Bøger udgivet af Santa Fe Writer's Project

The lives of the working class in West Virginia--a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed--are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone--but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.

Eloquently written essays about aspects of Asian American life comprise this collection that looks at how Asian-Americans view themselves in light of America's insensitivities, stereotypes, and expectations. My Chinese-America speaks on masculinity, identity, and topics ranging from Jeremy Lin and immigration to profiling and Asian silences. This essays have an intimacy that transcends cultural boundaries, and casts light on a vital part of American culture that surrounds and influences all of us.

The stories in Muscle Cars explore the unique and sometimes flawed relationships between men, their families, and their friends. Featuring a diverse cast of inarticulate misfitsincluding a compulsive body builder obsessed by the death of his brother, a former boxer forced to sell his prized 1946 New York Yankeesautographed baseball, and two boyhood friends who plan to steal Ted Williams' scientifically frozen headthis stand-out debut from Pushcart-nominated Eoannou is a powerful journey through the humor, darkness, and neuroses of the modern American everyman.

Annita Sawyer's memoir is a harrowing, heroic, and redeeming story of her battle with mental illness, and her triumph in overcoming it. In 1960, as a suicidal teenager, Sawyer was institutionalized, misdiagnosed, and suffered through 89 electroshock treatments before being transfered, labeled as "e;unimproved."e; The damage done has haunted her life. Discharged in 1966, after finally receiving proper psychiatric care, Sawyer kept her past secret and moved on to graduate from Yale University, raise two children, and become a respected psychotherapist. That is, until 2001, when she reviewed her hospital records and began to remember a broken childhood and the even more broken mental health system of the 1950s and 1960s, Revisiting scenes from her childhood and assembling the pieces of a lost puzzle, her autobiography is a cautionary tale of careless psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, both 50 years ago and today. It is an informative story about understanding PTSD and making emotional sense of events that can lead a soul to darkness. Most of all, it's a story of perseverance: pain, acceptance, healing, hope, and success. Hers is a unique voice for this generation, shedding light on an often misunderstood illness.

A largely untold story of an extraordinary historical figure, this biography sheds light on the life of William Sheppard, a 19th-century African American who, for more than 20 years, defied segregation and operated a missionary run by black Americans in the Belgian Congo. This work shows how Sheppard returned to the United States periodically, and traveled the country telling tales of his adventures to packed auditoriums. An anthropologist, photographer, big-game hunter, and art collector, the man billed as the "e;Black Livingstone"e; helped expose the atrocities that occurred under the reign of King Leopold, and this stirring work tells how he eventually helped to break Belgium's hold on the Congo.

A unique look at the Jehovah Witnesses in the rural western United States and the logging industry in Northern California during the 1970s, By Way of Water addresses the devastating effects of poverty on rural families. Struggling to feed their children in an unforgiving California forest when there are no logging jobs to be found, Jake and Dale Colby make personal vows that only make matters worse. Jake will not accept help from the government or his neighbors, and Dale won't allow him to hunt, believing her faith will sustain them. But one other member of the family makes a promise to herself. Seven-year-old Justy believes that she alone can hold the family together, even when her father's violence resurfaces. With a clear insight and the deepest empathy, Justy isolates the stark realities around her, even as she dreams with her mother of a safe world that only God can promise.

The 14 stories in this collection display the often quiet, inconspicuous way in which terrible truths and experiences are intimated: the death of a sailboarder makes a widower see deeper into love and loss; a young poet visits his former teacher only to discover he is literally not the person he used to be; a middle-aged man glimpses the terrible humdrum of his third marriage as his son embarks on a new chapter in his life. Conveyed without grandeur or pathos, the revelations in these minimalist stories demonstrate clearly and effectively Fruelund's gift of subtlety and nuance; like scenes from life, characters' dramas are played out in brief but brilliant flashes. Ranging across the wide arc of human experience, from the comic to the tragic, each piece explores the complex emotions of the human heart.

The very best short stories and novellas from National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse are brought together in a quintessential collection. Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Cheuse, America's "e;voice of books,"e; and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. The title story--a flash fiction piece that acts as both prologue and an intriguing look at a writer's inspiration--takes us through a child's eyes into a fantastic land, one that informs, shapes, and travels along with the other stories in this stunning collection. These stories deal with life, death, love, family, work, and a deep exploration of the soul.

A devastating portrait of war in all its horror, brutality, and mindlessness, this extraordinary novel is written in beautifully cadenced prose. A combat medic in Vietnam faces the chaos of war, set against the tranquil scenes of family life back home in small-town America. This young man's rite of passage is traced through jungle combat to malaria-induced fever visions to the purgatory of life in military-occupied Saigon. After returning home from war to stay with his grandfather, he confronts his own shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal.

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish--to be cremated--only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.