The Neon Wilderness
10 best books like The Neon Wilderness (Nelson Algren): Fancies and Goodnights, The Best Short Stories, Blood and Grits, Kentucky Straight: Stories, Poachers, Division Street: America, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, Nightmares of an Ether Drinker, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories
| Author | John Collier |
| ISBN | 1590170512 |
John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters...
| Author | J.G. Ballard |
| ISBN | 0312278446 |
First published in 1978, this collection of nineteen of Ballard's best short stories is as timely and informed as ever. His tales of the human psyche and its relationship to nature and technology, as viewed through a strong microscope, were eerily prescient and now provide greater perspective on our...
| Author | Harry Crews |
| ISBN | 0060914599 |
17 essays written by fiction author Crews - all published in Playboy and Esquire in the early '70s - ranging widely in topic from bio sketches of Charles Bronson and William Blake to life as a carny or independent trucker. Crews inserts himself as a major character in all of these essays; his upbringing...
Riveting, often heartbreaking stories that take readers through country that is figuratively and literally unmapped. These stories are set in a nameless community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation....
| Author | Tom Franklin |
| ISBN | 0688177719 |
In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps, and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling...
| Author | Studs Terkel |
| ISBN | 1595580727 |
Division Street, Studs Terkel’s first book of oral history, established his reputation as America’s foremost oral historian and as “one of those rare thinkers who is actually willing to go out and talk to the incredible people of this country” (in the words of Tom Wolfe).
Viewing...
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren
| Author | Simone de Beauvoir |
| ISBN | 1565845609 |
In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir met Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Nelson Algren in Chicago, and it was love at first sight. A passionate affair ensued, spanning twenty years and four continents in an era when a transatlantic flight took twenty-four hours and overseas telephone calls were a luxury....
| Author | Jean Lorrain |
| ISBN | 1872621651 |
Contents:
-Introduction by Brian Stableford
-Early Stories: The Egregore/ Funeral Oration/ The Locked Room/ Magic Lantern/ The Glass of Blood/ Beyond/ Glaucous Eyes
-Sensations: One of Them/An Undesirable Residence/ A Troubled Night/ A Posthumous Protest/ An Uncanny Crime/...
| Author | Charles Baxter |
| ISBN | 0307379213 |
Ever since the publication of The Harmony of the World in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short-story writers. Each subsequent collection—Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, and Believers—was further confirmation of his mastery: his...
| Author | Stuart Dybek |
| ISBN | 0226176584 |
In Stuart Dybek's Chicago, wonder lurks in unexpected places—in garbage-strewn alleys, gloomy basement apartments, abandoned rooms at the top of rickety stairs periodically rumbled by passing el trains. Transformed through the wide eyes of Dybek's adolescent heroes, these grimy urban backwaters...
| Author | V.S. Pritchett |
| ISBN | 0812972945 |
Introduction by JEREMY TREGLOWN
"In his daily walks through London," notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, "Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception." This finely...
| Author | Zoran Živković |
| ISBN | 1904619657 |
Impossible Stories I is a collection of several of the author's finest works, including Time Gifts, Impossible Encounters, Seven Touches of Music, The Library (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and Steps through the Mist. The perfect introduction to the incredible world of Zoran Zivković.
Impossible...
| Author | Ivan Bunin |
| ISBN | 1566637589 |
"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger....
Overnight to Many Distant Cities
| Author | Donald Barthelme |
| ISBN | 0140075801 |
As others have said -- a more even Barthelme, with fewer risks, fewer peaks or outright failures. These stories are odd in more normal ways that his earlier more audacious experiments in form and content. Peculiar characters, stylized dialogue, bits of incident that wouldn't show up in a realist story,...
| Author | Barry Hannah |
| ISBN | 0140088113 |
I absolutely loved Airships. I've read it cover to cover maybe three times. I've read the stories Testimony of Pilot and Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa maybe a dozen times each. I wanted to love Captain Maximus, I really did, but it felt like it was comprised of a couple of stories Gordon Lish cut from Airships...
| Author | Anna Kavan |
| ISBN | 0720611237 |
This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration in a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name, evokes The Trial by Kafka, a writer with...
The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy
| Author | James Purdy |
| ISBN | 0871406691 |
The publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single volume. As prolific as he was unclassifiable,...
| Author | John Fante |
| ISBN | 0876855826 |
A high two stars. There are a couple of really good stories in here (Scoundrel, In the Spring, A Kidnapping In the Family) that bring to mind Fante's best work, but there's also a lot of corniness and false sentimentality. I like Fante, I really do, but most of this showcases his worst tendencies. For example,...
| Author | Mike Royko |
| ISBN | 0226730727 |
With the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko was a Chicago institution who became, in Jimmy Breslin's words, "the best journalist of his time." Culled from 7500 columns and spanning four decades, from his early days to his last dispatch, the writings in this...
| Author | Hubert Selby Jr. |
| ISBN | 0714530506 |
Hubert Selby is probably one of the six best novelists writing in the English language.?Financial Times
Author of controversial cult classic, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby began as a writer of short fiction. He excels in this form, plunging the reader head-first into the densely realized...
A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man...
| Author | Ron Hansen |
| ISBN | 0871133490 |
The verbs in this thing! The magnificent and effortless similes! My god! Congratulations, Ron Hansen--with Nebraska, you've earned your place among my favorite short story writers, alongside Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and Jim Shepard.
"Wickedness" comes blazing out of the gate, a swirling...
