1923 results for "Literary Fiction"

Letter to His Father: Modern Translation

Kafka, Franz
Discover the Heartbreaking Confession Franz Kafka Never Meant for the World to See Franz Kafka, the literary genius behind The Metamorphosis and The Trial, opens the door to his most personal struggle in Letter to His Father. This raw and emotional text, written in 1919 but never sent, is both a plea for understanding and a scathing account of the turbulent relationship between a son and his overbearing father. Letter to His Father is now presented in a fresh, modern translation designed to make Kafka’s poignant and powerful words accessible to contemporary readers. This updated version brings clarity and immediacy to Kafka’s timeless exploration of the complex and fraught relationship between a son and his overbearing father. In this searing letter, Kafka grapples with feelings of fear, guilt, and inadequacy, offering readers a unique window into the forces that shaped his identity and his work. With his signature introspection and masterful prose, he examines the weight of familial expectations, the wounds inflicted by power imbalances, and the desperate longing for reconciliation. Published posthumously in 1952, Letter to His Father is more than a personal document—it is a universal exploration of the human condition, relatable to anyone who has felt misunderstood or struggled to find their place in the shadow of someone else. This is Kafka at his most vulnerable, unguarded, and unforgettable. Whether you are a longtime admirer or discovering his work for the first time, Letter to His Father is a powerful testament to the man behind the masterpieces. Step into Kafka’s world and uncover the story behind the stories. Order your copy today!
Independently published 2025-01-20 49 pages

And after the fire: a novel

Belfer, Lauren
"The New York Times-bestselling author of A Fierce Radiance and City of Light returns with a new powerful and passionate novel--inspired by historical events--about two women, one European and one American, and the mysterious choral masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach that changes both their lives. In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted mansion and mistakenly kills the girl who tries to stop him. In America in 2010, Henry's niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after she experiences a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City. When Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript. She becomes determined to discover what it is and to return it to its rightful owner, a journey that will challenge her preconceptions about herself and her family's history--and also offer her an opportunity to finally make peace with the past. In Berlin, Germany, in 1796, amid the city's glittering salons where aristocrats and commoners, Christians and Jews, mingle freely despite simmering anti-Semitism, Sara Itzig Levy, a renowned musician, conceals the manuscript of an anti-Jewish cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, an unsettling gift to her from Bach's son, her teacher. This work and its disturbing message will haunt Sara and her family for generations to come. Interweaving the stories of Susanna and Sara, and their families, And After the Fire traverses over two hundred years of history, from the eighteenth century through the Holocaust and into today, seamlessly melding past and present, real and imagined. Lauren Belfer's deeply researched, evocative, and compelling narrative resonates with emotion and immediacy"--
Harper 2016 451 pages

Sonora

Assadi, Hannah Lillith
"Ahlam, the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and his Israeli wife, grows up in the arid lands of desert suburbia outside of Phoenix. In a stark landscape where coyotes prowl and mysterious lights occasionally pass through the nighttime sky, Ahlam's imagination reigns. She battles chronic fever dreams and isolation. When she meets her tempestuous counterpart Laura, the two fall into infatuated partnership, experimenting with drugs and sex, and watching helplessly as a series of mysterious deaths claim high school classmates. The girls flee their pasts for New York City, but as their emotional bond heightens, the intensity of their lives becomes unbearable. In search of love, ecstasy, oblivion, and belonging, Ahlam and Laura's drive to outrun the ghosts of home threatens to undo them altogether"--
Soho Press Inc 2017-03-28 196 pages

Bucky F*cking Dent

Duchovny, David
"Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American novel, and spends the waning malaise-filled days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent. When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of his youth is living to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from a crew of neighborhood old-timers and the lovely Mariana--Marty's Nuyorican grief counselor--Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Sox winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of David Duchovny's richly drawn Bucky F&%@ing Dent is a story of the bond between fathers and sons, Yankee fans and the Fenway faithful, and grapples with the urgent need to find our story in an age of irony and artifice. Culminating in that fateful moment in October of '78 when the meek Bucky Dent hit his way into baseball history with the unlikeliest of home runs, this tragicomic novel demonstrates that life truly belongs to the losers--that the long shots are the ones worth betting on. Bucky F&%@ing is a singular tale that brims with the hilarity, poignance, and profound solitude of modern life"--
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016-04-05 296 pages

Last night

Salter, James
From a writer whose every book is a literary event, a superbly accomplished work of fiction. "Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion-by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. In ten powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life-as it is and never will be again-when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend. A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog. A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife's request to give up what may be his most treasured relationship. And in the title story, already hailed by Frank Conroy as "a masterpiece, clearly and without question," a translator, tormented by an agonizing sense of inevitability, assists in his wife's suicide even as he performs a last betrayal. A haunting symphony of desire, memory, and loss-from a writer whose assured style and emotional insight make him one of our most compelling voices at work today.
Vintage International 2006-03-14 132 pages

8 great Hebrew short novels

Alan Lelchuk,Gershon Shaked
Hebrew fiction has emerged as a vital modern literary force, and the scope and riches of this literature is brilliantly exemplified by the eight short novels included in this landmark collection. Some of the authors represented here, like S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua are internationally celebrated. Others, like David Vogel, are writers of rare genius whose work until now had not been widely avaliable. Earlier writers like Y.H. Brenner and Uri Gnessin virtually created modern Hebrew literature, yet are rarely read by modern audiences. Writing in Hebrew, these writers tell of earlier European experiences, of emigration to Israel and of the lives of modern Israelis. Chosen and introduced by Alan Lelchuk, the American novelist, and Gershon Shaked, the Israeli critic, 8 Great Hebrew Short Novels has been superbly translated. This is an outstanding introduction to classic and contemporary Hebrew writing, now avaliable to English readers.
Toby Press 2005 451 pages

Tom Stoppard: a life

Lee, Hermione
"A perfect match of writer and subject: one of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights--with his cooperation and access to a trove of hitherto unseen material. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love--remain as fresh and moving as when they dazzled their first audiences. Stoppard's life, too, is fascinating: born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard was surprised to learn late in life of his Jewish family and the relatives he lost to the Holocaust, secrets his mother had kept from him. Lee's in-depth analysis seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man"--
Alfred A. Knopf 2021 872 pages

Tesseracts eleven: amazing Canadian speculative fiction

Cory Doctorow,Holly Phillips
Hand-picked authors and a literary legacy... You may want to read it in one quick bite... Or savor it slowly like fine Swiss chocolate... One delicious prose at a time! For 22 years, SF lovers from around the world have enjoyed the stories and poems of the Tesseracts series, ( Tesseracts One through Tesseracts Ten , and Tesseracts Q ). This unique collection of books has featured the work of some of Canada's finest speculative fiction writers, selected and edited by ever changing combinations of editors, hand-picked for each edition. For many science fiction writers, Tesseracts was a spring board to their fame. Tesseracts Eleven brings the series to a new height, with a tasty blend of past and present writers, with their own individual visions of the future. The literature of Tesseracts Eleven has been critically selected and shaped into the collection you see by this year's editors, two of Canada's finest writers - acclaimed authors Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Together they have chosen a powerful combination of works by well-known writers, as well as newer authors whose futures you will want to follow. Some favorite Tesseracts ingredients are a featured part of this edition's literary blend: some very popular award winning names in Canada's SF scene, like Canada's grand dame of speculative fiction, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Claude Lalumiere, David Nickle and Candas Jane Dorsey, to name just a few. As well, readers will find some bright new stars in the science fiction world like Yukon's Jerome Stueart, or Calgary's Susan Forest - just 2 of the delicious authors featured in this fine offering. All told, Doctorow and Phillips have presented 22 pieces of literary delights to tantalize your imagination, and although you may want to consume the book in one sitting - take your time, and savor each exquisite morsel - delight in every bite. Grab your favorite beverage, settle down, and enjoy the latest in Canada's literary legacy - Tesseracts Eleven
Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Pub 2007 325 pages

Nabokov and the real world: between appreciation and defense

Alter, Robert
Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.
Princeton University Press 2021-03-16 232 pages

The Time of Our Time

Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers. Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces. How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy--tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs. On display here are Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation. Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary. As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits. He goes at the world like a tiger. What will surprise many readers of The Time of Our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been. "From the Hardcover edition."
Modern Library 1999 1304 pages

How to fall: stories

Pearlman, Edith
Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer. --From the Foreword by Joanna Scott How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world's immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than four countries in sixty years, these sixteen stories flesh out the complexities of people who, at first glance, live ordinary, unremarkable lives. Widowers, old men, estranged spouses, young restaurant workers, career women and Jewish grandmothers are all at the center of Pearlman's cool, studied observation. Each character is rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of the stories either begin or wind their way back to one, mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town--Godolphin, a place that "called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston." Edith Pearlman has published over 100 stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories , The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita , won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among the Greats , won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Sarabande Books 2005 227 pages

Another life

Korda, Michael
From world leaders to Mafia dons, from Hollywood stars to the literary world's most eccentric writers, the notable and notorious alike have entrusted their life's work to Simon & Schuster's preeminent editor, Michael Korda. In this masterful memoir, Korda reveals the unforgettable cast of characters and outrageous anecdotes behind four decades of blockbuster publishing, bringing us face-to-face with dozens of larger-than-life figures: Richard Nixon, who maintained his "presidential" persona long after his public life was over; Joan Crawford, whose autobiography reflected a life she would have liked to have lived but did not; Joseph Bonanno, the retired Mafia don who'd do anything to keep from being killed by the reviewers. And in a revelatory account that reads as compulsively as fiction, Another Life paints a vivid picture of publishing's glitterati, including Jacqueline Susann, who liberated women's fiction--and terrorized a publishing house, and Tennessee Williams, who nourished his genius on four-course vodka lunches. A veritable Who's Who of stage, screen, and letters, Another Life is the deft interweaving of publishing at it most fascinating--and storytelling at its finest.
Random House International 2000 544 pages

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Leigh Bardugo,Dale Bailey,Helena Bell,Genevieve Valentine,E. Lily Yu,Debbie Urbanski,Nisi Shawl,Alexander Weinstein,Jeremiah Tolbert,Catherynne M. Valente,A. Merc Rustad,Greg Van Eekhout,Peter S. Beagle,Brian Evenson,N. K. Jemisin,Caroline M. Yoachim,Alice Sola Kim,Nick Wolven,Joseph Allen Hill
"This volume showcases the nuanced, playful, ever-expanding definitions of the genre and celebrates its current renaissance." --Washington Post Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres--they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view--literary, meta, and adventurous--to the series' third edition.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017 345 pages

The Fabulist

Stephen Glass
A NOVEL OF AN IGNOMINIOUS FALL, THE RISE TO INFAMY, AND LIFE AFTER BOTH. • It is the summer of 1998, and Stephen Glass is a young magazine journalist whose work is gaining more and more acclaim -- until a rival magazine tells Glass's editor that it suspects one of his stories is fabricated. As his editor sorts out the truth, Glass is busy inventing it -- spinning rich and complex blends of fact and fiction, and exploiting the gray world in between. But Glass is caught. His fabulism is uncovered and his career instantly unravels. Worse, his editor learns that it's not the first time. Soon, a long history of invention, passed off as journalism, emerges. Glass suddenly becomes a household name -- an emblem of hubris and a flashpoint for Americans' distrust and dislike of the press. The media is consumed with the story: Once the young man who had been known for mastering the "takedown" article, Glass now becomes the one every journalist wants to take even further down. Once the hunter, Glass becomes the hunted -- the story of the year. Glass responds to this agonizing public scrutiny with a self-imposed exile, first near Chicago with his family and then in the anonymous suburbs of Washington, D.C. There, he begins a long personal struggle with his misdeeds, working out his own answers to the questions of why he fabricated, how he can learn to stop lying, and whether, at age twenty-five, he has destroyed his life irrevocably. Glass encounters a world far stranger than his own fabrications -- one populated by eccentric coworkers, ailing animals, angry masseuses, sexy librarians, competitive bingo players, synchronized swimmers, a soulful stripper, and a mysterious guardian angel who dresses only in purple. Meanwhile, Glass is chased by marauding journalists whose desperation and ruthlessness manage to match even his own. As he dodges his pursuers, Glass grasps at straws only to find that, wondrously, they sometimes hold. Despite himself, he rediscovers the Judaism he'd left far behind in Hebrew school, and falls helplessly in love with a young woman who turns out to have her own shameful past. In the end, The Fabulist is as much about family, friendship, religion, and love -- about getting through somehow, even when it seems impossible -- as it is about reality and fantasy. At once hilarious and harrowing, The Fabulist is one of the year's most provocative novels.
Simon & Schuster 2014-05-03 352 pages

Mountain Climbing in Sheridan Square

Stan Leventhal
A series of discrete episodes among friends provide snapshots of one gay man's life. There are parties, concerts, dinners with everyday life - and death - interwoven in the rich story-telling. An actress, a painter, a set designer, a writer - all sweating and surviving in Manhattan, all scoring their first successes. Part autobiography and part documentary, artfully written, it details the lives of these creative people. Young and professional, they know there is more to life than money. There is trust and the sort of love that trades in deeds of kindness. Leventhal's debut novel was welcomed warmly garnering a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist in 1988, this new edition features a 2020 foreword by Christopher Bram.
ReQueered Tales 2020-03-10 198 pages

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

Nadine Gordimer
Always exploring the boundaries of race, identity, politics, memory, sexuality, and love with fearless insight and deep compassion, Nadine Gordimer has produced another masterpiece of short fiction. From a former anti-apartheid activist’s search for his own racial identity by tracing his great-grandfather’s part in South Africa’s diamond industry to a parrot that scandalizes people with repetitions of their quarrels and clandestine love-talk, this new collection of stories eloquently probes how people are never free from their past nor spared from loss.
Penguin Publishing Group 2008-10-28 192 pages

The death of the adversary

Keilson, Hans
Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed "adversary" whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is never stated outright that our narrator is Jewish, nor that his adversary is Adolf Hitler, though there can be no mistaking either fact. It shows the minutiae of fear, anger, denial and perseverance that accompany life under the shadow tyranny. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler's gathering menace but also in its hero's desperate attempt to discover logic where none exists. The Death of the Adversary is a lost classic of modern fiction
Vintage Classic 2012 208 pages

The Long Night of White Chickens

Francisco Goldman
Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Long Night of White Chickens marked the brilliant debut of Francisco Goldman's internationally acclaimed writing career. The Long Night of White Chickens is a novel born of two worlds: It is the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by a patrician Guatemalan mother, and his relationship with Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young Guatemalan orphan sent by his grandmother to live with his family as a maid. When, years later in the 1980s, Flor is murdered in Guatemala, Roger returns to uncover the truth of her death. There he is reunited with Luis Moya, a childhood friend, and together they venture on a quest into Flor's life that will have unexpected, and unforgettable, repercussions.
Grove Press 2013 570 pages