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La Medusa
Vanessa Place
University of Alabama Press, 2008

La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.

Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating a cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.

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The Lacquer Screen
A Chinese Detective Story
Robert van Gulik
University of Chicago Press, 1962
Early in his career, Judge Dee visits a senior magistrate who shows him a beautiful lacquer screen on which a scene of lovers has been mysteriously altered to show the man stabbing his lover. The magistrate fears he is losing his mind and will murder his own wife. Meanwhile, a banker has inexplicably killed himself, and a lovely lady has allowed Dee's lieutenant, Chiao Tai, to believe she is a courtesan. Dee and Chiao Tai go incognito among a gang of robbers to solve this mystery, and find the leader of the robbers is more honorable than the magistrate.

"One of the most satisfyingly devious of the Judge Dee novels, with unusual historical richness in its portrayal of the China of the T'ang dynasty."-—New York Times Book Review

"Even Judge Dee is baffled by Robert van Gulik's new mysteries in The Lacquer Screen. Disguised as a petty crook, he spends a couple of precarious days in the headquarters of the underworld, hobnobbing with the robber king. Dee's lively thieving friends furnish some vital clues to this strange and fascinating jigsaw."-—The Spectator

"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."-—New York Times

Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
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Ladders to Fire
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 2014

Anaïs Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that “it was the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin’s continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross,The Four-Chambered Heart,A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.

This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.

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Ladders To Fire
New Expanded Edition
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 1959

After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anaïs Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style. She resisted realistic writing and drew on the experience and intuitions of her diary to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, the language of emotion, spontaneity, and improvisation.

Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Nin’s celebrated series of novels called Cities of the Interior

For Anaïs Nin, her writing and her life were not separable, they were both part of the same experience. She claimed that “is it the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Anaïs Nin continues to find an audience, whether for her fiction, her diaries, or her own life story, which has enjoyed the attention of biographers and filmmakers. This 1995 reissue of Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.

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Ladies & Gentleman, The Original Music
Of The Hebrew Alphabet And Weekend In Mustarra
Curt Leviant
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
Filled with Curt Leviant's signature blend of humor and drama, these two enchanting and original novellas lure readers into a dazzling storybook world.
    "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" is set in Budapest during the Communist era. The story focuses on the tenuous seesaw between Dr. Isaac Gantz, a musicologist, and engineer Ferdinand Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that he possesses one of the greatest manuscripts of the ages, a Rosetta Stone of Judaica. Friedman is willing to share it—but there is a "but." In pursuing this prize, Gantz enters a world of strange human relationships filled with doubts and surprises. A vibrant cast of characters adds dimension to this gripping story in which Jewish folklore, music, and history coalesce.
    "Weekend in Mustara" unfolds on the fictional island of Mustara in southern Europe, a mountainous, totalitarian country that tolerates Judaism. Its few Jews cling to their heritage, embodied in their beautiful but sparsely attended synagogue and their museum, where a great memorial book is inscribed with the names of all Mustara Jews martyred during World War II. A scholar of medieval Hebrew manuscripts comes to the island, searching for traces of Yehuda Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of the Spanish Golden Age. He is soon enmeshed among elusive personalities and tangled loyalties, but only when he finds himself displaced in time—in a kind of theater of the absurd—are the purposes of his journey finally realized.
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Lady in Ermine
The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance. A Biographical Novel
Donna DiGiuseppe
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019

Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance reveals the discovery of an historic figure who embodies the struggle of women throughout the ages while immersing the reader in the sixteenth century world of the Renaissance figures she paints.

As a girl in Lombardy, Sofonisba Anguissola trains to paint with mannerist masters, and though society frowns upon women having such ambition, Sofonisba’s father unwaveringly encourages her. A royal tour by Prince Philip of Spain inspires her lifelong dream: to perfect the king’s portrait and show his truth on canvas, the highest calling for a Renaissance portraitist. Her drive to vindicate her loving father, a bastard of nobility, propels her. Politics of the Spanish empire brings Sofonisba to the heart of the royal court in Madrid. She aspires to achieve her goal while others at court work to undermine her as a female artist. Tragedy unfolds in the royal household, but in the process, Sofonisba finds her opportunity to paint the King of Spain, honoring her family name with her success. In life after court, Sofonisba navigates two marriages, royal appointments, love, hardship, and bankruptcy, while leaving a legacy of hundreds of paintings and influencing generations of artists from Anthony van Dyck to Peter Paul Rubens. This is her story.

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Lamps at High Noon
Jack S. Balch
University of Illinois Press, 1941
The Federal Arts Projects were created by FDR in the summer of 1935. A year later, a handful of writers employed in the St. Louis office of the Missouri Writers' Project, including Jack Balch, went out on strike. Lamps at High Noon is the only novel about this strike and the only one to treat comprehensively any aspect of the Federal Writers' Project, whose participants included some of the country's most accomplished and promising authors.
 
Charlie Gest, the wide-eyed and well-intentioned protagonist of the novel, confronts firsthand the project's sometimes underhanded efforts to monitor the political views of its writers. Named assistant director of the project in Monroe (a fictional St. Louis), Gest is vaguely aware that the program's good intentions do not always overshadow the abuses it tolerates, which include shielding corporate interests and avoiding hiring highly qualified black writers. Gest is hounded by a nagging suspicion that, like lamps that burn in broad daylight, the issues at stake in the work stoppage are not the ones that most need addressing.
 
Part radical socialist commentary, part absurdist theater, Balch's novel offers a peerless critical engagement of the economic constraints and political exigencies surrounding debates over the federal funding of art since the New Deal.
 
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A Land Like You
Tobie Nathan
Seagull Books, 2020
A riveting and revealing tale of an Egypt caught between tradition and modernity, multiculturalism and nationalism, oppression and freedom.

Cairo 1925, Haret al-Yahud, the old Jewish Quarter. Esther, a beautiful young woman believed to be possessed by demons, longs to give birth after seven blissful years of marriage. Her husband, blind since childhood, does not object when, in her effort to conceive, she participates in Muslim zar rituals. Zohar, the novel’s narrator, comes into the world, but because his mother’s breasts are dry, he is nursed by a Muslim peasant—also believed to be possessed—who has just given birth to a girl, Masreya. Suckled at the same breasts and united by a rabbi’s amulet, the milk-twins will be consumed by a passionate, earth-shaking love. 
 
Part fantastical fable, part realistic history, A Land Like You draws on ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan’s deep knowledge of North African folk beliefs to create a glittering tapestry in which spirit possession and religious mysticism exist side by side with sober facts about the British occupation of Egypt and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers’ Movement. Historical figures such as Gamel Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and King Farouk mingle with Nathan’s fictional characters in this engaging story.
 
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Land of Cockaigne
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2023
A novel written as a sharp parable of American society, addressing love, purpose, discrimination, and poverty.
 
In Jeffrey Lewis’s novel, the Land of Cockaigne, once an old medieval peasants’ vision of a sensual paradise on earth, is reimagined as a plot on the coast of Maine. In efforts to assuage their grief over their son’s death and to make meaning of his life, Walter Rath and Catherine Gray build what they hope will be a version of paradise for a group of young men from the Bronx. As Walter and Catherine work to reinvent this land, formerly a summer resort, the surrounding town of Sneeds Harbor proves resistant. The residents’ well-meaning doubts lead to well-hidden threats, and the Raths’ marriage unravels as Walter loses faith in democracy. Meanwhile, the Bronx boys, who have only ever known the city, try to navigate this new land that is completely alien to them. Written as a parable of contemporary American society, Land of Cockaigne is by turns furious, funny, subversive, tragic, and horrifying. Faced with the question of what to do amid disastrous times, Walter Rath offers a clue: Love is an action, not a feeling. Once you go down this path of faith, there is much to be done.
 
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The Land of Green Plums
Herta Muller
Northwestern University Press, 1998

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Land of Milk and Money
A Novel
Anthony Barcellos
Tagus Press, 2012
Land of Milk and Money tells the story of the Francisco family, Portuguese immigrants who build a prosperous California dairy farm. With their growing success, plans to return to the Old Country fall by the wayside, and the legacy of the older generation becomes a source of contention among descendants competing to inherit herds of cattle and tracts of farmland. As matriarch, Teresa had devoted her life to keeping the peace in her big family. But when she dies long-simmering resentments and feuds burst into the open—and into the courtroom. Teresa, however, had seen it all coming, and her will contains a few surprises.
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A Land the Size of Binoculars
Igor Klekh
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Igor Klekh emerges as a writer from the crossroads of Europe—Western Ukraine—influenced by the great Russian literary tradition as well as the languages and dialects of both East-Central Europe and his native country. A Land the Size of Binoculars collects his breakthrough 1993 novella Kallimakh's Wake, five short pieces, and two more recent novellas.

Throughout, Klekh studies landscapes as intimate as the terrain between fathers and sons and as broad as the wild, mysterious Carpathian Mountains. His work has been compared to that of Borges, Eco, and the magical realists, and celebrated for its synthesis of numerous literary traditions, its use of esoteric knowledge, and its breathtaking prose.
 
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Landfall
A Ring of Stories
Julie Hensley
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
In this ring of connected short stories, grounded in the fictional town of Conrad’s Fork, Kentucky, everyone is staging some sort of escape. A woman harboring the dark truth about her youngest daughter’s birth, a new teacher suddenly under suspicion after a student’s disappearance, a young girl witnessing her older sister’s sexual awakening: all the people in this Appalachian community suffer a paralyzed desire in response to the stagnancy and exposure they experience in their small town. Landfall: A Ring of Stories weaves together the voices of two generations of mountain families in which secrets are carefully guarded—even from closest kin. One by one, those who leave confront the pull of the land and the people they’ve left behind. Perhaps Conrad’s Fork will save them, or, perhaps, in the wake of urban encroachment and shifting family systems, they will save it.
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The Language of Birds
Norbert Scheuer
Haus Publishing, 2018
It is 2003, and Paul Arimond is serving as a paramedic in Afghanistan. The twenty-four-year-old has no illusions of becoming a hero. Rather, he has chosen the army to escape the tragedies of his past and his own feelings of guilt. As a result, he finds himself in the same land, now war-torn, where an ancestor of his, Ambrosius Arimond, a late eighteenth-century traveler and ornithologist, once explored and developed the theory of a universal language of birds.

As visceral horrors and everyday banalities of the war threaten to engulf Paul, he, like his great-great-grandfather, finds his very own refuge in Afghanistan’s natural world. In a diary filled with exquisite drawings of birds and ruminations on the life he left behind, Paul describes his experiences living with two comrades who are fighting their own demons and his befriending of an Afghan man, Nassim, as well as his dreams of escaping the restrictive base camp and visiting the shores of a lake visible from the lookout tower. But when he finally reaches the lake one night, he finds himself in the midst of a chain of events that, with his increasingly fragile state of mind, has dramatic—and ultimately heartbreaking—consequences.

A meditative novel that shows a new side to the conflict in Afghanistan, The Language of Birds takes a moving look at the all-too-human costs of war and questions what it truly means to fight for freedom.
 
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The Language of Fiction
A Writer’s Stylebook
Brian Shawver
University Press of New England, 2013
Grand themes and complex plots are just the beginning of a great piece of fiction. Mastering the nuts and bolts of grammar and prose mechanics is also an essential part of becoming a literary artist. This indispensable guide, created just for writers of fiction, will show you how to take your writing to the next level by exploring the finer points of language. Funny, readable, and wise, this book explores the tools of the fiction writer’s trade, from verb tenses to pronouns to commas and beyond. Filled with examples from the best-seller lists of today and yesterday, it will help you consider the hows and whys of language, and how mastery of them can be used to achieve clarity and grace of expression in your own work. Here, you’ll find Encouragement and advice to face the big questions: Past or present tense? Comma or semicolon? Italic or roman? Should your dialogue be phonetically rendered, or follow standard rules of grammar? (And where does that pesky quotation mark go, again?) Warning signs of the betrayal of language, and ways to avoid it: Unwitting rhymes, repetition, redundancy, cliché, and the inevitable failure of vocabulary How-to (and how-not-to) examples: The grammatical “mistakes” of Charles Dickens; ambiguous pronoun usage by Nathaniel Hawthorne; the minefield of paragraph fragments found in one of today’s most successful authors.
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The Last Client of Luis Montez
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Hard-luck attorney Luis Montez has hit the big-time at last. He's successfully defended Jimmy Esch, the good-for-nothing son of a powerful Denver family. No small bonus, Jimmy's attractive sister Lisa is, as the saying goes, appreciative. It's enough to make a man quit moping about a lost love.

What a difference a day makes. Inside of twenty-four hours, a cop rumored to have received bribes from Montez takes a header off a mountain, Jimmy Esch is found butchered, and the cops consider the attorney their top suspect. Lisa—Montez's alibi—has conveniently disappeared. As if all that wasn't enough, Montez must also cope with the news his father is in the hospital.

Distracted by family strife and a media circus, Montez broods on the latest wrong turns in his life. Then he decides to act. Jumping bail, he heads across the Rockies to the barrios of San Diego. It's not easy to unravel the perfect set-up when you're down to your last cent. But Montez pursues the truths that will clear his name, and ultimately confronts the powerful force that is Family.
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The Last Country
Svenja Leiber
Seagull Books, 2017
Now in paperback, the epic tale of a violinist who must navigate the fractious world of early twentieth-century Germany.

Ruven Preuk stands apart from the village, on an August day in 1911, and listens.” Thus begins an epic bildungsroman about the life of Ruven Preuk, son of the wainwright, child of a sleepy village in Germany’s north, where life is both simple and harsh.

Ruven, though, is neither. He has the ability to see sounds, leading him to discover an uncanny gift for the violin. When he meets a talented teacher in the Jewish quarter, Ruven falls under the spell of a prodigious future. But as the twentieth century looms, Ruven’s pursuit of his craft takes a turn. In The Last Country, Svenja Leiber spins a tale that moves from the mansions of a disappearing aristocracy to a communist rebellion, from a joyous village wedding to a Nazi official’s threats, from the First World War to the Second. As the world Ruven knows disappears, the gifted musician must grapple with an important question: to what end has he devoted himself to his art?

Winner of the 2015 Arno Reinfrank Literaturpreis
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The Last Days of El Comandante
By Alberto Barrera Tyszka; translated by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer
University of Texas Press, 2020

2021 — Honorable Mention, Best Fiction Book Translation – International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now

Winner of the Tusquets Prize in 2015 and previously translated into French, German, Dutch, Polish, and Portuguese, Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s Patria o muerte is now available in English.

​President Hugo Chávez’s cancer looms large over Venezuela in 2012, casting a shadow of uncertainty and creating an atmosphere of secrets, lies, and upheaval across the country. This literary thriller follows the connected lives of several Caracas neighbors consumed by the turmoil surrounding the Venezuelan president’s impending death.

Retired oncologist Miguel Sanabria, seeing the increasingly combustible world around him, feels on constant edge. He finds himself at odds with his wife, an extreme anti-Chavista, and his radical Chavista brother. These feelings grow when his nephew asks him to undertake the perilous task of hiding cell-phone footage of Chávez in Cuba. Fredy Lecuna, an unemployed journalist, takes a job writing a book about Chávez’s condition, which requires him to leave for Cuba while his landlord attempts to kick his wife and son out of their apartment. Nine-year-old María, long confined to an apartment with a neurotic mother intensely fearful of the city’s violence, finds her only contact with the outside world through a boy she messages online.

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The Last Days of Mandelstam
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Seagull Books, 2020
The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin’s government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, “the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer,” is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From the depths of his prison cell, lost in a world full of ghosts, Mandelstam sees scenes from his life pass before him: constant hunger, living hand to mouth, relying on the assistance of sympathetic friends, shunned by others, four decades of creation and struggle, alongside his beloved wife Nadezhda, and his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and many others.

With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word—proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism.
 
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The Last Days of Publishing
A Novel
Thomas M. Engelhardt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail—the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin—after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.

Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.

Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.
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The Last Happy Occasion
Alan Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The Last Happy Occasion is the coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the sixties and seventies. In this memoir in six movements, Alan Shapiro recalls how poetry helped him make sense of his own and other people's lives. Events unfold, including his sister's death, that make him reconsider the transformative power of art and accept the limitations of poetry in confronting the untransformable pain of mortal loss.

A refreshingly honest, lovingly crafted work, The Last Happy Occasion is a treasure map for anyone interested in exploring the intersections of life and art.
Nominated for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award.
 
"[Shapiro] seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart to mitigate his—and our—separateness from others."—Chase Collins, Chicago Tribune Books

"The Last Happy Occasion is touching and intelligent, emotionally satisfying and eloquent testimony to the power of poetry to instruct, heal and inspire."—Emily Barton, New York Times Book Review

"Shapiro, not unlike Auden, doses his wordplay with a certain sly irony. . . . We come away from Shapiro's book with an intimate appreciation of the little subversions that poetry can work in one's life."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"He is an acute observer of moments, people, art and language. And he packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning. . . . He shows us the power and importance of transformative art in life."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The literary criticism is sharp, but what enthralls the reader more is Shapiro's humorous but honest perspective on his younger self, a perspective that is critical without being condescending."—Heller McAlpin, Newsday

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The Last Hurrah
A Novel
Edwin O'Connor
University of Chicago Press, 2016
“We’re living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I’m not altogether sure you’re fully attuned to it.” So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington—a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents of his New England city and enjoys their unwavering loyalty in return. But in our age of dynasties, mercurial social sensitivities, and politicians making love to the camera, Skeffington might as well be talking to us.

Not quite a roman á clef of notorious Boston mayor James Michael Curley, The Last Hurrah tells the story of Skeffington’s final campaign as witnessed through the eyes of his nephew, who learns a great deal about politics as he follows his uncle to fundraisers, wakes, and into smoke-filled rooms, ultimately coming—almost against his will—to admire the man. Adapted into a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford (and which Curley tried to keep from being made), Edwin O’Connor’s opus reveals politics as it really is, and big cities as they really were. An expansive, humorous novel offering deep insight into the Irish-American experience and the ever-changing nature of the political machine, The Last Hurrah reveals political truths still true today: what the cameras capture is just the smiling face of the sometimes sordid business of giving the people what they want.
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The Last Journey of Ago Ymeri
Bashkim Shehu
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor Dragoti has been dead for nine years, killed by the Albanian coast guard while trying to swim to freedom, only adds to the stranger's mystery--and to the suspense of this curiously real and yet otherworldly work by one of Albania's most distinguished writers. With echoes of The Return of Martin Guerre and Kafka's The Trial, with allusions to The Odyssey and the Albanian folktale of Ago Ymeri, a legendary hero released from the underworld for one day, Shehu's novel blends the autobiographical and the historical, the personal and the political into a powerful tale--a story that conveys the terrors, small and large, of a totalitarian state while capturing all that is surreal and even lyrical in life in such a deeply distorted world.
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The Last Judgment of Kings / Le Jugement dernier des rois
A Bilingual Edition
Yann Robert
Bucknell University Press
First performed the day after Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, Le Jugement dernier des rois stages the burlesque trial of the remaining kings and queens of Europe—paraded in chains like animals, made to brawl over a barrel of crackers, and finally obliterated by a spectacular volcanic eruption. Such is the shocking context—at once tragic and farcical—of the most infamous play of the French Revolution, familiar to all specialists of the period. Until now, however, no standalone critical edition or English translation of this historic play existed. This bilingual edition revives Maréchal’s play and reveals its centrality to scholarly debates about Revolutionary notions of justice, religion, commemoration, comedy, and propaganda. Provocative, written in accessible prose, and short—perfect for students in a French or history seminar—Le Jugement dernier des rois offers an ideal introduction to the most important and contentious questions of the Revolutionary period.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal
Stories
Brian Ascalon Roley
Northwestern University Press, 2016
The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal is a collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. The impact of immigration and separation filters through the stories as a way of communing with or creating distance between individuals and family, country, or history.

Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In "New Relations," an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.

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Last Mountain Dancer
Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life
Chuck Kinder
West Virginia University Press, 2018

This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the “Dancing Outlaw.”

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The Last of the Husbandmen
A Novel of Farming Life
Gene Logsdon
Ohio University Press, 2008

“Nan turned to see Ben’s face turn as hard and white as a sauerkraut crock. When he did not respond, Nan figured that he was just going to back off as he usually did, the shy and retiring husbandman. She did not know her history. She did not know that shy and retiring husbandmen have been known to revolt against oppression with pitchforks drawn.”
The Last of the Husbandmen

In The Last of the Husbandmen, Gene Logsdon looks to his own roots in Ohio farming life to depict the personal triumphs and tragedies, clashes and compromises, and abiding human character of American farming families and communities. From the Great Depression, when farmers tilled the fields with plow horses, to the corporate farms and government subsidy programs of the present, this novel presents the complex transformation of a livelihood and of a way of life.

Two friends, one rich by local standards, and the other of more modest means, grow to manhood in a lifelong contest of will and character. In response to many of the same circumstances—war, love, moonshining, the Klan, weather, the economy—their different approaches and solutions to dealing with their situations put them at odds with each other, but we are left with a deeper understanding of the world that they have inherited and have chosen.

Part morality play and part personal recollection, The Last of the Husbandmen is both a lighthearted look at the past and a profound statement about the present state of farming life. It is also a novel that captures the spirit of those who have chosen to work the land they love.

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The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press, 2011
Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, as Britain and France fought for control of North America, The Last of the Mohicans is a historical novel and a rousing adventure story. It is also, Wayne Franklin argues in his introduction, a probing examination of the political and cultural contest taking shape more than half a century later in the author’s own day as European settlement continued to relentlessly push Native Americans westward. The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of the novel from The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, published by the State University of New York Press.
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The Last of the Ofos
Geary Hobson
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Thomas Darko is a Mohican for the twentieth century, the last surviving member of the tiny Mosopelea Tribe of the Mississippi Delta, called Ofos by outsiders. Never numbering more than a few hundred people in recorded history, his kinsmen have died away until Thomas comes to think of himself as "a nation of one." Now an old man in the waning years of the century, Thomas tells the story of his rough-and-tumble life--one which saw many of the changes that Indian people have faced in modern America—and he emerges as one of the most endearing characters in contemporary Native American literature.

In this subtle but inventive novel, presented as Thomas's memoirs, Geary Hobson offers us a glimpse into a life filled with simple joys and sorrows. In relating his Louisiana childhood, Thomas recalls not just school-learning but being taught Indian ways by the small Ofo community. He tells of his life as a roustabout in the oil fields, of his courtship of the rambunctious Sally Fachette, and of his career as a bootlegger, which landed him in prison. We share Thomas's wartime stint with the Marines—where "for the first time in my life I was treated like a equal"—and his life as a farm laborer and a Hollywood extra portraying warbonneted Cheyennes. Then in his later years, when he truly has become the last of his kind, we find Thomas recruited by an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution to preserve his people's culture. In Washington, he is exposed to the vagaries of Indian policy and the emerging Native American movement.

Throughout Thomas's story, readers are introduced to a wide-ranging cast of characters, from the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde to a fellow Marine who is wary of Indians, to an uppity anthropologist who doesn't consider Thomas "expert" enough to handle an Ofo flute. Always poor in material wealth but rich in heritage, Thomas Darko is a Native American Everyman whose identity is shaped by family and homeland. His "autobiography" paints a realistic portrait of an Indian confronting the obstacles in his life and the dilemmas of his age as his story reveals the painful legacy of being the last of one's kind.
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The Last Shepherd
Martin Etchart
University of Nevada Press, 2012
Mathieu Etchiberri wants nothing more than to leave his family’s Arizona sheep ranch and go to college, but his father insists that he take over the ranch instead. Then his father is killed in an accident, and Matt discovers that he is not the heir to the ranch. So he travels to the French Pyrenees from which his father and grandparents came to settle the questions about his legacy. Instead, he discovers a vast Basque family and a mystery that drove his father to America and still festers in the mountain village. As Matt resolves the mystery of his family, he also discovers his Basque roots and learns the nature of love of family, responsibility, and the tension between individual desires and the needs of a community.

Matt’s journey to manhood takes place in a vividly depicted landscape populated by lively, memorable characters. This is the powerful story of a young man’s search for an identity that encompasses two cultures and one complex, scattered family.
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Last Stands
Stories
Stories by Gordon Weaver
University of Missouri Press, 2004
In a distinguished career that has yielded four novels, ten story collections, and a volume of poetry, Gordon Weaver has maintained a distinctive literary voice that, despite its always recognizable presence, never fails to surprise longtime readers of his work. His best stories somehow manage to be witty and deadly serious at the same time.
Last Stands presents people at crucial moments in their lives, the moments in which ultimate challenges are confronted, ultimate questions are asked, and definitive judgments are made. Weaver’s characters may flounder, and fail, but they are redeemed by their courage and their honesty.
A hired assassin ponders his self-worth, a bartender takes his only chance for worldly success, a man buries his mother, another talks with the dead, yet another attends his high school reunion determined on vindication, and a war-weary Vietnam vet finds a place he can call home. These are stories that do not shun the darker side of Weaver’s characters, but seek the illumination of the insights needed to make their lives meaningful, if only to themselves.
[more]

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The Last Syrian
Omar Youssef Souleimane
Seagull Books, 2024
A rare narrative of gay love in the Arab world that travels into the lives of a group of spirited youth during the Syrian Revolution.
 
Youssef’s mother has always told him that he is named after the biblical prophet Joseph who had the power of foresight. But when Youssef participated in the first demonstration in Damascus in 2011, he felt that the uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime after forty years of silence and fear was “a miracle more powerful than that of the prophet.”
 
While Josephine, a charming young Alawite, gathers in her home a group of youth to fight for their visions of a promising future, a forbidden love story unfolds between two men, Youssef and Mohammad. Meanwhile, young Khalid’s love for Josephine is brutally interrupted by the agents of the oppressive regime. Homosexuality clashes with tradition, emancipation with persecution, and feelings with loyalties, leading to an upheaval that sweeps away the destinies of the young as well as that of an entire nation.
 
Omar Youssef Souleimane’s eloquent novel is not only a narrative of the Syrian Revolution; it is also a story about inter-generational conflicts, rebellion, and liberation. With intense, poetic prose, he brilliantly captures the indomitable yearning for freedom that, despite all obstacles and setbacks, always survives in a hopeful person’s heart until it’s attained.
 
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The Last Tortilla
and Other Stories
Sergio Troncoso
University of Arizona Press, 1999
"She asked me if I liked them. And what could I say? They were wonderful." From the very beginning of Sergio Troncoso's celebrated story "Angie Luna," we know we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller. Born of Mexican immigrants, raised in El Paso, and now living in New York City, Troncoso has a rare knack for celebrating life.

Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, he spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds. Troncoso's El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat, sleep, fall in love, and undergo epiphanies just like everyone else. His tales are coming-of-age stories from the Mexican-American border, stories of the working class, stories of those coping with the trials of growing old in a rapidly changing society. He also explores New York with vignettes of life in the big city, capturing its loneliness and danger.

Beginning with Troncoso's widely acclaimed story "Angie Luna," the tale of a feverish love affair in which a young man rediscovers his Mexican heritage and learns how much love can hurt, these stories delve into the many dimensions of the human condition. We watch boys playing a game that begins innocently but takes a dangerous turn. We see an old Anglo woman befriending her Mexican gardener because both are lonely. We witness a man terrorized in his New York apartment, taking solace in memories of lost love. Two new stories will be welcomed by Troncoso's readers. "My Life in the City" relates a transplanted Texan's yearning for companionship in New York, while "The Last Tortilla" returns to the Southwest to explore family strains after a mother's death—and the secret behind that death. Each reflects an insight about the human heart that has already established the author's work in literary circles.

Troncoso sets aside the polemics about social discomfort sometimes found in contemporary Chicano writing and focuses instead on the moral and intellectual lives of his characters. The twelve stories gathered here form a richly textured tapestry that adds to our understanding of what it is to be human.
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Last Words of the Holy Ghost
Matt Cashion
University of North Texas Press, 2015

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Late Fire, Late Snow
New and Uncollected Poems
Robert Francis
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992
The poems offered here were gathered from what Robert Francis wrote in the last decade of his life and from earlier work not available either in his seven previous books or his Collected Poems, 1936-1976. While aging is a recurring theme, the later poems converse with the earlier ones in an engaging mixture of subject and tone, mingling the pastoral with the political, the contemplative with the Chaplinesque. Recipient of the Shelly Memorial Award, Prix de Rome, and Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Francis lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, until his death in 1987 at age eighty-five.
[more]

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Late Night, Early Morning
Stories
Allen Wier
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

While Allen Wier is perhaps best known as a prizewinning novelist, he is also a master of the short story, an art he has perfected over four decades. Late Night, Early Morning contains twenty-two of Wier’s tales: the stories in his first collection (Things About to Disappear), six uncollected stories, and seven stories that became part of his four novels. Richly textured and often lyrical, with intense images and diverse subjects, these stories feature indelible characters who imprint themselves onto readers’ minds. A man with no family finds the abandoned corpse of an infant and adopts the dead baby as his son. A Texas laborer, while repairing hen houses, learns that the stench of the egg ranch is the smell of money. In 1862 Louisiana, a runaway slave comes face to face with a white sharecropper’s wife who may turn him in, but something unexpected momentarily unites them. An American widow in Mexico as a photographer meets a florist from Texas who widens her angle of view. After discovering an underground cavern, a man lives his entire life in an imagined world shaped from stalactites and stalagmites.

Allen Wier’s skillfully written and compassionate stories reveal the shimmering moments in day-to-day life

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Late Night, Early Morning
Stories
Allen Wier
University of Tennessee Press

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Latin Moon in Manhattan
A Novel
Jaime Manrique
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

Exuberant and colorful, Latin Moon in Manhattan paints a vivid portrait of New York City as the land of El Dorado for today’s Latino immigrants. From Little Colombia in Queens to the street life of Times Square, this brilliant novel is crowded with an extraordinary cast of characters: Hot Sauce, a midget hooker; Simon Bolivar, a parrot who croons Julio Iglesias songs; the Urrutias, a family rich from cocaine smuggling; Santiago Martinez, a loner and would-be poet whose ancient cat, Mr. O’Donnell, is slowly dying of an enlarged heart. Exploding with a profusion of plots and subplots involving drug smuggling, romance, and the literary politics of Queens, Latin Moon in Manhattan is a rich and utterly charming work.

[more]

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Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction
The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio López-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt.

Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city.

The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city.

A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/o–Latina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, López-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectives—including urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studies—contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.
[more]

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Latinx Rising
An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy
Matthew David Goodwin and Frederick Luis Aldama
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
It has been half a century since a few now-canonical Latin American writers introduced magical realism to the world. In that time, new generations of Latinx writers and artists have used that watershed moment as a springboard into new and bold explorations of speculative and fantasy forms. Collectively, they have found exciting new ways to delve into Latinx identities and cultures across genres. Latinx Rising, the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy by Latinxs living in the United States, exuberantly displays the full range of their art. 
 
The new and established voices assembled here (including Kathleen Alcalá, Carmen Maria Machado, Ernest Hogan, and other luminaries) invite us to imagine a Latinx past, present, and future that have not been whitewashed by mainstream perspectives. As in the best mixtapes, this anthology moves satisfyingly through the loud and brash, the quiet and thoughtful. There are ghosts, space aliens, robots—and a grandmother who unwittingly saves the universe through her cooking. The result is a deeply pleasurable read that pushes beyond magical realism and social realism to demonstrate all the thrilling possibilities of what Latinx literature can be. 
 
[more]

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Latter-day Lore
Mormon Folklore Studies
Eric A. Eliason
University of Utah Press, 2013
Latter-day Lore gathers nearly thirty seminal works in Mormon folklore scholarship from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present in order to highlight the depth, breadth, and richness of that scholarship. This examination of LDS folklore studies reveals theoretical, methodological, and topical shifts that also reflect shifts in the field at large. Areas for future research are also suggested.
The thorough introduction by the volume editors elucidates the major influences, tensions, and questions shaping the study of Mormon folklore. The book is divided into six parts according to major thematic and topical patterns. The extensive introductory essays preceding each of the six parts provide invaluable historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts to frame the studies that follow: society, symbols, and landscape of regional culture; formative customs and traditions; the sacred and the supernatural; pioneers, heroes, and the historical imagination; humor; and the international contexts of Mormon folklore.
While exploring the ground that scholars have covered over the past century, Eliason and Mould also illuminate those areas of LDS folklore that have been understudied, exposing fertile areas for future research. Providing the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey of Mormon folklore studies available, Latter-day Lore is an indispensible resource for students, scholars, and readers interested in folklore, Mormon studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, and religious studies.

[more]

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Laughing Stock
Thomas S. Stribling
University of Alabama Press, 2003

In the intense blossoming of American literary talent between the World Wars, T.S. Stribling took his place with Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and other members of his generation with the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his bestselling novel The Store. In Laughing Stock, Stribling’s autobiography, the gifted writer reflects with humor, irony, and passion on his trajectory from a remote southern town to the literary heights of Paris and New York.

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Laughing Whitefish
Robert Traver
Michigan State University Press, 2011
Laughing Whitefish is an engrossing trail drama of ethnic hostility and the legal defense of Indian treaties. Young Lawyer William (Willy) Poe puts out a shingle in Marquette, Michigan, in 1873, hoping to meet a woman who will take him seriously. His first client, the alluring Charlotte Kawbawgam, known as Laughing Whitefish, offers an enticing challenge—a compelling case of injustice at the hands of powerful mining interests. Years earlier, Charlotte's father led the Jackson Mining Company to a lucrative iron ore strike, and he was then granted a small share in the mine, which the new owners refuse to honor. Willy is now Charlotte's sole recourse for justice. Laughing Whitefish is a gripping account of barriers between Indian people and their legal rights. These poignant conflicts are delicately wrought by the pre-eminent master of the trial thriller, the best-selling author of Anatomy of a Murder. This new edition includes a foreword by Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University, that contextualizes the novel and actual decisions of the Michigan Supreme Court ruling in favor of Charlotte.
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Lava Falls
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Scrabbling for ways to believe in themselves and the world, the spirited, heart-driven people who populate these stories find surprising pockets of hope. A woman returns to the Alaskan cabin of her survivalist childhood, full of misgivings and memories. A trip to Yellowstone sparks a crisis for a man who feels kinship with the wolves he glimpses there. Nursing painful pasts, sisters take a cruise together to Antarctica. A runaway finds salvation from violence in her own singing. And in the title novella, a Grand Canyon rafting expedition profoundly changes the lives of six women.

Refusing to buckle under the pressures of family and political traumas, the sojourners in this collection are unified by themes of creative expression and of love—how we define it, how we are impelled by it, and how we are lifted by it.
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The Law of Inheritance
Yasser Abdellatif
Seagull Books, 2018
This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isolation: through his experiences and memories Yasser Abdellatif also unfolds the experiences of his Nubian family through the epochal changes the country underwent in the twentieth-century.
 
The symphonic four-part text presents us with narratives of Egyptian identity, a constant knitting and unravelling that moves us back and forth through time, as the reader slides and leaps across the shifting tectonic plates of Abdellatif’s vignettes, his immaculately limpid prose poetry bringing forth the same questions. Nobody quite belongs in Cairo, it seems, but at the same time none of them belongs anywhere else: a relative emigrates from his Nubian village to the Cairo of the 1930s, where Italian fascists chase him through the streets and into a Maltese exile, only for him to return and make his way back South to the homeland he left. Another relative falls into religious esotericism and later madness, spinning away from Cairo and back to the wasteland of a village relocated after it had been flooded by the Aswan Dam. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, students fight security forces and binge on pills amid the dysfunctional remnants of a centralized state whose gravitational pull uprooted their parents and offered the possibility of assimilation into a national identity.
 
Through the clear sky of Abdellatif’s novel his characters, the spaces they call home, their way-stations, and even the nation that contains them all are a murmuration of starlings, held together and apart forever.
 
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The Law of Miracles
And Other Stories
Gregory Blake Smith
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
These stories take place in the space where the rational and irrational intersect—the space governed by The Law of Miracles. Writing with a remarkable range of invention, Gregory Blake Smith has created a world in which his characters navigate between the everyday and the extraordinary: an aged Russian woman who lives simultaneously in the St. Petersburg of iPods and BMWs and in the starving Leningrad of the Siege; a Venetian art conservator who loves the women of the Renaissance paintings he restores but cannot bear the touch of the woman at his side; a down-and-out slot-machine technician who calculates the probability of his wife's dying. Yet for all their variety of setting and subject, there runs through each of these stories a thread of the miraculous, a suspicion that the transcendent lies just at the edge of perception. We watch the characters of The Law of Miracles struggle toward that transcendence, whether it be through love or art or violence, until we as readers feel—like the main character of the Pushcart Prize–winning "Presently in Ruins"—that if we could only parse the seemingly random details of our existence some new pattern of meaning would emerge, some new magic that would transform our lives.
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The Lean Lands
By Agustin Yáñez
University of Texas Press, 1968

What was it that flew over with such a terrifying roar? Was it, as many said, the devil, or was it that thing a few had heard of, a flying machine? And those electric lights at Jacob Gallo’s farm, were they witchcraft or were they science?

The theme of this harshly powerful novel is the impact of modern technology and ideas on a few isolated, tradition-bound hamlets in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The old ways are represented by Epifanio Trujillo, the cacique of the region, now ailing and losing his grip on things; by ancient Madre Matiana, the region’s midwife, healer, counselor, and oracle; by penniless Rómulo and his wife Merced. “Progress” is represented by Don Epifanio’s bastard son Jacob, who acquired money and influence elsewhere during the Revolution and who now, against his father’s will, brings electricity, irrigation, fertilizers, and other modernities to the lean lands—together with armed henchmen. The conflict between the old and the new builds slowly and inexorably to a violent climax that will long remain in the reader’s memory.

The author has given psychological and historical depth to his story by alternating the passages of narrative and dialogue with others in which several of the major characters brood on the past, the present, and the future. For instance, Matiana, now in her eighties, touchingly remembers how she was married and widowed before she had reached her seventeenth birthday. This dual technique is superbly handled, so that people and events have both a vivid actuality and an inner richness of meaning. The impact of the narrative is intensified by the twenty-one striking illustrations by Alberto Beltrán.

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A Lean Year and Other Stories
Robert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1994
In this collection of sixteen short stories, Robert Laxalt illuminates the Nevada of the 1950s. Written when Laxalt was in his twenties, the stories are as fresh as if they were penned yesterday. Humanity good and bad, humor and cruelty, satire and adventure are found in these early stories of a Nevada poised on the brink of change.

In the lead story, Cowboy Clint Hamilton laments that the town is “getting more like a big city every day” as the traditional gambling joints of earlier times give way to the gaudy casinos that will soon become modern glitz.

Sobering experiences from his days as a reporter give Laxalt an insight into murderers and prison life and lethal gas chambers. In a chilling short story, “The Snake Pen,” we find the seed of Robert Laxalt’s celebrated novel, A Man In the Wheatfield.

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Leap of Faith
Richard Benyo
University of Scranton Press, 2009

Eastern Pennsylvania during the 1950s: King Coal has been dethroned, the railroads are all but defunct, and the region is in an economic depression. Fathers are forced to commute many miles to work, while at home the kids know no other pastime but to run wild in the woods. From the same author who intrigued readers with his whimsical stories of childhood in Jim Thorpe Never Slept Here comes an all-new batch of coming-of-age tales in Leap of Faith.

            In these eight stories, the adults are often offstage, leaving the children to make up the rules as they go. From the story of an unrepentant bully who gets more than he deserves to the tale of a boy who finds serenity in short bursts of flight, Richard Benyo captures a time and a place where small triumphs are enormous, where the strong rule and the swift survive, and where the outside world—beyond the mountains that enclose Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania—seldom intrudes.

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Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome
Alexander Kluge
Duke University Press, 1996
Fiction writer, internationally known filmmaker, critical theorist, Alexander Kluge is perhaps postwar Germany’s most prolific and diverse intellectual. With this translation of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, a novella first published in German in 1973, one of Kluge’s most important literary works becomes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet’s remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on.
Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe’s resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of “evidence” that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets.
With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.
[more]

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Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective
The Private Record of J.B.
John Babbington Williams
Westholme Publishing, 2008

Private Detective James Brampton's Casebook

A welcome link to the chain connecting the early masters of detective fiction.... The collection offers a window into the early days of American detective fiction and the power of deductive thinking."Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Times

"This story collection featuring New York City private detective James Brampton will intrigue Sherlock Holmes fans, given the number of eerie parallels between the two characters."—Publishers Weekly


"It is the observation of small things that makes a good detective, for it is often the most trivial circumstance which supplies the first link in the chain."James Brampton

Twenty years before the Sherlock Holmes mysteries were written, a fictional New York private investigator was celebrated for his ability to solve crimes based on the principles of observation and deductive reasoning that later became Holmes' hallmark. Originally published in 1864 and never before reprinted, Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective features twenty-nine cases of James Brampton, the first American detective hero to appear in fiction. The book opens with a chance meeting between a medical doctor, John Babbington Williams (the actual author of the stories), and detective James Brampton. They become acquaintances, and after Brampton has retired after twenty years of service, he sends his case notebooks to Dr. Williams to be edited and published. The result is a stunning collection of intriguing mysteries, including "The Defrauded Heir," "The Phantom Face," "A Satanic Compact," and "The Walker Street Tragedy." In case after case, using his power of observation, detective Brampton is able prove the innocence of the wrongly accused. Never before reprinted, this first modern edition of this important work now takes its place once more in the development of detective fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the casebook of the original American detective hero.

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Lebanese Blonde
Joseph Geha
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Lebanese Blonde takes place in 1975-76 at the beginning of Lebanon's sectarian civil war. Set primarily in the Toledo, Ohio, "Little Syria" community, it is the story of two immigrant cousins: Aboodeh, a self-styled entrepreneur; and Samir, his young, reluctant accomplice. Together the two concoct a scheme to import Lebanese Blonde, a potent strain of hashish, into the United States, using the family's mortuary business as a cover. When Teyib, a newly arrived war refugee, stumbles onto their plans, his clumsy efforts to gain acceptance raise suspicion. Who is this mysterious "cousin," and what dangers does his presence pose? Aboodeh and Samir's problems grow still more serious when a shipment goes awry and their links to the war-ravaged homeland are severed. Soon it's not just Aboodeh and Samir's livelihoods and futures that are imperiled, but the stability of the entire family.

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Lectures on Imagination
Paul Ricoeur
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures.

The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world.
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Ledfeather
Stephen Graham Jones
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be

After burning up the blacktop in New Mexico with The Fast Red Road and rewriting Indian history on the Great Plains with The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones now takes us to Montana. Set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, Ledfeather lays bare the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon: his near-death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the unnecessary death of one of his best friends.

But through Doby emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians—and the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history collapsing in on him.

Jones’s beautifully complex novel is a story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be: the power of one moment, the weight of one decision, the inevitability of one outcome, and the price of one life.

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The Legend
Marie Bronsard
Seagull Books, 2013
Now in paperback, Marie Bronsard's strikingly original memoir reweaves the history of her family—and the legend of her grandmother—leaving no stone unturned and no skeleton in the closet.

Egocentric and domineering, Bronsard’s grandmother was once a vibrant and sensual beauty. In Indochina at the end of the Second World War, she thrived in the social life of the French colony, but her young soldier husband sought a quieter existence, finding solace in the companionship of their adolescent daughter, Bronsard’s mother. The consequences of this choice reverberate throughout the family. But far from being an airing of grievance or dirty laundry, Bronsard’s memoir has the air of catharsis—here, the pain, secrets, and comic moments of Bronsard’s family are remembered with gentle humor, understanding, and affection. A wry irony tempers emotion, and it is in these pages that the author, at last, finds it possible to name the woman of the legend and perhaps bring her grandmother a measure of peace.
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Legendary Connecticut
Traditional Tales from the Nutmeg State
David E. Philips
Northwestern University Press, 1992
From Litchfield's great church stove war to Hartford's Charter Oak to Stonington's infamous Lantern Hill, these traditional tales from the Nutmeg State span four centuries of Connecticut history. Personal legends, narratives, anecdotes, and supernatural stories—all are fascinating, humorous and rich with the history and lore of the land.
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The Legendary Detective
The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction
John Walton
University of Chicago Press, 2015
“I’m in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they don’t want to take to the cops.” That’s Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, succinctly setting out our image of the private eye. A no-nonsense loner, working on the margins of society, working in the darkness to shine a little light.
 
The reality is a little different—but no less fascinating. In The Legendary Detective, John Walton offers a sweeping history of the American private detective in reality and myth, from the earliest agencies to the hard-boiled heights of the 1930s and ’40s. Drawing on previously untapped archival accounts of actual detective work, Walton traces both the growth of major private detective agencies like Pinkerton, which became powerful bulwarks against social and labor unrest, and the motley, unglamorous work of small-time operatives. He then goes on to show us how writers like Dashiell Hammett and editors of sensational pulp magazines like Black Mask embellished on actual experiences and fashioned an image of the PI as a compelling, even admirable, necessary evil, doing society’s dirty work while adhering to a self-imposed moral code. Scandals, public investigations, and regulations brought the boom years of private agencies to an end in the late 1930s, Walton explains, in the process fully cementing the shift from reality to fantasy.
 
Today, as the private detective has long since given way to security services and armed guards, the myth of the lone PI remains as potent as ever. No fan of crime fiction or American history will want to miss The Legendary Detective.
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Legends of Paul Bunyan
Harold W. Felton
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Legends of the Northern Paiute
as told by Wilson Wewa
Wilson Wewa
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Legends of the Northern Paiute shares and preserves twenty-one original and previously unpublished Northern Paiute legends, as told by Wilson Wewa, a spiritual leader and oral historian of the Warm Springs Paiute. These legends were originally told around the fires of Paiute camps and villages during the “story-telling season” of winter in the Great Basin of the American West. They were shared with Paiute communities as a way to pass on tribal visions of the “animal people” and the “human people,” their origins and values, their spiritual and natural environment, and their culture and daily lives. 
 
The legends in this volume were recorded, transcribed, reviewed, and edited by Wilson Wewa and James Gardner. Each legend was recorded, then read and edited out loud, to respect the creativity, warmth, and flow of Paiute storytelling. The stories selected for inclusion include familiar characters from native legends, such as Coyote, as well as intriguing characters unique to the Northern Paiute, such as the creature embodied in the Smith Rock pinnacle, now known as Monkey Face, but known to the Paiutes in Central Oregon as Nuwuzoho the Cannibal.
 
Wewa’s apprenticeship to Northern Paiute culture began when he was about six years old. These legends were passed on to him by his grandmother and other tribal elders. They are now made available to future generations of tribal members, and to students, scholars, and readers interested in Wewa’s fresh and authentic voice. These legends are best read and appreciated as they were told—out loud, shared with others, and delivered with all of the verve, cadence, creativity, and humor of original Paiute storytellers on those clear, cold winter nights in the high desert.
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Legends of the Slow Explosion
Eleven Modern Lives
Baron Wormser
Tupelo Press, 2018
Multi-genre literary master Baron Wormser’s new book is about people from the mid-twentieth century whose lives created ripple effects beyond their individuality. Including electrifying portraits of Rosa Parks, Hannah Arendt, Miles Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Willem de Kooning, among others, these are not conventional “biographical” essays. Wormser has created a molten, multi-dimensional prose that brings a reader into the visceral presence of these human catalysts.
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The Lemon Grove
A Novel
Ali Hosseini
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Identical twins Ruzbeh and Behruz are at the center of Ali Hosseini’s debut novel in English--a story about love, redemption, and the courage to survive in the face of calamity and loss. The novel begins in the small town in southern Iran where the boys were raised and in their summer home which is surrounded by a lemon grove. Their idyll is shattered by personal and geopolitical events. Both boys fall in love with Shireen, a childhood friend. Behruz goes to America to escape the pain of competing for Shireen's affections. Ruzbeh fights in the Iran/Iraq war and ends up alone and wandering the streets. When Behruz returns to Iran to help his shell-shocked brother, he finds the country devastated by revolution and war. His return sets off a string of events that change all their lives. 
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Lemons Never Lie
An Alan Grofield Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 1971
Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.
 
Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. Available as an e-book–only edition, Lemons Never Lie—a taut thriller that finds Grofield recruited by a man named Myers for a sketchy brewery heist. But when Grofield gets cold feet, he has to decide if it’s riskier to go through with the plot, or to say no to Myers.
 
With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, these novels are an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.
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The Length of Days
An Urban Ballad
Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Harvard University Press, 2022

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z—an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in the occupied Donbas after Russia’s initial aggression in 2014.

With elements of magical realism, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel combines a wicked sense of humor with political analysis, philosophy, poetry, and moral interrogation. Witty references to popular culture—Ukrainian and European—underline the international and transnational aspects of Ukrainian literature. The novel ends on the hopeful note that even death cannot have the final word: the resilient inhabitants of Z grow in power through reincarnation.

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Leon and Louise
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2011
Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Léon Le Gall, a French teenager from Cherbourg who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead. Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise's refusal to destroy Léon's marriage and by the German invasion of France. In occupied Paris during the Second World War, where Léon struggles against the abhorrent tasks imposed upon him by the SS, and the wilds of Africa, where Louise confronts the hardships of her primitive environment, they battle the vicissitudes of history and the passage of time for the survival of their love.
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Leonard Cohen
Jeffrey Lewis
Haus Publishing, 2024
A man who shares his name with a famous singer must grapple with his identity, purpose, and love.
 

The Leonard Cohen at the center of Leonard Cohen: A Novel is an everyman, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure, yet a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in particular, to write one song as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen's songs.

At the center of Leonard's life is Daphne. In their meeting on a Greek island, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out. But even with Daphne, Leonard is shadowed by the other Leonard Cohen, whom he fears is the real Apollo. The ancient myth haunts the fated lovers, and the nobody Leonard Cohen’s life becomes at once a mystery, a miracle, and a myth on its own terms. 

Once upon a time, Apollo fell hard for Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree. No less a fate awaits the protagonists of this slender yet universal novel, where art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.
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Les Guerilleres
Monique Wittig. Translated from the French by David Le Vay
University of Illinois Press, 2007

One of the most widely read feminist texts of the twentieth century, and Monique Wittig’s most popular novel, Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community. A path-breaking novel about creating and sustaining freedom, the book derives much of its energy from its vaunting of the female body as a resource for literary invention.

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Less Than Charming
A Novel
Rebecca A. Demarest
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
A second novel, LESS THAN CHARMING tells the story of a world beyond a veil in which all of the characters writers have ever created are alive and living in their own society. As writers in the other—human world—constantly write new characters into existence, those characters emerge into this mirror world. A hierarchy evolves as every retelling of existing characters is layered onto the original, adding to and changing their personality, knowledge base, and sometimes their emotional stability. Prince Charming conspires to rule the society of characters, which includes every protagonist and foil you’ve ever found in a story or a book, and the prince is not as charming as you first imagine.
One character sands in the Prince’s way—Princess Sophia from Grimm’s lesser known “12 Dancing Princesses.” She’s stable—mostly—but Prince Charming is most definitely not. The good Storyteller and the First Character have tasked Sophia with stopping the Prince from destroying their world, and, by extension, ours. 
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Lester Higata's 20th Century
Barbara Hamby
University of Iowa Press, 2010

“Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.” Thus begins Barbara Hamby’s magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. The quietly beautiful linked stories in Lester Higata’s 20th Century bring us close to people who could be, and should be, our friends and neighbors and families.

Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing backward in time throughout his life with his wife, Katherine, and their children in Hawai‘i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1946, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby recreates not just one but any number of the worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine’s mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his own; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata’s 20th Century are filled with ordinary people living extraordinary lives, moving from farms to classrooms and offices, from racism to acceptance and even love, all in a setting so paradisal it should be heaven on earth.

Never forgetting the terrors of wartime—“We wake one morning with the wind racing toward us like an animal, and nothing is ever the same”—but focusing on the serene joys of peacetime, Lester populates his worlds with work, faith, and family among the palm trees and blue skies of the island he loves.

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Let Me See It
Stories
James Magruder
Northwestern University Press, 2014

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous coworkers, résumé boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behavior to his characters, who have no way of learning them except through painful experience.

Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognize themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.

[more]

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Let's Do
Rebecca Meacham
University of North Texas Press, 2004

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A Letter to Harvey Milk
Short Stories
Lesléa Newman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
This poignant and humorous collection of stories offers a fresh perspective on current issues such as homosexuality and anti-Semitism and lends a unique voice to those experiencing growing pains and self-discovery. Newman’s readers accompany her quirky Jewish characters through all types of experiences from an initial lesbian sexual encounter to being sequestered in a college apartment after paranoid Holocaust flashbacks. In these stories characters anxiously discover their lesbian identities while beginning to understand, and finally to embrace, their Jewish heritage. The title story, "A Letter to Harvey Milk," was the second place finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Competition.
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Letters of a German American Farmer
Juernjakob Swehn Travels to America
Johannes Gillhoff
University of Iowa Press, 2001

Early in the twentieth century, drawing upon the hundreds of letters written to his father by students who had emigrated to northeastern Iowa from Mecklenburg, in northeastern Germany, Johannes Gillhoff created the composite character of Juernjakob Swehn: the archetype of the upright, honest mensch who personified the German immigrant, on his way to a better life through ambition and hard work. Gillhoff's farmer-hero, planting and harvesting his Iowa acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church with his own hands, proved so popular with the German public that a million copies of Jürnjakob Swehn der Amerikafahrer are in print. Now for the first time this wise and endearing book is available in English.

“First, let's talk about pigs,”Juernjakob Swehn writes from his farm in Iowa. “In America, pigs have a curly tail and talk in Low German so I can understand them.” Swehn builds a log house and makes a success of farming, marries a woman who's “a whole different nation that has its confidence from the inside,” raises a family, and becomes an elder in the Lutheran church. He recognizes his good fortune but acknowledges that memories of his village grow stronger every year, that “being homesick is the best thing that home can do for you …no power on earth holds on to you like your homeland.” It is this sense of home, both in Iowa and in Mecklenburg, that makes Juernjakob Swehn appeal to today's readers as much as he appealed to readers in 1916.

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Letters of Blood
Rizia Rahman
Seagull Books
Bengali writer Riza Rahman is the author of more than fifty novels, as well as countless short stories, set in Bangladesh and bringing to life the difficult, mostly forgotten lives of its poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Letters of Blood is set in the often violent world of prostitution in Bangladesh. Rahman brings great sensitivity and insight to her chronicles of the lives of women trapped in that bleak world as they face the constant risk of physical abuse, disease, and pregnancy, while also all too often struggling with drug addiction. A powerful, unforgettable story, Letters of Blood shows readers a hard way of life, imbuing the stories of these women with unforgettable empathy and compassion.
 
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The Letters of Mina Harker
Dodie Bellamy; with a new Forward by Dennis Cooper
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.
Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.
[more]

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Letters of Transit
Theodore Worozbyt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Letters of Transit is a passport to the space between: prose and poetry, reverie and memory, death and fecundity. Its invitation is a journey without destination, a ramble, a thrill ride, an open-ended ticket. But it maps an uncanny territory, populated with ominous doctors, proctors, theorists, forgers and game show hosts, whose agendas seem no less threatening than the intrusions of red spitting monkeys, biting spiders, monster hornets, unseen shrieking creatures. One ranges through its pages with an electric sense of visiting places impossibly recognizable—the dream realm of a collective unconscious. Its attractions are part freak show, part museum, part mausoleum. Theodore Worozbyt brings a rich and intricate vision to a world both gorgeous and grotesque, where one must suspect every detail of being a crucial clue.
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Leucippe and Clitophon
Achilles Tatius
Harvard University Press

A charming Greek romance narrated by its hero.

Achilles Tatius was a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt; he is now believed to have flourished in the second century AD. Of his life nothing is known, though the Suidas says he became a Christian and a bishop and wrote a work on etymology, one on the sphere, and an account of great men. He is famous however for his surviving novel in eight books, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, one of the best Greek love stories. Clitophon relates to a friend the various difficulties which he and Leucippe had to overcome before they are happily united. The story is full of incident and readers are kept in suspense. There are many digressions giving scientific facts, myths, meditations, and so on, the interest of which redeems irrelevance.

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Level 7
Mordecai Roshwald; Edited and with a new foreword by David Seed
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the "Push Buttons," a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return.
    Originally published in 1959, and with over 400,000 copies sold, this powerful dystopian novel remains a horrific vision of where the nuclear arms race may lead, and is an affirmation of human life and love. Level 7 merits comparison to Huxley’s A Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and should be considered a must-read by all science fiction fans.

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LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia
Jeff Mann
West Virginia University Press, 2018

This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.

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Liberty Lanes
Robin Troy
University of Nevada Press, 2011

Liberty Lanes is a bowling alley in a small Montana town where a senior bowling league meets three times a week. Nelson Moore, one of the bowlers, has recently become a local hero by saving a teammate from choking on a happy hour chicken bone. Now he must deal with his newfound fame while coping with the early stages of dementia.

This is an engaging and often moving novel about a group of senior citizens bound together by old friendships and romances, and by their determination to live life to its fullest. Senescence is not for sissies, but these characters show us that it is still a time to love, dream, and explore their own potential.

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The Library, Volume I
Books 1–3.9
Apollodorus
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s most influential mythological handbook.

The Library provides in three books a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Written in clear and unaffected style, the compendium faithfully follows the Greek literary sources. It is thus an important record of Greek accounts of the origin and early history of the world and their race. This work has been attributed to Apollodorus of Athens (born ca. 180 BC), a student of Aristarchus. But the text as we have it was written by an author probably living in the first or second century of our era.

In his highly valued notes to the Loeb Classical Library edition (which is in two volumes) J. G. Frazer cites the principal passages of other ancient writers where each particular story is told and compares the various versions to those in the Library.

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The Library, Volume II
Book 3.10–end. Epitome
Apollodorus
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s most influential mythological handbook.

The Library provides in three books a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Written in clear and unaffected style, the compendium faithfully follows the Greek literary sources. It is thus an important record of Greek accounts of the origin and early history of the world and their race. This work has been attributed to Apollodorus of Athens (born ca. 180 BC), a student of Aristarchus. But the text as we have it was written by an author probably living in the first or second century of our era.

In his highly valued notes to the Loeb Classical Library edition (which is in two volumes) J. G. Frazer cites the principal passages of other ancient writers where each particular story is told and compares the various versions to those in the Library.

[more]

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Lies to Live By
Lois Beardslee
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Lies To Live By brings together two selections of stories by Ojibwe storyteller Lois Beardslee. “Lies to Live By,” a series of interdependent tales, reflects the storyteller’s role in interpreting traditional stories for contemporary audiences, while preserving traditions based not in mysticism but in pragmatism. In “Calm Days,” three generations—the narrator, her grandfather, and her son—spend a week together on a remote island during the course of which they demonstrate the continuity of Ojibwe life. Together these stories weave the contemporary and the traditional to show how cultural diversity can be preserved even as cultural boundaries are transcended.

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The Lieutenant of Kouta
Massa Makan Diabaté
Michigan State University Press, 2017
The Lieutenant of Kouta is the first novel in Massa Makan Diabaté’s award-winning trilogy. Featuring an introduction by leading Diabaté scholar Cheick M. Chérif Keïta and Shane Auerbach, it tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of Europe to Kouta, a fictionalized version of the author’s own birthplace, the Malian town of Kita. Upon his return, Siriman Keita finds it difficult to adjust to village life as he navigates traditional customs in his attempts to create his place in the predominantly Muslim Kouta. The novel offers a rich and nuanced representation of Mali on the brink of independence; it is a tapestry of traditional Mandinka society and the French colonial apparatus, illustrating the dynamic interplay between the two. This text is, ultimately, a story of one man’s transformation coinciding with that of his country.
 
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Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters
Walt Whitman
University of Iowa Press, 2017
In 1852, young Walt Whitman—a down-on-his-luck housebuilder in Brooklyn—was hard at work writing two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, a free-verse revelation beloved the world over, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under a pseudonym and serialized in a newspaper. A short, rollicking story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle appeared to little fanfare.
 
Then it disappeared.
 
No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations. Now, after more than 160 years, the University of Iowa Press is honored to reprint this lost work, restoring a missing piece of American literature by one of the world’s greatest authors, written as he verged on immortality.
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The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
Vladimir Voinovich
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters.
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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
The Stoke Newington Edition
Daniel Defoe
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Robinson Crusoe, an adventure tale that fascinated such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee, has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. Moreover, the notion of isolation on a deserted island and a fascination with survival continue to be central to countless popular cinema and television programs. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Life, Brazen and Garish
A Tale of Three Women
Dacia Maraini
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen. 
 
Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistolary novel, telling the story of a family through the fragmented and disparate perspectives of daughter, mother, and grandmother. Yet even as each woman endures her private struggles with love and betrayal, youth and maturity, knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, the Cascadeis forge a solidarity that transcends generations. In turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this novel is a triumph of narrative voice and literary style from one of Italy’s most renowned writers.
 

Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
This book has been translated thanks to a contribution from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

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Life in Peacetime
Francesco Pecoraro
Seagull Books
When Life in Peactime opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He’s disillusioned and angry—but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reefs of the Red Sea using synthetics, he reflects on both the brief time he sees remaining ahead and on everything that has happened already in his life to which he can never quite resign himself. We see his slow bureaucratic trudge as a civil servant, long summer vacations on a Greek island, his twisted relationship with his first boss, the turmoil and panic attacks he faced during the student uprisings in 1968 that pushed him away from philosophy and into engineering, and his fearful childhood as a postwar evacuee.

A close-up portrait of an ordinary existence, Life in Peacetime offers a new look at the postwar era in Italy and the fundamental contradictions of a secure, middle-class life.
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Life is Good
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2018
Max has been married to Tina for twenty-five years. She is the love of his life, but now he must come to terms with the fact that she is to spend a year away on a work assignment—away, for the first time, from their home, their children and their life together. Her absence leaves him feeling like an Odysseus in reverse: he stays put whilehis Penelope goes out into the world.

Max, alone with his three teenage sons for the first time, is left contemplating life and the daily routine of the little bar of which he is the proprietor. As he spends more time with the regulars their problems begin to become his own. This new novel by Alex Capus is a hymn to trust, friendship and life’s small pleasures. Told with his trademark humor, Life is Good is a novel about finding contentment in rootedness as the world speeds up. 
 
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The Life of a Simple Man
Emile Guillaumin
University Press of New England, 1982
In order to “show the gents of Moulins, of Paris and elsewhere, just what a sharecropper’s life is like,” Emile Guillaumin, under the guise of fiction, wrote this story of “Tiennon,” a French peasant born fifty years before him in 1823. A peasant himself, Guillaumin was unique in that, after a few years of schooling, he continued to work his small farm in central France to the end of his life, reserving nights for study and writing. Guillaumin felt that the French peasant had been misrepresented in contemporary literature--either romanticized as in George Sand or depicted as a dumb victim of the forces of nature as in Zola--and wanted to correct the picture. The result is a moving first-person story that can be read as a fictional account, as well as the best kind of material for historians seeking to understand how nineteenth-century French peasants really lived.
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The Life of Arseniev
Youth
Ivan Bunin
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to his homeland; The Life of Arseniev is the major work of his émigré period.

In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.
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The Life of God (as Told by Himself)
Franco Ferrucci
University of Chicago Press, 1996
At the center of Franco Ferrucci's inspired novel is a tender, troubled God. In the beginning is God's solitude, and because God is lonely he creates the world. He falls in love with earth, plunges into the oceans, lives as plant and reptile and bird. His every thought and mood serve to populate the planet, with consequences that run away from him—sometimes delightfully, sometimes unfortunately.

When a new arrival emerges from the apes, God believes he has finally found the companion he needs to help him make sense of his unruly creation. Yet, as the centuries pass, God feels more and more out of place in the world he has created; by the close of his memoir, he is packing his bags.

Highly praised and widely reviewed, The Life of God is a playful, wondrous, and irresistible book, recounting thousands of years of religious and philosophical thought.

"A supreme but imperfect entity, the protagonist of this religiously enlightened and orthodoxically heretical novel is possessed by a raving love for his skewed, unbalanced world. . . . Blessed are the readers, for this tale of God's long insomnia will keep them happily awake. . . . Extraordinary." —Umberto Eco

"The Life of God is, in truth, the synthesis of a charming writer's . . . expression of his boundless hopes for, and poignant disappointments in, his own human kind." —Jack Miles, New York Times Book Review

"Rather endearing. . . . This exceedingly amusing novel . . . is a continuous provocation and delight; there isn't a dull page in it." —Kirkus Reviews

"A smart and charming knitting of secular and ecclesiastic views of the world. . . . The character of God is likable—sweet, utterly human. . . . The prose is delightful . . . the writing is consistently witty and intelligent and periodically hilarious." —Allison Stark Draper, Boston Review

"'God's only excuse is that he does not exist,' wrote Stendhal, but now Franco Ferrucci has provided the Supreme Being with another sort of alibi." —James Morrow, Washington Post Book World
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Life with a Star
Jiri Weil
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In Nazi-occupied Prague, ex-bank clerk Josef Roubick discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. When he begins to observe his new, increasingly skewed, and macabre environment with resigned detachment, his life becomes centered on survival and on the surprisingly small things he clings to in order to persevere.
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Life-Like
Toby Litt
Seagull Books, 2014
Emotionally compelling and formally innovative, Life-Like is Toby Litt’s most ambitious collection of short stories to date, bringing to fruition themes first aired in his previous books, Adventures in Capitalism, Exhibitionism, and I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay. Life-Like is a book about our globalizing and atomizing world—with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia, and Iran—that also looks at how we meet and fail to meet and what connects us to one another, as well as waste and communication, and, in turn, communication through waste.

The twenty-six stories begin with Paddy and Agatha, an English couple last seen in Litt’s Ghost Story. Following the stillbirth of their second child, their marriage has gently begun to collapse. Paddy and Agatha both meet someone else. First, Paddy meets Kavita, and Agatha meets John. Then each of these four engages with a different new person—and so on, through a doubling and redoubling of intimately interconnected stories. The remaining short stories exemplify Litt’s impressive, unflinching prose. 
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The Light People
A Novel
Gordon Henry
Michigan State University Press, 1994

The Light People is a multi-genre novel that includes a series of nested stories about a tribal community in Northern Minnesota. Major themes include Oskinaway’s search for his parents and the legal wrangling over the possession of a leg that has been removed from a tribal elder. Each story is linked to previous and successive stories to form a discourse on identity and cultural appropriation, all told with humor and wisdom.
     Taking inspiration from traditional Anishinabe stories and drawing from his own family's storytelling tradition, Gordon Henry, Jr., has woven a tapestry of interlocking narratives in The Light People, a novel of surpassing emotional strength. His characters tell of their experiences, dreams, and visions in a multitude of literary styles and genres. Poetry, drama, legal testimony, letters, and essays combine with more conventional narrative techniques to create a multifaceted, deeply rooted, and vibrant portrait of the author's own tribal culture. Keenly aware of Eurocentric views of that culture, Henry offers a "corrective history" where humor and wisdom transcend the political. 
    In the contemporary Minnesota village of Four Bears, on the mythical Fineday Reservation, a young Chippewa boy named Oskinaway is trying to learn the whereabouts of his parents. His grandparents turn for help to a tribal elder, one of the light people, Jake Seed. Seed's assistant, a magician who performs at children's birthday parties, tells Oskinaway's family his story, which gives way to the stories of those he encounters. Narratives unfold into earlier narratives, spinning back in time and encompassing the intertwined lives of the Fineday Chippewas, eventually revealing the place of Oskinaway and his parents in a complex web of human relationships.

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Light without Heat
Stories
Matthew Kirkpatrick
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Matthew Kirkpatrick’s debut, Light without Heat, is an inventive, surprising collection of short stories full of odd, marginal characters rendered with surreal humor and lyrical, often beautiful language.
 
Formally playful, these stories take the shape of biographies, instructions, glossaries, and diagrams, all ultimately in the service of depicting characters with emotional intensity.
 
Stories in the collection explore the flawed nature of memory, workplace malaise, the isolation of home, and the last throes of ending love. No two stories in Light without Heat are the same, yet all of them work toward sharing human experience in new, innovative ways.
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The Lightning Jar
Christian Felt
University of Iowa Press, 2018

The Lightning Jar is about lonely children. It may be more about lonely children than any other book. These children are good at making imaginary friends but have trouble keeping them. For instance, there’s the Morra, who plunges the world into eternal winter. But she also teaches Mons the meaning of love and helps him burn down his house after some Gypsies turn it into a middle school. 

Then there’s the Gorbel. Amanda invented it to scare the Guest, but it ended up liking him best. A bit like a cat but more like a spider, it turned out a lot cuter than she’d intended. 

And the Wisps—they’re pretty unhappy about being dead. Karl accidentally turned his smallest cousin into a Wisp. They were trying to catch some lightning in a jar, but they caught the smallest cousin’s ghost instead. Karl had to drown it for its own good. Something similar happened with his grandma Astrid and a rock named Melisande. 

But the loneliest character is probably Christian. He insists on being from Jämtland, where Karl and Amanda live. When his cousin Eskild got married, Christian rewrote their past so it’s like The Little Mermaid, except Eskild drowns and Christian doesn’t earn a soul. 

In the spirit of Tove Jansson, William Blake, and Calvin & Hobbes, The Lightning Jar contains a volatile mix of innocence and experience, faith and doubt, nostalgia and a sense of all there is to gain by accepting reality on fresh terms. 

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Like Blood in Water
Five Mininovels
Yuriy Tarnawsky
University of Alabama Press, 2007
A surrealist account of the creative and descriptive arts.

In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments—mininovels—that require the reader’s active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs.

A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed.

Tarnawsky’s language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.

 

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Like Light, Like Music
Lana K. W. Austin
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Emme McLean never imagined that in 1999 she would be living out the lyrics of the ancient murder ballads she grew up singing. But now Emme is back in Red River, Kentucky, using her skills as a journalist to prove her cousin did not kill her husband and to find out what is terrifying the town after many of its women went half-mad on the same night.

But to help her hometown’s haunted women, Emme must also face the things that haunt her, things she thought she had lost when she chose to move away: the majestic music of her family’s beloved hills and hollows, the mysterious old ways of her Appalachian kin, and the memory of her remarkable first love, Evan. Through it all, she must reckon with her magical “mountain gift”—is it real, or merely a unique synesthesia? And can she trust it to help heal her family and her town, a place still plagued by the social injustice that first drove her away? Can she trust it to help heal herself?
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Lilavai
Kouhala
Harvard University Press, 2021

Women’s voices and their desires are in the spotlight in this celebrated ninth-century Prakrit romance, set in modern-day coastal Andhra Pradesh.

The Prakrit romance Lilavai, an early ninth-century poem attributed to Kouhala and set in modern-day coastal Andhra Pradesh, is the most celebrated work in the genre. Complexly narrated in the alternating voices of its heroines and heroes and featuring a cast of semi-divine and magical beings, it centers on three young women: Lilavai, princess of Sinhala (today’s Sri Lanka); her cousin Mahanumai, princess of the mythical city Alaka; and Kuvalaavali, Mahanumai’s adopted sister. Following a prophecy that Lilavai’s husband will rule the earth, the princess happens upon a portrait of King Hala of Pratishthana and immediately falls in love. While journeying to meet him, she hears her cousins’ tales of their lost loves, and then vows not to marry until they are reunited. To win Lilavai’s hand, King Hala journeys to the underworld, faces monsters, and overcomes armies.

Lilavai explores themes of karma and female desire, notably privileging women as storytellers. A new edition of the Prakrit text, presented in the Devanagari script, accompanies a new English prose translation.

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