River Of Flesh And Other Stories

THE LOGIC OF FLESH and other stories is a gathering of new and previously uncollected stories with a wide selection of voices, characters and perspectives all united by Midwestern rural and urban setting from the 1940's through the 1970's. Th e stories range for graphic realism to the lyrical and poetic, from the colloquial to the reflective and satiric. Off beat and idiosyncratic, the characters occupy a world apart from main stream fiction and will strike the reader as refreshingly original.

Jiangnan, that part of east-central China watered by the Yangzi River, is the ironically Edenic setting for these six powerful tales of devotion, betrayal, and defilement. Zhu Lin, a uniquely angry female voice on China’s literary scene, takes a particular interest in the plight of young women whose exceptional qualities condemn them to exploitation by men. No other contemporary Chinese writer renders the hostility of rural society toward women in such stark and ultimately tragic terms. Serpents tyrannize the innocent in this fictional Jiangnan garden. The title story refers to a fragrant, blood-red flower known as the snake’s pillow, which symbolizes an innocent girl betrayed and violated by a male figure of authority. Immersed in the heady and sensual imagery of the natural world, Zhu Lin’s female protagonists invite comparisons not only with Eve but also with Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Zhu Lin has said of her fiction that its purpose is to “summon the souls” of readers who have lost themselves in the turbulence of a society in the transition to modernity—and then to restore these lost souls to the bodies they have left. An evocation of both flesh and spirit, these Jiangnan stories give voice to the complex and disturbing experience of women in a changing society.

The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, these thirty-one powerful and disturbing stories cement Flannery O'Connor as one of the preeminent fiction writers of the twentieth century. This collection includes twelve stories that did not appear in the two story collections O'Connor put together in her lifetime. This collection includes the following short stories: "The Geranium" "The Barber" "Wildcat" "The Crop" "The Turkey" "The Train" "The Peeler" "The Heart of the Park" "A Stroke of Good Fortune" "Enoch and the Gorilla" "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" "The River" "A Circle in the Fire" "The Displaced Person" "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" "The Artificial Nigger" "Good Country People" "You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead" "Greeleaf" "A View of the Woods" "The Enduring Chill" "The Comforts of Home" "Everything That Rises Must Converge" "The Partridge Festival" "The Lame Shall Enter First" "Why Do the Heathen Rage" "Revelation" "Parker's Back" "Judgement Day" Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Chemistry and Other Stories, A Picador Paperback Original From the pre-eminent chronicler of this forgotten territory, stories that range over one hundred years in the troubled, violent emergence of the New South. In Ron Rash's stories, spanning the entire twentieth century in Appalachia, rural communities struggle with the arrival of a new era. Three old men stalk the shadow of a giant fish no one else believes is there. A man takes up scuba diving in the town reservoir to fight off a killing depression. A grieving mother leads a surveyor into the woods to name once and for all the county where her son was murdered by thieves. In the Appalachia of Ron Rash's stories, the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.