Aloisia Schmidt is an ordinary secretary with a burning question: am I a redundant human being? She's neither pretty nor ugly (though she wishes she were hideous: at least that would be something), has no imagination, and is forced to live vicariously through "borrowed" fantasy--fantasy, that is, borrowed from books, plays, even other people's lives. She loves to hate herself, and loves for other people to hate her too. In one final, guilt-ridden, masturbatory, self-obsessed confession, Aloisia indulges her masochistic tendencies to the fullest, putting her entire life on trial, and trying, through telling her story (a story, she assures us, that's "so laughably mundane" it's really no story at all), to transform an ordinary life into something extraordinary.

Constructing and Reconstructing Gender is an excellent compendium of current research, and will be appealing and useful to those interested in gender issues in a wide variety of disciplines. This book cuts across disciplines and scholarly methods, drawing from many backgrounds, including Communication, Linguistics, English, Business, Law, and Psychology. The interweaving of rhetorical, critical, phenomenological, and statistical methods gives readers a multifaceted analysis of gender. At the same time that this book shows the value of gender research in provoking new currents of thought, it also brings into focus two aspects of gender that are often confused: how gender operates as a cultural category that affects communication behavior, and how communication and language function to create gender categories.

These touching novellas detail the difficulties of a Japanese woman to both adapt to her new life in the United States without abandoning ties to her family and community back home. This book collects two novellas by the noted Japanese painter: “Family Business” and “1,001 Pillars of Flame.” In the first, Megumi—like the author, a long-time resident of the United States—pays a visit to her now eighty-seven-year-old mother in Japan. After so many years living abroad, Megumi simply can't understand contemporary Japan, and when her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi finds herself having to relearn Japanese survival skills in an effort to bring them home safely. In “1,001 Pillars of Fire,” another Japanese-American woman, Yu, has been living in California for decades—which makes it all the more painful that she’s just as subject to discrimination now as ever. When, in the wake of the Rodney King trial, LA’s African-American population begins to riot, Yu learns just how much damage exclusion can do—finding it even within her own family.

In this darkly playful novel, polymath ReneÌ Belletto tells two complimentary stories: In one, a man finds himself paying a ransom demanded by the kidnappers of a woman he’s never actually met; in the other, a second man makes plans to fake his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him. Fast, funny, and sarcastic, partaking of the same vocabularies, imagery, and pitch-black sense of humor, these two variations on a single theme form a novel as much at home in the surreal as in everyday reality. from Dying: “One evening, shortly before my departure (just hours before my departure, truth be told: I only set aside my quill to make my escape), I resolved to put the story of my sojourn at the Rats and Vermin Hotel down in writing. Alas, I didn’t succeed. I learned that I wasn’t master of my own hand. It was stronger than I, yes stronger than I . . .”

A young man circles Avignon experiencing the town's history and exploring his own nature and sexuality.

New stories from a master of American fiction.