Without a Hero
10 best books like Without a Hero (T. Coraghessan Boyle): The Theory of Light and Matter, Kentucky Straight: Stories, Things that Fall from the Sky, Thirst, The Afterlife and Other Stories, The Best American Short Stories 1997, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, All Around Atlantis, I : Six Nonlectures, The Ghost Soldiers
| Author | Andrew Porter |
| ISBN | 0820332097 |
These ten short stories explore loss and sacrifice in American suburbia. In idyllic suburbs across the country, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, narrators struggle to find meaning or value in their lives because of (or in spite of) something that has happened in their pasts. In Hole, a young man...
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 | Kevin Brockmeier |
| ISBN | 0375727698 |
Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeier’s richly imagined Things That Fall from the Sky views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens.
In the deftly told “These Hands,” a man named Lewis recounts...
| Author | Ken Kalfus |
| ISBN | 1571310185 |
A few quite good stories, reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, surrounded by some okay stories. And then I remembered, Calvino and Borges do a pretty good Calvino and Borges as well--so I'll read them instead. If you only read one story from this collection, though read "Night And Day You Are The One"
I'll...
| Author | John Updike |
| ISBN | 0449912019 |
To the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig . . . each reed of thatch, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass.” All of these stories, each in its own way, partake of this glow, as life...
| Author | Annie Proulx |
| ISBN | 0395798655 |
The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best-selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx's selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert...
| Author | Steven Millhauser |
| ISBN | 0753808218 |
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all";...
| Author | Deborah Eisenberg |
| ISBN | 0671024620 |
Deborah Eisenberg's deeply etched and mysterious stories focus on individuals grappling with the dislocations, ironies, and compromises levied by ordinary reality and the vivid, troubling worlds her characters inhabit. In 'The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor, ' a messenger arrives to conduct...
| Author | E.E. Cummings |
| ISBN | 0674440102 |
The author begins his "nonlectures" with the warning "I haven't the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer." Then, at intervals, he proceeds to deliver the following:
1. i & my parents
2. i & their son
3. i & selfdiscovery
4. i & you & is
5. i & now...
| Author | James Tate |
| ISBN | 0061436941 |
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate returns with his fifteenth book of poetry, an exciting new collection that offers nearly one hundred fresh and thought-provoking pieces that embody Tate's trademark style and voice: his accessibility, his dark humor, and his exquisite sense of the absurd.
Tate's...
| Author | Adrienne Rich |
| ISBN | 0393065650 |
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth is one of Adrienne Rich's most unpredictable and evocative collections. In the folk/blues tradition behind "Rhyme," in the incantatory pattern of "Behind the Motel," in the voices from past and present in "Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged...
| Author | Reynolds Price |
| ISBN | 0743244990 |
For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short...
| Author | Matthew Klam |
| ISBN | 0375726616 |
The New Yorker magazine named Matt Klam one of the twenty best young writers in America, and the seven stories that comprise Sam the Cat are all the proof we need.
Knowing, perceptive, and wickedly funny, Matt Klam loves his characters but spares them nothing: the swaggering womanizer Sam falls...
| Author | Kōbō Abe |
| ISBN | 4770016905 |
Beyond the Curve, Kōbō Abe
Collection of fiction which explores many of modern man's dilemmas in an insightful, yet highly surrealistic style. Called by The New York Times, "The bestJapanese novelist (since) Mishima and Kawabata"..., Abe is one of the most highly regarded writers in Japan...
In this powerful series of short stories Helen Dunmore reveals a harsh, serious world of endless winters and midnight sun. In Short days, Long Nights a woman wakes to find a man in her bed and tries to piece together the jigsaw of the night before. But is he dead or just sleeping? In Girls on Ice two fashion...
| Author | Laura Furman |
| ISBN | 0307276880 |
An arresting collection of contemporary fiction at its best, these stories explore a vast range of subjects, from love and deception to war and the insidious power of class distinctions. However clearly spoken, in voices sophisticated, cunning, or na-ve, here is fiction that consistently defies...
| Author | J.G. Ballard |
| ISBN | 0099334712 |
JGB is one of my favourite authors. Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are two of my favourite books and stand up well in the canon of English contemporary fiction. You can have the discussion of science fiction as literature ad infinitum as well as whether JGB was a science fiction writer or not. Yes he...
| Author | James Alan McPherson |
| ISBN | 0060936479 |
First published in 1968, this collection includes the Atlantic Prize-winning story Gold Coast (selected by John Updike for the collection Best American Short Stories of the Century) and introduced America to McPherson's unforgettable, enduring vision and distinctive artistry.
Hue...
| Author | Stephen Horn |
| ISBN | 0061098760 |
Washington lawyer Philip Barkley was on the fast track, until scandal and personal tragedy brought him down. Left shattered and haunted, he now has a chance to make a fresh start. An aide to Senator Warren Young, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has vanished and may be a spy -- an eventuality...
| Author | Czesław Miłosz |
| ISBN | 0374526230 |
"I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands, where swirls of smoke hovered...
| Author | Tessa Hadley |
| ISBN | 0312425996 |
A Picador Paperback Original
Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships.
A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and...
