When the Messenger Is Hot
10 best books like When the Messenger Is Hot (Elizabeth Crane): Nice Big American Baby, Throw Like a Girl, Honeymoon: And Other Stories, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, How It Ended: New and Collected Stories, The Best American Short Stories 1994, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas: Stories, Through the Safety Net, Hiding Out
| Author | Judy Budnitz |
| ISBN | 0375726861 |
A blazingly original, profoundly moving new work of fiction by a writer whose world–and imagination–knows no boundaries. “I don’t know what planet Judy Budnitz comes from,” said Newsweek on the publication of her fiction debut, Flying Leap, “but I’m happy to have her. Tremendous...
| Author | Jean Thompson |
| ISBN | 1416541829 |
A master of short fiction whose "best pieces are as good as it gets in contemporary cction" (Newsday) returns, as Jean Thompson follows her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love with Throw Like a Girl.
Here are twelve new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood,...
Honeymoon: And Other Stories
| Author | Kevin Canty |
| ISBN | 0375708006 |
The characters in Kevin Canty’s new collection are people we all know. People who are perhaps ourselves, searching, often in the wrong places, for something meaningful, or real, or at least, for a moment, right. Here are couples like Vincent and Laurie, who after beginning an ill-timed relationship,...
Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir
| Author | Joe Meno |
| ISBN | 0810151677 |
Winner of 2006 The Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award
Children who anesthetize--and dress up--small wild animals in an ill-fated attempt to cheer their grieving mother; childhood friends who ritually return every year to the site of their near-kidnapping; an awkward teen...
| Author | Jay McInerney |
| ISBN | 0307268055 |
From the writer whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, defined a generation and whose seventh and most recent, The Good Life, was an acclaimed national best seller, a collection of stories new and old that trace the arc of his career over nearly three decades. In fact, the short story, as A. O. Scott...
| Author | Tobias Wolff |
| ISBN | 0395681022 |
Tobias Wolff brought a strong, if not flashy, batch of short stories for the 1994 edition of "The Best American Short Stories." If there is any general weakness in this volume of the stalwart anthology, its a similarity in tone from the first story to the last. Lost of rural middle American everymen confronting...
| Author | Lisa Glatt |
| ISBN | 0743257766 |
Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to...
| Author | Davy Rothbart |
| ISBN | 0743263057 |
In The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, Davy Rothbart's stories grow out of road trips and small towns and are populated by questionable heroes and gold-hearted thugs. Full of loneliness and hope, heartbreak and humor, Rothbart's tales blaze their way from midwestern farm fields to state prisons and...
| Author | Charles Baxter |
| ISBN | 0679776494 |
Baxter dives into the undercurrents of middle-class American life in these eleven arresting, often mesmerizing stories. Whether they know it or not, Baxter's characters are floating above an abyss of unruly desire, inexplicable dread, unforeseen tragedy, and sudden moments of grace.
A...
| Author | Jonathan Messinger |
| ISBN | 0977199231 |
The publishing of this book is an occasion to celebrate. There are many wonderfully sincere, humbling moments in each of these stories. Many of them involve characters stuck in dream worlds filled with obstacles they struggle to overcome during waking life. Rich, seductive things happen to these...
We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?: Stories
Achy Obejas writes stories about uprooted people. Some, like herself, are Latino immigrants and lesbians; others are men (gay and straight), people with AIDS, addicts, people living marginally, just surviving. As omniscient narrator to her characters' lives, Obejas generously delves into her...
| Author | Blake Nelson |
| ISBN | 0545104742 |
From Blake Nelson, a fantastic and topical novel about idealism and finding the ideal girl.
James Hoff likes to rant against America's consumerist culture. He also likes to rant against his ex-girlfriend, Sadie, who he feels isn't doing enough to change the world. But just like he can't avoid...
| Author | Chad Simpson |
| ISBN | 1609381262 |
The world of Tell Everyone I Said Hi is geographically small but far from provincial in its portrayal of emotionally complicated lives. With all the heartbreaking earnestness of a Wilco song, these eighteen stories by Chad Simpson roam the small-town playgrounds, blue-collar neighborhoods, and...
| Author | Patrick Somerville |
| ISBN | 0307275353 |
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
In this hilarious and wildly inventive debut, including a title story that was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Patrick Somerville charts the dangerous territories of adolescence and adulthood for the American male.
In “Puberty,” Brandon takes the matter...
Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night: Stories
Ironically, I've read that reading fiction makes people smarter and more sympathetic (even empathetic) because reading fiction allows us to somehow experience new things. To learn different ways of thinking, to see different ways of living, to feel different ways of loving, to consider different...
God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories
| Author | Tom Bissell |
| ISBN | 0375422641 |
Here are six fictional stories about Americans colliding with a remote and often perilous part of the world:
Two journalists, stranded in wartime Afghanistan, are taken in by a warlord who becomes the arbiter of their fates.
A female scientist investigating the Aral Sea disaster...
Enter Jeeves: 15 Early Stories
Born in England in 1881, Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse delighted generations of readers with his whimsical tales of the deliciously dim aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his brainy, imperturbable manservant. Many are unaware, however, that Bertie had a prototype — Reggie Pepper —...
| Author | Garrison Keillor |
| ISBN | 0140233725 |
"Guys are in trouble these days," says Garrison Keillor. "Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement and now it's just a problem to be overcome. Guys who once might have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling are now just trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, be passionate...
| Author | Richard McCann |
| ISBN | 1400096219 |
In these ten interwoven stories, two adolescent brothers face a world in which their father has suddenly died, a world dominated by their beautiful and complicated mother. Thirty years later, one of the brothers-the only remaining survivor of a family he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in...
| Author | Bobbie Ann Mason |
| ISBN | 0880015942 |
Since the night they eloped as teenagers over forty years ago, Spence and Lila have spent a lifetime together. Now Lila has been diagnosed with breast cancer and faces surgery. Spence visits her in the hospital, but the notion of losing his wife is sometimes more than he can bear. He retreats to his fields,...
| Author | Dave Reidy |
| ISBN | 1940430550 |
This is another book I only discovered after getting "Curbside Splendor" as my result in the Book Riot quiz, Which Indie Press Should You Be Obsessed With?" I had not heard of the publisher, and requested a bunch of interesting looking titles from interlibrary loan.
This book is a slow burn,...
Flights of Angels: Stories
| Author | Ellen Gilchrist |
| ISBN | 0316002305 |
I really like short stories, but I rarely read them, because I get frustrated when they don't match the times I have available for reading (nothing worse than having a lunch break end when I'm only a couple pages into a second or third story). But I made an exception because I really love Gilcrhist, and I...
| Author | Stephen Dobyns |
| ISBN | 0312278292 |
In his first collection of stories, Stephen Dobyns, one of our most accomplished writers, examines the lives of men and women challenged by their own uncontrollable, illogical natures: poets with free floating guilt, spouses with unacceptable sexual compulsions, farmers with midlife crises,...
What I'd Say to the Martians and Other Veiled Threats
| Author | Jack Handey |
| ISBN | 1401322662 |
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
One of my fondest childhood memories is spending Saturday night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live. A million few years later, I remain loyal to SNL – I’m just old now, so the correct...
| Author | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| ISBN | 0812971876 |
From an acclaimed and award-winning young writer comes an intensely moving debut collection set in the eye of life’s storms. In Corpus Christi, Texas—a town often hit by hurricanes— parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they...
