Underground Fugue

A New York Times Editors' Choice Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist “A pleasure to read from beginning to end.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March Esther, an American art conservator, has fled New York for London—partly to escape her failing marriage, partly to tend to her dying mother. On her first night there, she spots a young man returning home very late, wet and muddy, to the house next door. Their eyes connect and he disappears inside. This first encounter sparks Esther’s curiosity about her new neighbors: Amir, the moody college student she caught sneaking in, and, more intruiguing still, Amir’s father, Javad—a neuroscientist from Iran. Throughout the spring, a tentative friendship blossoms, but when terrorists attack London’s tube and bus lines in July, Esther finds her relationship with Javad strained by her gnawing suspicions about Amir . . . suspicions that will ultimately upend the possibilities for the future, and reveal the deep stamp of the past. Sweeping, suspenseful, and exquisitely written, Underground Fugue is a powerful testament to how human connection can survive history’s most fearsome echoes.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange object-strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common object-egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology offers expert instruction on writing creative nonfiction in any form-including memoir, lyric essay, travel writing, and more-while taking an expansive approach to fit a rapidly evolving literary art form. From a history of creative nonfiction, related ethical concerns, and new approaches to revision and publishing, this book offers innovative strategies and ideas beyond what's traditionally covered. Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology also includes: · An anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction by some of today's most inventive and celebrated writers · Advanced explorations into the craft of creative nonfiction across forms · In-depth discussion of truth, ethics, and memory · Practical advice on revision, editing, research, and publishing · Writing prompts and exercises throughout the textbook A companion website is also available for the book at http://www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/advanced-creative-nonfiction

Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground. Features in the second edition: -Updated introduction to the new edition -Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and "Unconventions" -A new section on Resistances -50 essays in all

Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on childhood—and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.

Love, in some of the infinite ways we may know it, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O’Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on love—and for planned anthologies on such topics as work, family, animals, children, and more. Emerging love, or love on its way out the door. Love that transcends, or love that just stubbornly hangs on. These fourteen stories give us at least that many new ways of looking at a state of mind that can send us either soaring or plummeting, all in a heartbeat.

Acclaimed short-story writer and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, Robert Anderson has written a brilliantly inventive first novel–a book that blends the facts of a famous writer’s life with the profound effect of her death on an entire generation. Sylvia Plath’s legacy inspires, harrows, and haunts the three people at the center of Little Fugue: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her death and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer, who is obsessed with Plath’s poems and her suicide, which “forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.” Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades: the ’68 student riots, the drug-addled seventies, the AIDS crisis of the eighties, the cataclysm of 9/11. Little Fugue crackles with wit and verbal dexterity. There have been many accounts of the Plath/Hughes drama, but author Robert Anderson provides a fresh, utterly convincing interpretation of events. This is a brilliant novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.