has told her—where he was born, where he lives in Montreal, where he works—was a lie. He is not the man he said he was, and he had several fiancées, all believing the same promises he gave Morgan. And then, one by one, these other women are murdered. Morgan’s research into Bennett has taken on new urgency: in order to stay alive, she must find out how an intelligent woman like herself, who studies predators, becomes a victim. For readers of Girl on a Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, this “twisty, unsettling thriller” (The New York Times) is an “irresistible” (Vogue) collaboration between two outstanding writers. “The Hand That Feeds You goes from zero to terrifying in about five pages…Once this thriller gets its teeth into you, it doesn’t let go” (The Tampa Bay Times). |
| amy hempel short stories: Tumble Home Amy Hempel, 1998-05-28 Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter. |
| amy hempel short stories: Why I Don't Write Susan Minot, 2021-06-15 A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A “clear-eyed and fearless” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of ten short stories from the award-winning author of Evening “Tender, precise, emotional, insightful, and funny.”—JULIANNE MOORE A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Susan Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, stunningly observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form. “Intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical . . . Few short story collections shine as brightly.”—Portland Press-Herald |
| amy hempel short stories: State of Grace Joy Williams, 2011-04-13 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • This beautifully crafted (The New York Times Book Review), haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, State of Grace bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers. |
| amy hempel short stories: New Micro Robert Scotellaro, 2018-08-28 A new collection of very short stories selected by Flash Fiction editor James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro. All of the stories in this book are exceptionally short, revealing themselves in no more than 300 words. With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Best American Short Stories 2017 Chad B. Anderson, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Kevin Canty, Jai Chakrabarti, Emma Cline, Leopoldine Core, Patricia Engel, Danielle Evans, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Amy Hempel, Noy Holland, Sonya Larson, Fiona Maazel, Kyle McCarthy, Eric Puchner, Maria Reva, Jim Shepard, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jess Walter, 2017 Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources. |
| amy hempel short stories: Tiny Crimes Lincoln Michel, Nadxieli Nieto, 2018-06-05 Forty very short stories that reimagine the genre of crime writing from some of today’s most imaginative and thrilling writers “An intriguing take on crime/noir writing, this collection of 40 very short stories by leading and emerging literary voices—Amelia Gray, Brian Evenson, Elizabeth Hand, Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Laura van den Berg and more—investigates crimes both real and imagined. Despite their diminutive size, these tales promise to pack a punch.” —Chicago Tribune, 1 of 25 Hot Books for Summer Tiny Crimes gathers leading and emerging literary voices to tell tales of villainy and intrigue in only a few hundred words. From the most hard–boiled of noirs to the coziest of mysteries, with diminutive double crosses, miniature murders, and crimes both real and imagined, Tiny Crimes rounds up all the usual suspects, and some unusual suspects, too. With illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook and flash fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Amelia Gray, Adam Sternbergh, Yuri Herrera, Julia Elliott, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Charles Yu, Laura van den Berg, and more, Tiny Crimes scours the underbelly of modern life to expose the criminal, the illegal, and the depraved. |
| amy hempel short stories: The End of the Story Lydia Davis, 2015-03-26 The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013. 'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.' Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel. 'Extraordinary' Newsday 'Brilliant' New Yorker 'Breathtakingly elegant' Details 'Beautifully written' Marie Claire 'Astonishing' Elle Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. |
| amy hempel short stories: Knockemstiff Donald Ray Pollock, 2008-03-18 More engaging than any new fiction in years. —Chuck Palahniuk An unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place. Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Heavenly Table Donald Ray Pollock, 2016-07-12 From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors. It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it? In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre's literary masters. |
| amy hempel short stories: I Look Divine Christopher Coe, 2013-11-01 Nicholas is beautiful, wealthy and hopelessly vain. With his older brother in tow, he jets from one glamorous scene to another. Whether it's in Rome, Madrid, or Mexico, what matters to him most is the admiration of others. Then one day, not even forty and his beauty faded, his life comes to an early end. His brother is left to pick up the pieces and make sense of Nicholas' untimely demise. I Look Divine is a precisely told and moving tale about what lurks beneath the ripples of Narcissus' reflecting pool. |
| amy hempel short stories: Campfires of the Dead Peter Christopher, 1989 |
| amy hempel short stories: The Virginity of Famous Men Christine Sneed, 2018-03-06 This collection of short stories on the human condition features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices--both personal and professional--they have so far made--Publisher marketing. |
| amy hempel short stories: Death and So Forth Gordon Lish, 2021-04-13 With Death and So Forth, esteemed writer and editor Gordon Lish returns with a new book of scintillating short fiction. With his trademark precision, wit, and wiliness, Lish writes outside the margins and around the edges of the death, loss, and the fractiousness and fragmentation of language. Death and So Forth collects a number of Lish's acclaimed stories and introduces eight new fictions, including a tribute to Denis Johnson and so many others lost in the course of a long life. Brilliant and sharp-eyed, this is a treasure for fans of Gordon Lish, new and lifelong. |
| amy hempel short stories: Ninety-Nine Stories of God Joy Williams, 2016-07-12 A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at Esquire, Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly. From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being. This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists. |
| amy hempel short stories: Carried Away Alice Munro, 2006-09-26 A dazzling selection of seventeen stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro—featuring an Introduction by Margaret Atwood “Munro stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing.”—The New York Times The stories brought together in Carried Away span a quarter century, drawn from Alice Munro’s earlier works. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Albanian Virgin,” a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own. Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Art of Fiction David Lodge, 2012-04-30 In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works. |
| amy hempel short stories: New American Stories Ben Marcus, 2015-07-21 In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story . In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and unforgettable works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of an American idiom. |
| amy hempel short stories: And Yet They Were Happy Helen Phillips, 2022-10-11 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD longlist nominee, Helen Phillips's debut novel, And Yet They Were Happy is A gallery of marvels. A young couple comes of age in a surreal world of apocalypse, delight, longing, and tenderness. Brilliant miniatures. . . . Like the fables of Calvino, Millhauser, or W.S. Merwin. . . . Beautifully blends short story and prose poem. . . . Mermaids, subways, floods, cucumbers, magicians. . . .The book is a gallery of marvels. Phillips guides us through the 'Hall of Nostalgia For Things We Have Never Seen, ' 'the factory where the virgins are made, ' and 'the Anne Frank School for Expectant Mothers.' A depressed Noah admits he 'didn't get them all, ' a wife guesses which of two identical men is her husband, a regime orders citizens to grow raspberries on windowsills. [Helen Phillips'] quietly elegant sentences are as clear as spring water, haunting as our own childhood memories.--Michael Dirda A deeply interesting mind is at work in these wry, lyrical stories. Phillips exploits the duality of our nature to create a timeless and most engaging collection.--Amy Hempel Haunted and lyrical and edible all at once.--Rivka Galchen A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing--but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar. Helen Phillips received a 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, 2009 Meridian Editors' Prize, and 2008 Italo Calvino Fabulist Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and two anthologies. She holds degrees from Yale University and Brooklyn College, and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College. |
| amy hempel short stories: Why Did I Ever Mary Robison, 2018-01-01 “Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself. |
| amy hempel short stories: Micro Fiction Jerome Stern, 1996-08-06 The World's Best Short-Short Fictions in a Big, Little Book that you could probably carry in your Pocket. Ten years ago, Jerome Stern, director of the writing program at Florida State, initiated the World's Best Short Short Story Contest. Stories were to be about 250 words long; first prize was a check and a crate of oranges. Two to three thousand stories began to show up annually in Tallahassee, and National Public Radio regularly broadcast the winner. But, more important, the Micro form turned out to be contagious; stories of this lack of length now dot the literary magazines. The time seemed right, then, for this anthology, presenting a decade of contest winners and selected finalists. In addition, Stern commissioned Micros, persuading a roster of writers to accept the challenge of completing a story in one page. Jesse Lee Kercheval has a new spin on the sinking of the Titanic; Virgil Suarez sets his sights on the notorious Singapore caning; George Garrett conjures up a wondrous screen treatment pitch; and Antonya Nelson invites us into an eerie landscape. Verve and nerve and astonishing variety are here, with some wild denouements. How short can a Micro be, you wonder. Look up Amy Hempel's contribution, and you'll see. |
| amy hempel short stories: Collected Fictions Gordon Lish, 2010 This definitive collection of Lish's short work includes a forword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition--Page 4 of cover. |
| amy hempel short stories: Birds of America Lorrie Moore, 2012-03-07 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories that’s “one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability (The New York Times Book Review). A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language. From the opening story, Willing—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. In the story Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People (There is nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is. In Charades, a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties. In Community Life,a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens, a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Heaven of Animals David James Poissant, 2014-03-11 A first collection by an award-winning writer features characters at relationship crossroads in such stories as Lizard Man, in which two men race to save a sick alligator; and The End of Aaron, in which a girl helps her boyfriend face his greatest fears. |
| amy hempel short stories: A Manner of Being Annie Liontas, Jeff Parker, 2015 What do the punk singer Henry Rollins, the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, the American authors Tobias Wolff, Tayari Jones, and George Saunders, the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, and the Russian poet Polina Barskova have in common? At some point they all studied the art of writing deeply with someone. The nearly seventy short essays in A Manner of Being, by some of the best contemporary writers from around the world, pay homage to mentors--the writers, teachers, nannies, and sages--who enlighten, push, encourage, and sometimes hurt, fail, and limit their protégés. There are mentors encountered in the schoolhouse and on farms, in NYC and in MFA programs; mentors who show up exactly when needed, offering comfort, a steadying hand, a commiseration, a dose of tough love. This collection is rich with anecdotes from the heartfelt to the salacious, gems of writing advice, and guidance for how to live the writing life in a world that all too often doesn't care whether you write or not. Each contribution is intimate and distinct--yet a common theme is that mentors model a manner of being. Selections include: Arthur Flowers on John O'Killens James Franco on Harmony Korine Mary Gaitskill on an Ann Arbor bookstore owner Noy Holland and Sam Lipsyte on Gordon Lish Tayari Jones on Ron Carlson Henry Rollins on Hubert Selby Jr. Rodrigo Rey Rosa on Paul Bowles George Saunders on Douglas Unger and Tobias Wolff Christine Schutt on Elizabeth Hardwick Tobias Wolff on John L'Heureux . . . and many more |
| amy hempel short stories: Plaza Requiem Martha Batiz, Martha Beatriz Bátiz Zuk, 2017 Mexican-Canadian Martha Bátiz has crafted, in her first collection written in English, visceral stories with piercing and evocative qualities. She has filled her recognizable, sisterly/motherly, and imaginative characters with qualities we all hold close to our hearts, but this is powerfully juxtaposed by the uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives. Most often they are women trapped in violent relationships, facing dangerous political situations, or learning to live with the pain of betrayal. Yet her stories shimmer with the emotional surge of vindication, evoking the rewards women attain after a powerful exploration of their darkest moments. As an emerging writer, Bátiz crafts her stories with qualities reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, and Cuban author Leonardo Padura: with precision, haunting vision, and the will to survive all odds.-- |
| amy hempel short stories: I Walk Between the Raindrops T.C. Boyle, 2022-09-13 An electric collection of new short stories from the inimitable, bestselling writer of Talk to Me and Outside Looking In In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.” A virtuoso of the short form, T.C. Boyle returns with an inventive, uproarious, and masterfully told collection of short stories characterized by biting satire, resonant wit, and a boundless, irrepressible imagination. |
| amy hempel short stories: Ellen Foster Kaye Gibbons, 2012-01-01 Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children. |
| amy hempel short stories: The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction Lex Williford, Michael Martone, 2007-12-04 Selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists, this revised and updated second edition features fifty remarkable stories written by a wide spectrum of stylistically and culturally diverse authors. Russell Banks - Donald Barthelme - Rick Bass - Richard Bausch - Charles Baxter - Amy Bloom - T. C. Boyle - Kevin Brockmeier - Robert Olen Butler - Sandra Cisneros - Peter Ho Davies - Janet Desaulniers - Junot Diaz - Anthony Doerr - Stuart Dybek - Deborah Eisenberg - Richard Ford - Mary Gaitskill - Dagoberto Gilb - Ron Hansen - A. M. Homes - Mary Hood - Denis Johnson - Edward P. Jones - Thom Jones - Jamaica Kincaid - Jhumpa Lahiri - David Leavitt - Kelly Link - Reginald McKnight - David Means - Susan Minot - Rick Moody - Bharati Mukherjee - Antonya Nelson - Joyce Carol Oates - Tim O'Brien - Daniel Orozco - Julie Orringer - ZZ Packer - E. Annie Proulx - Stacey Richter - George Saunders - Joan Silber - Leslie Marmon Silko - Susan Sontag - Amy Tan - Melanie Rae Thon - Alice Walker - Steve Yarbrough |
| amy hempel short stories: Scrapper Matt Bell, 2016-08-23 For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, Scrapper traces one man’s desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit. Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City... powerful. —Publishers Weekly Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love? |
In a Tub - Jerry W. Brown
Excerpted from The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Originally published in Reasons to Live, copyright © 1985 by Amy Hempel. The year I began to say vahz instead of …
The Harvest - Amy Hempel - Archive.org
My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes. He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.” I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after …
Directory listing for ia803101.us.archive.org
the at the gates of the animal kingdom
Amy Hempel - neenahlibrary.org
Read these stories and join library staff for a discussion at lion's tale brewing Monday, april 11th at 7:00pm. "Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuf or skip it." …
AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM By Amy Hempel
When her auspicious 1985 debut volume, Reasons to Live, appeared, Amy Hempel credited Dr. Christian Barnard, who like Hempel knows his way around the human heart, with a fitting …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel - Al Jazeera
Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel (book)
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a …
In a very short story called “Equivalent,” Amy Hempel ... - SSRN
Consider “Equivalent,” one of the shorter stories in Hempel’s book. Summarizing this story takes almost as long as reproducing it in its entirety. It begins: The former owner was supposed to fix …
The Masters Review
Amy Hempel has established herself as an expert on short fiction. Her accomplishments range from a Guggenheim Fellowship to PEN/Malamud and Rea Awards for short sto-ries. Her work …
Amy Hempel Short Stories Copy - admissions.piedmont.edu
Gates of the Animal Kingdom Amy Hempel,1991 A collection of 16 poignant stories about the rogue stresses that threaten the stability of modern women At the Gates of the Animal …
The Harvest - Archive.org
Amy Hempel The Harvest meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in “The Harvest.” In the years …
TUMBLE HOME: A novella and stories - Andy Solomon
Some writers--Joyce Carol Oates serves as the perfect example--write torrentially: a world forms in their heads, then floods onto the page. At the other end of the spectrum stands Amy …
Amy Hempel , and the coeditor of , and have been and
Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including The Best …
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried - Fictionaut
I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel (book)
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a …
AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF SELECTED SHORT FICTION …
The critical portion also examines three pieces of short fiction: Donald Barthelme’s “The Crisis,” Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest,” and Judy Budnitz’s “Scenes from the Fall Fashion Catalogue.” …
ON THE FRINGES: SUBMERGED POPULATION GROUPS IN THE …
ABSTRACT In his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O'Connor asserts that “the short story has never had a hero” but instead features “submerged population groups," which …
Flash Fiction Forward 80 Very Short Stories James Thomas
How short can a Micro be, you wonder. Look up Amy Hempel's contribution, and you'll see.
Evergreen State College
Feb 22, 2016 · American Short Stories, Vol. I. "Du Jour" was published in The Mississippi Review. "Rapture of the Deep " and "The Day I Had Everything " were published in Grand Street. "At …
THE REASONS FOR MISINTERPRETATION OF MINIMALISM …
Similarly to minimalism, the short story, as a genre of writing, has a history of being underestimated and misinterpreted. As the name suggests, short stories are concise.
In a Tub - Jerry W. Brown
Excerpted from The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Originally published in Reasons to Live, copyright © 1985 by Amy Hempel. The year I began to say vahz instead of …
The Harvest - Amy Hempel - Archive.org
My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes. He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.” I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after …
Directory listing for ia803101.us.archive.org
the at the gates of the animal kingdom
Amy Hempel - neenahlibrary.org
Read these stories and join library staff for a discussion at lion's tale brewing Monday, april 11th at 7:00pm. "Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuf or skip it." …
AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM By Amy Hempel
When her auspicious 1985 debut volume, Reasons to Live, appeared, Amy Hempel credited Dr. Christian Barnard, who like Hempel knows his way around the human heart, with a fitting …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel - Al Jazeera
Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel (book)
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a …
In a very short story called “Equivalent,” Amy Hempel ... - SSRN
Consider “Equivalent,” one of the shorter stories in Hempel’s book. Summarizing this story takes almost as long as reproducing it in its entirety. It begins: The former owner was supposed to fix …
The Masters Review
Amy Hempel has established herself as an expert on short fiction. Her accomplishments range from a Guggenheim Fellowship to PEN/Malamud and Rea Awards for short sto-ries. Her work …
Amy Hempel Short Stories Copy - admissions.piedmont.edu
Gates of the Animal Kingdom Amy Hempel,1991 A collection of 16 poignant stories about the rogue stresses that threaten the stability of modern women At the Gates of the Animal …
The Harvest - Archive.org
Amy Hempel The Harvest meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in “The Harvest.” In the years …
TUMBLE HOME: A novella and stories - Andy Solomon
Some writers--Joyce Carol Oates serves as the perfect example--write torrentially: a world forms in their heads, then floods onto the page. At the other end of the spectrum stands Amy …
Amy Hempel , and the coeditor of , and have been and
Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including The Best …
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried - Fictionaut
I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like …
The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel (book)
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a …
AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF SELECTED SHORT …
The critical portion also examines three pieces of short fiction: Donald Barthelme’s “The Crisis,” Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest,” and Judy Budnitz’s “Scenes from the Fall Fashion Catalogue.” …
ON THE FRINGES: SUBMERGED POPULATION GROUPS …
ABSTRACT In his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O'Connor asserts that “the short story has never had a hero” but instead features “submerged population groups," which …
Flash Fiction Forward 80 Very Short Stories James Thomas
How short can a Micro be, you wonder. Look up Amy Hempel's contribution, and you'll see.
Evergreen State College
Feb 22, 2016 · American Short Stories, Vol. I. "Du Jour" was published in The Mississippi Review. "Rapture of the Deep " and "The Day I Had Everything " were published in Grand Street. "At …
THE REASONS FOR MISINTERPRETATION OF …
Similarly to minimalism, the short story, as a genre of writing, has a history of being underestimated and misinterpreted. As the name suggests, short stories are concise.
