David Foster Wallace

373 pages. Selection of stories. Book shows signs of use, ear marked, creased, soft wrinkles.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

Stories 1989 edition

This collection could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmoderism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine. A compelling presence of a holograph and the up-to-the-second feeling of the most advanced art. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Girl with Curious Hair

78f9921c-2f82-4f08-968e-87516118d5dc-1

George Saunders

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

North Carolina

Stories

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. . . . An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic."--Oprah Daily
 
Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, NPR, Time, USA Today, The Guardian, Esquire, Kirkus Reviews

The "best short-story writer in English" (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

"Love Letter" is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. "Ghoul" is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In "Mother's Day," two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In "Elliott Spencer," our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory "scraped"--a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And "My House"--in a mere seven pages--comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.

Liberation Day (Signed Copy)

0a08b1e9-1659-4f60-9a4f-42d30fd6f497-1

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Colorado

Weird Tales

4eb750e0-28dd-402f-8166-f70875bf7eb7-0

#immigrantstories
#paperback #fiction #womenauthors #anthology #shortstories #howtopronounceknife 

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, this revelatory story collection honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." A failed boxer painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. A mother teaching her daughter the art of worm harvesting. In her stunning debut story collection, O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to belong. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. As one of Thammavongsa's characters says, "All we wanted was to live." And in these stories, they do--brightly, ferociously, unforgettably. Unsentimental yet tender, taut and visceral, How to Pronounce Knife announces Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most striking voices of her generation. "As the daughter of refugees, I'm able to finally see myself in stories." --Angela So, Electric Literature

How to Pronounce Knife

66ed8a67-bd95-44ac-b10f-7f7dc1392833-1

Massachusetts

Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird

Spine is broken, it’s a bad habit of mine. Read about half before DNF’d. Just not my style of book.#paperback #shortstories #paperback #adult 

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Her Body and Other Parties

2437ce92-1a95-48ed-be9c-14e7cf04b811-1

J. D. Scott

Beautiful and magical book filled with short stories. Dreamlike prose, magical scrolls, a drowned twin returning from the sea, a drama on life and death of an ancient chinchilla… in perfect condition! Needs a new home if you like fantastical short stories from a new talent.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The award-winning debut collection of short fiction by New York resident JD Scott.

Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day

9c82484a-3bd3-4f3d-9724-678ec6bd35f0-1

Arkansas

Fiction. Asian American Studies. MEMORY SICKNESS by Phong Nguyen is the winner of the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Award. It is a loosely related series of short stories, set in Rhode Island, that illuminates our tentative and painful paths in this world. William Giraldi has this to say about it: "Dead-on in its depiction of modern malaise, MEMORY SICKNESS will burn in your own memory forever, assuring you of the sickness we are. Phong Nguyen has crafted stories with zero at the bone, stories of how the child is father of the man, of what we do to one another in this world, and what we do to ourselves. His Providence, Rhode Island, seems borne into being by the bastard offspring of Denis Johnson and Mary Gaitskill: a place of danger, horror, and the dim hope necessary for our survival. This book will scar you."

Memory Sickness, and Other Stories

b12b0817-ac24-4408-bc7f-48c39c615953-1

Emma Donoghue

Old Tales in New Skins

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. Acclaimed writer Emma Donoghue spins new tales out of old in a magical web of thirteen interconnected stories about power and transformation and choosing one's own path in the world. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin.

2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA

Kissing the Witch

994cb6ed-cf29-48ff-8fd0-f5e04ba00fbc-1

John Joseph Adams

Stories of the Apocalypse

Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence . . . the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon . . . these are our guides through the Wastelands. From the Book of Revelation to ''The Road Warrior'', from ''A Canticle for Leibowitz'' to ''The Road'', storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse. Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction - including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King - Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders. Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.

Wastelands

5b2ba937-d8de-4089-904b-9afcc57ab3a8-1

#hardcover #fiction #classics #shortstories #literature #historicalfiction #American #southerngothic #southern #anthologies

Connecticut

The Portable Faulkner

#hardcover #fiction #zadiesmith #shortstories #signededition

New York

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal! A dazzling collection of short fiction Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us. Nothing is off limits, and everything—when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze—feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.

Grand Union (Signed Edition)

dd0069c9-7102-4cfe-8cae-f87ed26a25e7-1

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Other Classic Stories

Carmen Maria Machado

Read once. Spine is unbroken! Brand new. All books come with a complimentary book mark.

Pennsylvania

A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (This Edition, 1895)

Traffics and Discoveries (1st Edition, 1949)

#fiction #humor#contemporary #shortstories #vintage photographs #signed #first american edition

Virginia

Chance developments

228d5c94-4f8e-4825-ad1e-3c63f9805432-1

Richard Powers

Oregon

A Novel

A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

The Overstory

0dc1f9cb-7d84-46f3-90f5-e494f5fb50d2-1

#paperback #nonfiction #teens #shortstories

Inspirational stories on life, love, and learning for teens, including contributions by teens. More inspiration and encouragement from the best-selling name in teen nonfiction Chicken Soup knows what teenagers want, and teenagers flock to these books to hear the news, views, and attitudes of their fellow teens. From stories of friendship and romance to hilarious hijinks at school to the tough stuff of modern life (divorce, death, getting dumped by the love of your life), Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul IV covers the full gambit of the teen experience with the now often imitated but never emulated formula of teens talking directly to teens about what matter most to them.

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Iv

41b738dd-9b24-4cb7-b899-44798ba2cd45-1

Lovely vintage limited edition leather bound book from the Franklin Library. 1976. Bound in green leather with gold gilt details. Ribbed spine. Gold gilt page edges. Green silk moire endpapers. Pages clean and bright with no marks, tears or bends. Small knick to leather on spine. Please see photographs. This is a lovely book for a collector! 

Georgia

The Franklin Library 

Winesburg, Ohio

Small amount of dirt present on dust jacket. Minor shelf wear on top edge. No damage to hardcover or pages.

Volume 1

Literotica 

Published between 1922-1928
Kipling’d First major work as a writer 

Michigan

Plain Tales From The Hills (Antique) 

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Previous owner’s name in a pencil and price in pencil. Dust jacket has some tears. See photos. 1933

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David Foster Wallace

Girl with Curious Hair

George Saunders

Liberation Day (Signed Copy)

Jonathan Mayberry

Weird Tales

Souvankham Thammavongsa

How to Pronounce Knife

Agustina Bazterrica

Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

J. D. Scott

Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day

Phong Nguyen

Memory Sickness, and Other Stories

Emma Donoghue

Kissing the Witch

John Joseph Adams

Wastelands

William Faulkner, Edited by Malcolm Cowley

The Portable Faulkner

Zadie Smith

Grand Union (Signed Edition)

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Other Classic Stories

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties

Felix E. Schelling

A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (This Edition, 1895)

Rudyard Kipling

Traffics and Discoveries (1st Edition, 1949)

Alexander McCall Smith

Chance developments

Richard Powers

The Overstory

Jack Canfield

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Iv

Sherwood Anderson; Miki

Winesburg, Ohio

Lori Selke

Literotica

Rudyard Kipling J.H. Sears & Company, Inc Publishers

Plain Tales From The Hills (Antique)

Buck, Pearl S.

The First Wife and other stories