The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life.

In this emotionally gripping, genre-defying novella from Sarah Pinborough, a woman sits at her father's bedside, watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters--she is the middle child of five--have all turned up over the past week to pay their last respects. Each is traumatized in his or her own way, and the bonds that unite them to each other are fragile--as fragile perhaps as the old man's health. With her siblings all gone, back to their self-obsessed lives, she is now alone with the faltering wreck of her father's cancer-ridden body. It is always at times like this when it--the dark and nameless, the impossible, presence that lingers along the fringes of the dark fields beyond the house--comes calling. As the clock ticks away in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her, a reunion she both dreads and aches for...

Samuel and Morgan are twin brothers separated by several oceans. Once, when they were children together, they shared not only a family and a childhood, but a secret imaginary world that had a language of its own: Nahum. But that was decades ago: before Morgan became a wanderer whose only contact with his brother was stories, written in Nahum. When Morgan unexpectedly passes away in the Netherlands, the woman he was living with –the mysterious Ana –agrees to accompany his body, and his final Nahum story, home to Australia. What she carries home to Samuel is not just a manuscript, but a startling revelation. In gorgeous and incisive prose, Sulway conjures a haunting, moving story of the complex relationships and allegiances of family life, of silence and memory, and the power of words and the imagination to transform everything. 'Dreamlike and prophetic and true. Like the best translators, Sulway pushes language to defy its limitations, to defy our own.' Kristina Olsson

In First Person Mortal, Lucy Bregman and Sara Thiermann interpret the autobiographical narratives of C. S. Lewis, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilda Radnor, and many others as attempts by deeply thoughtful individuals to wrest meaning from situations that often seem to defy - even mock - human comprehension. The authors consider a variety of issues recurring in these narratives: theories of autobiography; patients' rights and medical ethics; modern society's emphasis on "expressive individualism"; the genderedness of mortal experience; the destruction of the body in a culture prizing physical beauty; the loss of the self and personal identity; and the ways people use religion or "spirituality" to interpret their experiences. Drs. Bregman and Thiermann conclude that in a society lacking a public, normative understanding of death and dying, the autobiographical genre is uniquely appropriate to our quest for meaning.

Avid gamers love to recount their most exciting exploits in online play, especially their moments of greatest challenge, skill, and luck. This is a collection of fifty such War Stories from the battlefields of the Internet: Fifty accounts of valiant struggles, glorious victories, and sometimes of overwhelming defeat.

From its beginnings narratology has incorporated a communicative model of literary narratives, considering these as simulations of natural, oral acts of communication. This approach, however, has had some problems with accounting for the strangeness and anomalies of modern and postmodern narratives. As many skeptics have shown, not even classical realism conforms to the standard set by oral or ‘natural’ storytelling. Thus, an urge to confront narratology with the difficult task of reconsidering a most basic premise in its theoretical and analytical endeavors has, for some time, been undeniable. During the 2000s, Nordic narratologists have been among the most active and insistent critics of the communicative model. They share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using ‘natural’ narratives as a model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them, the distinction of fiction is of vital importance. This anthology presents a collection of new articles that deal with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.