front cover of 20 More
20 More
Selected Stories from Drue Heinz Literature Prize Winners, 2001-2021
Jane McCafferty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
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Constance Fenimore Woolson
Selected Stories And Travel Narratives
Victoria Brehm
University of Tennessee Press, 2004
American writer and world traveler Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) was author of more than fifty short stories, four novels, a novella, and numerous poems and travel essays. During her lifetime, she achieved both popular and critical success, but much of her work is no longer available. This volume, as the first anthology to collect representative samples of her stories, travel sketches, poems, and correspondence, represents a major advance toward re-establishing her place in nineteenth-century literature and letters. As these pieces demonstrate, Woolson offered keen observations on the issues she cared most deeply about, namely the cultural and political transformation of the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the status of women writers and artists in the nineteenth century, and the growing implications of nationalism and imperialism.

Woolson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and began her career writing regional travel stories about the closing of the American frontier in the old Northwest Territories (now known as the Great Lakes region). During the Civil War, she worked for a variety of Union causes and in 1873 moved to St. Augustine, Florida. Traveling throughout the South, she wrote stories and travel narratives that highlighted the wholesale changes facing Americans after the Civil War.

In 1879, Woolson left the United States for Europe. There, she engaged her passion for nature and exercised her gift for social satire. In her European writings, she deplored the Americans’ slavish devotion to the ubiquitous guidebooks of the nineteenth century, and she chose instead to spend long periods of time in one place in order to better learn about it. Throughout her time in Europe (including visits to North Africa), Woolson often commented that she could not describe landscapes, only experience them. By the time of her death in Venice at age fifty-three, she had become convinced that the colonial agendas of the United States and Europe would transform landscapes and peoples in far-reaching and ultimately dangerous ways.

This collection features selections from each of the three distinct periods of Woolson’s career and includes a chronology of her life and travels. Focusing primarily on Woolson’s short stories, editors Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean also include a representative letter, poem, and travel sketch for each section.

Victoria Brehm is associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University. She is editor of three anthologies, including “A Fully Accredited Ocean”: Essays on the Great Lakes and Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits: Stories of the Great Lakes.

Sharon L. Dean is professor of English at Rivier College and is author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound and Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art.


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From the Jewish Provinces
Selected Stories
Fradl Shtok; Translated from the Yiddish by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Winner, 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies

From the Jewish Provinces showcases a brilliant and nearly forgotten voice in Yiddish letters. An insistently original writer whose abrupt departure from the literary scene is the stuff of legend, Fradl Shtok composed stories that describe the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them. These women struggle with disability, sexual violence, and unwanted marriage, striving to imagine themselves as artists or losing themselves in fantasy worlds. The men around them grapple with their own frustrations and failures to live up to stifling social expectations. Through deft portraits of her characters’ inner worlds Shtok grants us access to unnoticed corners of the Jewish imagination.
 
Set alternately in the Austro‑Hungarian borderlands and in New York City, Shtok’s stories interpret the provincial worlds of the Galician shtetl and the Lower East Side with literary sophistication, experimenting with narrative techniques that make her stories expertly alive to women’s aesthetic experiences.
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A Good Deal
Selected Stories from "The Massachusetts Review"
Mary Heath
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
For twenty-seven years The Massachusetts Review has offered its readers a lively and eclectic mix of essays, stories, poetry, and art. Now the editors have gathered together twenty of the best stories from past issues of the journal, by writers known and unknown.
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front cover of How Celia Changed Her Mind and Selected Stories
How Celia Changed Her Mind and Selected Stories
Rose Terry Cooke
Ammons, Elizabeth
Rutgers University Press, 1986
This anthology of fiction by Rose Terry Cooke contains eleven stories, drawn together for the first time in one volume, that reflect the whole spectrum of Cooke's career from the 1850s to the 1890s. It restores to American literature the work of a writer highly admired in her own day and increasingly recognized today as an important figure in the development of realism, the evolution of regionalism as a literary form, and the emergence of women writers in nineteenth-century fiction.

Cooke's stories are rich literarily and historically; her command of dialect, ear for dialogue, dramatic sense, and ability to draw interesting, memorable characters all distinguish her work. This reissue of some of her best work represents an important contribution to the canon of American literature.
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Marginal Voices
Selected Stories
By Julio Ramón Ribeyro
University of Texas Press, 1993

Julio Ramón Ribeyro has been widely acclaimed Peru's master storyteller. Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo.

Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of the fantastic playfully interrupt some of the stories. As Ribeyro's characters become swept up in circumstances beyond their understanding, we see that the only freedom or dignity left them comes from their own imaginations.

The fifteen stories included here are "Terra Incognita," "Barbara," "The Featherless Buzzards," "Of Modest Color," "The Substitute Teacher," "The Insignia," "The Banquet," "Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote)," "The Little Laid Cow," "The Jacaranda Trees," "Bottles and Men," "Nothing to Do, Monsieur Baruch," "The Captives," "The Spanish," and "Painted Papers."

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The Out-of-Sorts
New and Selected Stories
Gary Fincke
West Virginia University Press, 2017
The new and selected stories in this collection, written over a period of thirty years, are firmly entrenched in the culture and people of rust belt cities and rural Appalachia.
These stories are often set against large, significant events like the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Kent State shootings, but are always uniquely local. A mother fends off the police by brandishing copperhead snakes. A woman cares for the dog of an alleged double murderer. A husband who has lost his job works at trying to save his wife from a debilitating phobia.
 
This extensive collection by Gary Fincke, an accomplished poet and writer of fiction, gives rise to ordinary people living lives made fascinating by attention to the particulars of voice, place, and character. With precise language, surprising imagery, and sharp, evocative dialogue, these stories deepen beyond the oddities of their characters, who are scarred and defeated by circumstance and choice, but also attain moments of grace, compassion, and generosity of the spirit.
 
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Selected Stories
Franz Kafka
Harvard University Press, 2024

A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.

Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose—terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.

Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.

Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.

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Selected Stories
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Harvard University Press, 2011

Dark, weird, psychologically complex, Hawthorne’s short fiction continues to fascinate readers. Brenda Wineapple has made a generous selection of Hawthorne’s stories, including some of his best-known tales as well as other, less-often anthologized gems. In her introduction, she explores a writer whose best stories, as Wineapple has elsewhere observed, “penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything.”

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative texts of Hawthorne’s stories in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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The Train That Had Wings
Selected Stories of M. Mukundan
M. Mukundan; Translated from the Malayalam by Donald R. Davis Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The Train That Had Wings presents modern life in Kerala in terms of a shared but tragically compromised humanity. Mukundan dares to look beneath the routines and facades of everyday life in order to probe depth of sin, greed, and hypocrisy but also to rediscover what brings joy and hope.
Sixteen short story translations and a critical introduction, offering examples of Mukundan's realistic, existentialist, psychedelic, and parabolic stories, show his range and talent for the very short story. If Hawthorne wrote “twice told tales,” Mukundan writes half-told tales, stories that jump in the middle, stomp around for just a minute, and leap away almost before the reader can settle in. Half-told, but a powerful and infectious half.
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The World of Kate Roberts
Selected Stories, 1925-1981
Joseph Clancy
Temple University Press, 1991
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1991, 1991 Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre. The World of Kate Roberts offers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words. The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' fiction: material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture."
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