Damballah
10 best books like Damballah (John Edgar Wideman): Back in the World, Across the Bridge, Facing the Music, Bats Out of Hell, The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, Oxherding Tale, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Disasters in the First World, Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel, The Best Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
| Author | Tobias Wolff |
| ISBN | 0679767967 |
To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety. To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories...
| Author | Mavis Gallant |
| ISBN | 0786701439 |
There is something very elusive and magical about Mavis Gallant's style. It seems to me that Gallant perfected the use of free indirect discourse in discussing familial groups, a narrative style that links her to other (mostly women) writers all the way back to Jane Austen. Gallant moves in and out of...
| Author | Larry Brown |
| ISBN | 1565121252 |
Facing the Music, Larry Brown’s first book, was originally published in 1988 to wide critical acclaim. As the St. Petersburg Times review pointed out, the central theme of these ten stories “is the ageless collision of man with woman, woman with man--with the frequent introduction of that other...
Love and torment, lunacy and desire, tenderness and war — the stories in Bats Out of Hell provide a brilliant, dazzling odyssey into American life. Barry Hannah's reputation as a master of the short story, first established in 1978 with the publication of Airships, is magnified in this volatile,...
The Collected Stories of Chester Himes
| Author | Chester Himes |
| ISBN | 1560250216 |
I enjoyed this huge compilation of short works by Chester Himes but I didn't love it. The collection can roughly be divided in thirds, with the first-third being my favorite. The first third showcases some great snapshots of Black American life during World War II, descriptive and evocative of early...
| Author | Charles R. Johnson |
| ISBN | 0743264495 |
One night in the antebellum South, a slave owner and his African-American butler stay up to all hours until, too drunk to face their wives, they switch places in each other's beds. The result is a hilarious imbroglio and an offspring -- Andrew Hawkins, whose life becomes Oxherding Tale. Through...
| Author | Paule Marshall |
| ISBN | 0394726332 |
The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Carribean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants -- black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense ambivalent relationships...
| Author | Olivia Clare |
| ISBN | 0802126618 |
Olivia Clare’s delightfully strange and tender debut traces the intersection of larger-than-life forces—natural and otherwise—in our daily lives. From siblings whose relationship is as fragile as glass, to a woman grappling with both an emotional and physical drought, to a superstitious...
The actual "stories" themselves are wonderful, witty, and synthesize wry social commentary with architectural theory and history.
But the preface, the commentary at the beginning of chapters, and other "text blocks" - almost ruin this book for me. It will probably turn people off to what...
The Best Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
| Author | Anton Chekhov |
| ISBN | 0760738998 |
The Best Stories of Anton Chekhov is an unforgettable journey through the complexities of the human heart. Celebrated as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, Chekhov's masterpieces are given the difinitive treatment by editor John Kulka in this edition.
Among the twelve stories...
| Author | Ralph Ellison |
| ISBN | 0679776613 |
Written between 1937 and 1954 and now available in paperback for the first time, these thirteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and were discovered among the author's effects in a folder labeled "Early Stories."...
| Author | Buchi Emecheta |
| ISBN | 0435909851 |
Kehinde and her husband Albert had always intended to return to Nigeria. When the opportunity arises, Kehinde realises she is reluctant to leave London and the independence she has enjoyed there. Albert, longing for the prosperity and status that will be his in Nigeria, is determined not to be thwarted...
| Author | Eley Williams |
| ISBN | 1910312169 |
This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one’s thoughts — absurd, encompassing, oblique — may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.
Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language...
| Author | Dorthe Nors |
| ISBN | 1555979386 |
Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first-century romances. In "Days," a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days--one moment she...
| Author | Ilyasah Shabazz |
| ISBN | 0345444965 |
“Ilyasah Shabazz has written a compelling and lyrical coming-of-age story as well as a candid and heart-warming tribute to her parents. Growing Up X is destined to become a classic.”
–SPIKE LEE
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. June...
| Author | Stuart Dybek |
| ISBN | 0374280509 |
In this remarkable collection of bite-size stories, Stuart Dybek, one of our most prodigious writers, explores the human appetite for rapture and for trust. With fervent intensity and sly wit, he gives each tale his signature mix of characters—some almost ghostly, others vividly real—who live...
| Author | Jane Gardam |
| ISBN | 1609451996 |
From the inimitable Jane Gardam, whose 'Old Filth' trilogy cemented her status as one of England’s greatest living novelists, comes a collection of short stories that showcase her subversive wit, gentle humor, and insight into the human condition. Gardam’s versatility is on full display, while...
| Author | Willa Cather |
| ISBN | 0679736484 |
The most complete collection available of Willa Cather's remarkable short fiction, Collected Stories brings together all the stories published in book form during her lifetime along with two additional volumes compiled after her death.
These nineteen stories resonate with all the...
| Author | Terry McMillan |
| ISBN | 0140116974 |
I read this when I was staying with my aunt in a very small town in Alabama (Anniston). She was recovering from a serious illness, and needed some help. It is a book that I had very little trouble reading from cover to cover. All the stories were well-written and helped to while away the time in a very small...
| Author | Aleksandar Hemon |
| ISBN | 0375727000 |
In this stylistically adventurous, brilliantly funny tour de force-the most highly acclaimed debut since Nathan Englander's-Aleksander Hemon writes of love and war, Sarajevo and America, with a skill and imagination that are breathtaking.
A love affair is experienced in the blink of...
| Author | Thomas McGuane |
| ISBN | 0394755219 |
This one is a real mixed bag of good, bad and everything in between.
Some of the tales are a bit unsettling, including one that involves a father deciding how to best capitalize on his teenage daughter's pregnancy.
Some were amusing, but bittersweet, like the story about how one man's...
| Author | Asali Solomon |
| ISBN | 0374299420 |
Asali Solomon's characters are vivid misfits--a heathen at Jesus camp, a scheming prep-school student, a middle-aged mom pining for her salsa-dancing salad days, a scheming twentysomething virgin, a college stud in love with his weight-lifting partner, a lonely girl in love with a yellow dress....
