![Seven Dials [Tv Tie-In]](https://cdn.kingstone.com.tw/english/images/product/5722/9780063495722m.webp?Q=c0f9f "Seven Dials [Tv Tie-In]")
The Pelican Child
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of "perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss" (The Atlantic). "Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night." "Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly." "Caring was a power she'd once possessed but had given up freely." The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in "After the Haiku Period," who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in "Nettle," a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the "pelican child" who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience ("I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable," says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.
Disinheritance
A collection of fiction by the Booker Prize-winning author and "one of the 20th century's great female writers" (The Washington Post), drawn from her ample body of work that has been out of the public eye for decades Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala's powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India's middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background. Salman Rushdie has described her as a "rootless intellectual," and John Updike called her an "initiated outsider." All these qualities shine in this very special collection, with stories undiscovered for decades. Including an introduction from the author's 1979 lecture when awarded the Neil Gunn Prize in Scotland, Disinheritance balances a host of cultural influences to showcase Jhabvala's signature voice and her buoyant, satiric fiction.
Outer Stars
In these seven short stories, both realist and speculative, Sundberg Lunstrum considers life in the Anthropocene, an era marked by individual isolation, environmental degradation, and the erosion of our relationships with one another and our land. As they encounter heartbreak and new love, the aches and joys of parenthood, and the grief of bodies in decline, her characters seek connection, identity, and purpose. They ask the questions we all ask: Can we hold on to each other across the fractures that divide us? How do we find belonging in the face of great loss? And is it possible to locate meaning--and even beauty--in our darkest moments? The stories in Outer Stars present the tensions of our age with clarity, but they also leave the reader with hope, affirming the truth of human resilience and compassion. "Puzzle-box narratives containing secret spaces within secret spaces within secret spaces, some concealed so carefully among the interlocking literary mechanisms that one suspects there are secrets in this text that may not be discovered for centuries to come. This book is an extraordinary achievement."--Matthew Baker, judge and author of The Sentence
Pulse
From the award-winning author of The Dig and Cove, a collection of viscerally powerful short stories in which man is pitted against nature, against circumstance, and against himself.A man heads into the snow to hunt down the bear that has been taking stock from farms in the valley. A father tries to make something go right for the son he no longer lives with. A partner is called to help when a cow's labor goes horribly wrong. A fierce storm threatens to bring down a tree on powerlines over a family's home.Fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from one of the finest British writers at work today.
Jerks
With Jerks, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives--desire is a live wire, however frayed; a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth living. The messy characters in these eighteen stories may hack up their bedsheets with group sex, anonymous sex, infidelity, and a literal handsaw, but there's tenderness, too, among the lust and rage. With crisp precision, ample honesty and desperate humor, Lippmann delivers an irresistibly fraught cast of characters at various stages of undress.
Below the Line
Whether it's an immigrant woman who loves to watch American action movies or a young American-born woman who joins a film crew in China, these stories are about Chinese Americans trying to make sense of their divided history and culture. As both the immigrant and the American-raised generations succumb to some deeply American impulses, notions of home and language and self get misplaced, repositioned, changed, and history and memory are reinvented by nostalgia, dreams, and desire."Below the Line is a page-turner, a rich and satisfying collection. The language is lean and elegant, the humor sly, the characters poignant, quirky, and all-too human, moving with jet-set ease from East to West, and back again ... Sara Chin is a smart, welcome new voice in contemporary fiction."--Jessica Hagedorn"Sara Chin, with careful ear, takes the reader below the line, where guttural utterances like eh and nh matter, where sounds of immigrant life intrude on a muted screen filled with American signage and gesture."--Karen Tei Yamashita"Sara Chin writes with subtlety, wit, and feeling ... Which one of us cannot identify in some way with the lonely exile's tragicomic struggle for survival and meaning, like the immigrant father who, having made it though bombings and political upheaval in China, gets frantically lost circling the Washington, D.C. Beltway loop? These wonderful stories express a luminous intelligence and are told with compassion."--Elaine Kim"Alternating between short stories and even shorter glimpses of the world, Below the Line (City Lights) careens dangerously on the edge of breakdown: emotional, linguistic, familial, cultural. Her characters are imbued with the weird and lovely qualities of those living on this precipice."--Lawrence Chua, BOMB Magazine"Chin's themes are compelling, but her pace and language are less so--slow, unmelodious, more akin to script direction than to storytelling. Still, in page-long vignettes before each tale, this first-timer displays her true potential, evoking scenes in a sensitively visual language."--Kirkus ReviewsSara Chin lives and works in San Francisco.
Bayou Coeur and Other Stories
Forget Duck Dynasty and True Detective. Read Bayou Coeur and enter a world as different from the homogeneity of American life as 矇touff矇e is different from Campbell's soup. Gray leads us through this unique culture like a skilled cajun accordionist laying down his chords and pursuing a melodic line that evokes nostalgia and mystery and resolves into surprising harmonies. --Bill Dowie, author of critical biographies of Peter Matthiessen and James Salter in the Twayne U.S. Authors Series
Thank You For Staring Into The Void, Your Scream Is Important To Us
