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خطوة إلى عالم لا حدود له من القصص

الاستماع والقراءة

Jennifer Colville

The ordinary and the extraordinary merge in the strange and complex lives of young women in this “frequently luminous” debut short story collection (Kirkus Reviews).

Unsettling and perceptive, this debut story collection challenges our notion of American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Alternately wide-eyed, wise, and mysterious, the girls at the center of these stories leave their realities behind for curious new places where the barrier between real and unreal begins to blur. Still others hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation.

The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls take place at a boundary where both the girls’ bodies and their narratives belong either to themselves or to the cultures that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends.

“Brisk, satisfying, and fiercely observant.”—Publishers Weekly

Indiana University Press

Break Away Book Club Edition

Elegies for Uncanny Girls

Barbara Shoup

A woman’s former life as a radical antiwar protestor threatens her new identity as a wife and mother in this “poignant and stirring novel” (Booklist).

While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name—her real name—a name she has not heard in more than twentyfive years. Not even her husband knows that back in the ‘60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. Now Jane, and her radical past, are about to come into the light.

Shuttling between the present day and the turbulent 1960s, An American Tune tells the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who flees when she becomes complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she becomes: a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An American Tune is both a poignant story of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, and an evocation of a country struggling with its own violent legacy.

An American Tune

Scott Russell Sanders

This story collection by the acclaimed author and conservationist “sparks with brilliant imagery” in tales of dystopian worlds and human resilience (Teresa Milbrodt, author of Bearded Women: Stories).

 Fans of Scott Russell Sanders, the Lannan Literary Award-winning essayist and author of The Conservationist Manifesto, may be surprised to learn he was one of the brightest science-fiction newcomers of the 1980s. In Dancing in Dreamtime, Sanders returns to his sci-fi roots, exploring both inner and outer space in a speculative collection of short stories.

 At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where people are forced to live in biodomes to escape poisoned air. “Clear-eyed and philosophical” these vividly imagined stories combine “intellectualism with magical realism in an uncommon unity of mind and spirit” (Shelf Awareness).

Dancing in Dreamtime

Erin Stalcup

In this debut fantasy collection “science, physics, and electricity . . . are the background for short stories of startling human disconnection and alienation” (ForeWord Reviews).
 
 This “engaging collection . . . takes on the love and loneliness lurking in the bright lights and shadowed corners of the everyday” (Kirkus Reviews). In these pages, a taboo romance breaks the laws of gravity; Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he abandoned; and a female physicist meets Stephen Hawking in a bar. In the closing novella, All Those Stairs, an elevator operator with a genius IQ rides up and down all day enclosed in a metal box.
 
 Author Erin Stalcup explores these lives with compassion, depth, and insight as she examines loss and longing and how our bodies and minds can be both weighted and freed. And Yet It Moves is a powerful combination of both absurdist and realist fiction. “Simply put: these stories defy gravity” (Zachary Tyler Vickers, author of Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!).
 
A 2016 ForeWord Indies Finalist.

And Yet It Moves

B. J. Hollars

The Truman Capote Prize-winning author “provides an offbeat look at the fragility of human life and our resilience when faced with death” (Kirkus).

On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another.

In this collection of personal essays, Hollars faces tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes. These experiences force him to acknowledge the inexplicable while he attempts to overcome his greatest fear—the impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the world’s cruelties. Through his and others’ stories, Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.

This Is Only a Test

Rebecca McClanahan

The Pushcart Prize-winning author’s multi-generational memoir interweaves stories across more than a century in a “loving reminder of the ties that bind” (Lee Martin, From Our House and Turning Bones).
 
 Are we responsible for, and to, those forces that have formed us—our families, friends, and communities? Where do we leave off and others begin? In The Tribal Knot, award-winning poet and author Rebecca McClanahan mines her personal family history to explore provocative questions about legacy, identity, and familial connection.

 Poring over letters, artifacts, and documents that span more than a century, McClanahan discovers a tribe of hardscrabble Midwest farmers, hunters, trappers, and laborers struggling to hold tight to the ties that bind them, through poverty, war, political upheavals, illness and accident, filicide and suicide, economic depressions, personal crises, and global disasters. Like the practitioners of Victorian "hair art" who wove strands of family members' hair into a single design, McClanahan braids her ancestors' stories into a single intimate narrative of her search to understand herself and her place in the family's complex past.