An aesthetic perspective on the short fiction of Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver Taking a distinctively aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters--Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver--to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars. At the center of this argument is the notion that the realist short story is a glimpse--powerful and tightly focused--into a world that the writer must precisely craft and in which the reader must fully invest. Selecting writers from different generational, national, and cultural backgrounds, McSweeney chooses writers based on their commitment to the realist representation of experience and their shared belief in the importance and efficacy of the short story form. By considering their efforts in tandem, he develops a means to assess the strategies and claims of realist short fiction. McSweeney demonstrates that when the comments these writers have made about their work are assembled and critically scrutinized, the result is an aesthetic critical model--as opposed to more interpretative models that focus attention on the determination (or indetermination) of meanings. He suggests that a fully adequate reading of a realist short story involves the integration of three components: the enjoyment and contemplation of the story in and of itself; affective receptivity, or a response to the story's emotional content; and cognitive activity, or the reflective consideration of the story's conceptual implications. In individual chapters on Chekov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver, this presentational model is applied to widely known and often anthologized readings from each writer. McSweeney brings into sharp focus the distinctive features of each piece, makes qualitative discriminations, and assesses the profitability of other critical models. He concludes with an invitation to test the mettle of his approach in reading other realist short story writers.

Inspired by an experiment on Twitter, these 300 moving stories are no bigger than a sentence or two, on themes like love, death, and family. In this one-of-a-kind collection, author Sean Hill has crafted hundreds of engaging stories that conjure an entire novel in just a sentence or two. Sometimes sad, often humorous and always creative, these tales touch on a wide range of life experiences from romance and family to death and sex. Nana rocked in her old wooden rocking chair. “Timmy, you have always been my favorite,” she said. He looked at her. “Nana, I’m Bobby.” Read your diary, discovered your secret. I thought I loved you, but now I’m not sure. Don’t know what to do, you look so human. Clowning was Daryl’s profession, cooking was his passion. Stella thought he was perfect. She liked to laugh and never learned to cook. Alex bought Sharon a ring for Valentine’s Day, which she sold to buy the gun that stopped him from loving her. In 2009, Sean Hill combined his love of writing and technology by creating @VeryShortStory, a Twitter feed where he interacts with his readers and shares his 140-character stories. Praise for Very Short Stories “Some are touching, some ring true, but most are laugh-out-loud funny.” —Seattle Times “The book is a treasure-trove of fascinating exploration into the craft of language and storytelling.” —Summit Daily “Story telling is his bag, pure and simple.” —Austin American Statesman “The best of the stories might rival Hemingway's classic six word story in their descriptive brevity and their ability to tell a complete and affecting tale.” —Short and Sweet NYC “Witty, well-crafted and always thought-provoking.” —Salt Lake Tribune

"More engaging than any new fiction in years." —Chuck Palahniuk An unforgettable work of fiction that peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place. Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.

Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.

The book consists of many technique of ?Effective public speaking?. The author has transformed public-speaking into a life-skill which anyone cab develop. The book consists of basic principles of effective speaking, technique of effective speaking, and the 3-aspects of every speech and effective methods of delivering a talk. The book focuses on impromptu talk too. The author tells us how to make the most of our resources and achieve our fullest potential. A must read book for effective speaking.

The short story is one of the finest forms of writing. As short as a paragraph at times, or as lengthy as a novel, short stories are widely read and immensely lauded. Some of the most exceptional writers have dabbled in this form penning beautiful, unforgettable stories. In this carefully-crafted selection, we bring to you some of the greatest writers from around the world-- the iconic storytellers from America, such as Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, the legendary Grimm brothers from Germany, to the lyrical Rabindranath Tagore from India, and the witty H H Munro from Britain. All these and many more remarkable people come together in this edition . . . and all have stories to tell. An anthology beginning with Aesop's fables-- perhaps the first stories we come across-- and ending with Virginia Woolf's gothic, thrilling ' The Haunted House', 100 World's Greatest Short Stories brings together stories short and sweet, descriptive and lengthy, and stories that can do anything-- from telling a tale to hiding its narrator, from portraying the reality to diving into pure imagination-- and are a must-read for every fiction lover."