"Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of this generation, delivers a stellar anthology of the best short fiction being written today in America In New American Stories, Ben Marcus has collected a diverse, exciting, and wholly unique book of contemporary American fiction writers. Herein are the luminaries of the form like Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders, and Denis Johnson, as well as the best new voices of today, like Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins and Rivka Galchen. Practitioners of deep realism like Anthony Doerr and Yilun Li brush shoulders with genre-bending wonders like Charles Yu and Kelly Link. Finally there are the true emerging stars, like Tao Lin and Rachel Glasser standing next to long established writer like Joy Williams. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and interesting works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of the short story"--

"With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library, Anka Muhlstein's PEN AND BRUSH revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where Cezanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire"--

Lars Gustafsson is one of Sweden's leading and most prolific men of letters; a poet, philosopher, and fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit since his literary debut, at the age of twenty, in 1956. Although known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels, Gustafsson is nevertheless one of the most frequently translated of contemporary Swedish poets. Elegies and Other Poems is a companion volume to The Stillness of the World before Bach (New Directions, 1988). As in that earlier volume, editor Christopher Middleton has made his selection from several of the poet's books and included his own translations as well as those of others, Yvonne Sandstroem, Bill Brookshire, and Philip Martin. Readers of Gustafsson's fiction will recognize in his verse the elegant mix of intellect and sheer play, the ruminations of a mind that apprehends humanity in the riddles of the universe.

Winter Games is a dazzling tale of secrets and betrayal, and the perfect novel for fans of The Bolter by Frances Osborne, and all those fascinated by the Mitford sisters. Munich, 1936. She doesn't know it, but eighteen-year old Daphne Linden has a seat in the front row of history. Along with her best friend, Betsy Barton-Hill, and a whole bevy of other young English upper-class girls, Daphne is in Bavaria to improve her German, to go to the Opera, to be 'finished'. It may be the Third Reich, but another war is unthinkable, and the girls are having the time of their lives. Aren't they? London, 2006. Seventy years later and Daphne's granddaughter, Francie Fitzsimon has all the boxes ticked: large flat, successful husband, cushy job writing up holistic spas . . . The hardest decision she has to make is where to go for brunch - until, that is, the discovery of a photograph of Daphne sends her on a quest to discover what really happened to her grandmother in Germany, all those years ago. A dazzling tale of secrets and betrayal, Winter Games is powerful novel of innocent lives caught up in the march of history. 'Johnson has a brilliant eye for the telling specifics . . . She is a natural comic writer and has a breezy, Mitfordian tone that makes you laugh at the same time as wincing in recognition . . . To write an entertaining romp set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany is a tricky feat to pull off. Yet Johnson has done it - and done it in style' Observer 'A rip-roaring read' Evening Standard 'There's never a dreary moment in this blast of a book . . . Johnson's descriptions are irresistibly exuberant . . . As addictively, fizzily invigorating as the Alpine air itself' Daily Mail 'Johnson delivers a genuine sense of time and place . . . there isn't a dull sentence in this sure-footed novel' Jenny Colgan, Telegraph 'An excellent romp. Full of 'tally-ho' Mitfordian charm . . . a witty, fast read' Red 'Excellent on period detail, the blundering innocent abroad and young heartbreak' Sunday Times 'The Jane Austen of W11' Scotsman Rachel Johnson is a journalist who has written two previous novels and two volumes of diaries. The Mummy Diaries , Notting Hell, Shire Hell and A Diary of The Lady are all available now from Penguin.

Nothing is as it seems at Wood Norton. A Zeppelin on a midnight flight over the English coast nearly crashes, leaving behind its observation car-and a Homberg hat. A mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere bearing news of Lady Cranston's brother, who languishes as a German prisoner of war. And Sir Henry Cranston, who refuses to come out of retirement at a time when his country is in need, but prefers instead to spend his time fishing. The fate of nations and of two lovers separated by war depends on discovering the secret of... The Zeppelin's Passenger!

"Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust, depicting the complex web of relationships in and around the Łódź Ghetto"--

A reading of African American and Jewish American writers from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton's book offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in modern American literature, and rethinking the sometimes vexed relationship between two constituencies ordinarily confined to sociopolitical or media commentary alone. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. Through artful, dialogical readings of Saul Bellow and Chester Himes, David Mamet and Anna Deavere Smith, and others, Newton seeks to represent American Blacks and Jews outside the distorting mirror of 'Black-Jewish Relations', and restrictive literary histories alike. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.

A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Hélène Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly but still truculent mother and her writer-daughter, between the mother and her sister, and between the writer and her vanished but nonetheless intensely present friend, Jacques Derrida, whose death is movingly evoked. "I have in mind two lovely faces, old women in bloom," writes the author with a backwards nod to Proust's ‘jeunes filles.' "Here," she says in her preface, "the criss-crossing paths of my mother and my aunt will come to an end at last. When one old flower is left, what becomes of the other face?" Socrates is conjured up, along with the poisonous plants of Hamlet, the human comedies of Balzac and Proust, and other literary and philosophical ghosts who find themselves drawn into the fabric of Cixous's text: "I'm not sleeping," writes the protagonist. "A worm is drilling my brain. It's a phrase I heard in the hellish juice of the jusquiame. I pour it into my own ear. ‘I'm afraid Mama will die'." In this new work Hélène Cixous continues to explore and expand the boundaries of narrative, slipping from thought to thought and from image to image, so as to render every action, fear and thought palpable to the reader.

The Great American Novel (1923) is an experimental novel by William Carlos Williams. Although he is predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his career. In the defining decade of Modernism, Williams sought to try his hand at the so-called "Great American Novel," a concept fueling impassioned debate in academic and artistic circles nationwide. Far from conventional, Williams' novel is a metafictional foray into matters more postmodern than modern, a commentary masquerading as narrative and a satire of the all-American overreliance on cliché in form and content. "If there is progress then there is a novel. Without progress there is nothing. Everything exists from the beginning. I existed in the beginning. I was a slobbering infant. Today I saw nameless grasses--I tapped the earth with my knuckle. It sounded hollow. It was dry as rubber. Eons of drought. No rain for fifteen days. No rain. It has never rained. It will never rain." Williams' novel begins with the word and a birth. Language describes the experience of awakening to experience, of coming into consciousness as a living being in a living world. Using words from everyday speech, he builds a novel out of observations, a book that remains conscious of itself throughout. Like the child whose first experience with the written word often comes from names and slogans stretched over trucks and billboards, the reader eventually comes to accept their new reality, a world where people love and succeed and fail, where history and art intercede to make meaning where they can. The Great American Novel showcases Williams' experimental form, stretching the meaning of "novel" to its outermost limit. This edition of William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good , Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority. -- "Modern Language Quarterly"

The storm of controversy over Helen Demidenko and her novel, 'The Hand that Signed the Paper,' raised huge cultural and political questions. Robert Manne, the influential historian and commentator, was a key participant in that debate. In 'The Culture of Forgetting, Manne tells the fascinating story of Demidenko's triumphal march into the honors list of Australian literature, the furious argument she provoked, and her astonishing unmasking as Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants. In his pursuit of the truth, Manne is driven by one inescapable question: what is the relationship between 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and the greatest tragedy of twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust? 'The Culture of Forgetting' is a powerful and moving book about fiction and free speech, a deeply personal response to the Demidenko puzzle, and a brilliant account of the history at the heat of the affair.

Traces the literary ancestry of Ulysses and discusses how Joyce triangulated himself with Homer and Shakespeare. Professor Ellmann demonstrates that Joyce, far from being apolitical, was revolutionary, working in his own oblique fashion to subvert existing institutions.

"Recollections of one of the grand masters of science fiction, on his storied career as a celebrated author and on his relationships with other luminaries in the field. This memoir is filled with all the humor and irreverence Harry Harrison's readers have come to expect from the New York Times bestselling author of the uproarious Stainless Steel Rat series. This also includes black and white photos spanning his sixty-year career"--

At the dawn of the Reagan era Martin Bauman, nineteen, clever, ambitious and insecure, is enrolled at a prestigious college with a hard-won place under the tutelage of the legendary and enigmatic Stanley Flint, a man who can make or break writing careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the threshold of the writing life, his twin desires to get into print and to find his way out of the closet. Moving through the century's most licentious decade - the decade of cocaine, wild parties, huge advances and the tragic comedown of AIDS - Martin matures from brilliant student to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house to fully fledged member of the New York literary brat pack. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires refuse, stubbornly, to be satisfied and his every achievement is haunted by the austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. Subtle, erotic, honest and funny, David Leavitt's deliciously sharp, multi-layered dissection of literary and sexual mores lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, self-loathing, poignant glory.

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Bad objects are a contrarian's delight. In this volume, leading French feminist theorist and literary critic Naomi Schor revisits some of feminist theory's most widely discredited objects, essentialism and universalism, with surprising results. Bilingual and bicultural, she reveals the national character of contemporary theories that are usually received as beyond borders, while making a strong argument for feminist theory's specific claims to universalism. Written in a distinctive personal and self-reflective mode, this collection offers new unpublished work and brings together for the first time some of Schor's best-known and most influential essays. These engagements with Anglo-American feminist theory, Freud and psychoanalytic theory, French poststructuralists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Irigaray, and French fiction by or about women--especially of the nineteenth century--also address such issues as bilingual identity, professional controversies, female fetishism, and literature and gender. Schor then concludes with a provocative meditation on the future of feminism. As they read Bad Objects , Anglo-American theoreticians who have been mainly preoccupied with French feminism will find themselves drawn into French literary and cultural history, while French literary critics and historians will be placed in contact with feminist debate.

Is Faith Darwin Asbury really Grace Paley? Or is it coincidental that the personal history, politics, and relationships of the fictional Asbury seem to mirror those of the well-known author? And do other characters in Paley's stories represent individuals she has known, in scenes and entire episodes she has experienced? A writer who translates her life into art not only saves her own life, according to Paley, but offers others the revelation of its meaning. That idea is at the core of Judith Arcana's biographical reading of this strongly autobiographical writer. Grace Paley's Life Stories interweaves details about Paley with critical discussions of her works, examining her as a woman, mother, activist, and Jew. Arcana visited and interviewed Paley at her homes in Vermont and New York over a period of several years. She also interviewed Paley's family, friends, and colleagues. Such extensive research is unmatched in Paley scholarship; Arcana's focus on the political crucible of Paley's consciousness is rare in contemporary literary criticism.

A literary, psychological thriller set in 1951, reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.

Love's Shadow (1908) is a novel by Ada Leverson. Having established herself as a journalist and short story writer, Leverson published her debut novel in 1907 to moderate acclaim. Entertaining and effortlessly witty, Leverson's prose paints a stunning portrait of the Edwardian era, a time when hope and relative peace proved prosperous for many. Often compared to her close friend Oscar Wilde, Leverson, a pioneering Jewish woman, remains a unique and refreshing voice in English literature. Love's Shadow is the first installment in her Little Ottleys trilogy, a series of novels exploring the romantic lives of a hilariously diverse group of friends. Edith and Bruce Ottley seem to have it all--a charming flat, a healthy child, and a group of entertaining friends. Although they are far from perfect--Bruce can be jealous and quite the hypochondriac at times--their marriage remains strong and their home remains a place of refuge to their frequently lovelorn comrades. Among a dizzying array of faces and names, Hyacinth Verney, Mrs. Eugenia Raymond, Cecil Reeve, and Lord Selsey stand out. Although Hyacinth loves Cecil, a match favored by his uncle Lord Selsey, the young man seems inexplicably smitten with the widow Eugenia, who has no interest in marrying again. Edith and Bruce do their best to make themselves hospitable while defending their home against the hostilities of love, but the hearts and minds of their eclectic guests prove difficult to assuage. Love's Shadow is a humorous tale of romance and desire from Ada Leverson, an underappreciated novelist of the Edwardian era. This edition of Ada Leverson's Love's Shadow is a classic work of British literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.