Do these Gloves Make my Ass Look Fat? is Christina Oxenberg's collection of funny, punchy short stories and anecdotes which chronicles the life of the eccentric author. Scenes and scenarios revolve around her experiences in her adopted home of Key West, Florida & her hometown of New York City, and its environs.

Life is Short: Read Short Stories is Christina Oxenberg's 3rd collection of funny, punchy short stories and anecdotes and chronicles a year in the life of the eccentric author. Scenes and scenarios revolve around her experiences in her adopted home of Key West, Florida & her hometown of New York City, and its environs.

A few years ago, Christopher Buckley wrote of Bruce Jay Friedman in the New York Times Book Review that he "has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen," but that "he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis, and no mean thing. No further comparisons are necessary." We are happy to report that he remains the same Bruce Jay Friedman in his unique, unblinking, and slightly tilted essays—collected here for the first time—in Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos . A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan—all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of seven novels (including The Dick , Stern , and A Mother's Kisses ), four collections of short stories, four full-length plays (including Scuba Duba and Steambath ), and the screenplays for the movies Splash and Stir Crazy .

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. "You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards . . . [where there] are still . . . defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

Book by Lopate, Phillip

"[His] way with the familiar essay--that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity--has much in common with that of Messrs, Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro." --Wall Street Journal

In this unforgettable book, Arthur Waley brings together a number of his articles, poems and translations. Included in this collection are pieces on the eighth-century Chinese poet Ts'�n Sh�n and the great Chinese prose writer, Han Y�, as well as some of Waley's original poems and stories. But the most compelling is 'The Secret History of the Mongols', consisting of long extracts from a thirteenth-century Chinese saga. Written in vivid, elegant prose, it recounts fantastic tales of epic battles; of betrayal and love; of tyrants and prisoners. Suffused with symbolism and folklore, it is a masterpiece of storytelling which will appeal to the scholar and the ordinary reader alike.

From one of the modern era's most influential and boldly experimental writers — a generous collection of poems, stories and plays — all dating from 1910–1920. Wide range of the author's styles reveal Stein as philosopher, poet, portraitist, dramatist and short story writer, as the investigator of the nature of language, and much more.