Empfehlungen basierend auf "Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021"

Classic literary journalism which defined, for many, the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution "It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not..." "So physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate" that people tended to forget that her presence ran counter to their best interests, Joan Didion slipped herself into the heart of the Sixties Revolution, only to slip out again with this savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during those curious days. Now that some of the posturing and pronouncements of those times are being recycled, Didion's sobering reflections are timely once again: 'the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

Stories explore the experiences and troubled relationships of middle class inhabitants of New York City, who struggle with their loneliness

A Library Journal Best Book of 2022 in Short StoriesA collection of twelve powerful and moving new stories from one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers.Tinged with melancholy but rooted in resiliency, the exquisite stories of Bernard MacLaverty’s Blank Pages display the perseverance of the human spirit. In “A Love Picture,” a middle-aged woman, already no stranger to loss, consults a World War II newsreel to determine the fate of her son. “Blackthorns” tells of a poor, out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely savior. The harrowing but transcendent “The End of Days” imagines life in another pandemic as artist Egon Schiele and his wife, both stricken with the Spanish flu, spend their final days together. And in the poignant title story, an elderly writer takes stock of what remains after losing his life partner.Blank Pages elegantly probes MacLaverty’s signature themes―domestic love, Catholicism, the Troubles, aging―with compassion and insight. A consummately gifted storyteller, MacLaverty uncovers the turbulent undertones of seemingly ordinary human interactions and explores endings of all kinds with tenderness, affection, and wry humor.Acclaimed for his extraordinary emotional range and “telescopic observational powers” (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal), MacLaverty captures the joys and sorrows of everyday existence in crystalline, precise prose. Each resonant story in Blank Pages reminds us again why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers.

WINNER of THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021LONGLISTED for THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 and the HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE2020 Book of the Year according to the Spectator, TLS, New Statesman and Financial TimesDiscover Ali Smith's dazzling, once-in-a-generation series, the Seasonal Quartet, a tour-de-force cycle of novels about love, time, art, politics, and how we live right nowAll four instalments of the quartet are available to buy and read in paperback and ebook now: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer'Exquisite. Smith is in a class of her own' Nicola SturgeonIn the present, Sacha knows the world's in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?Summer.'The first great coronavirus novel - a book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation's psyche exquisitely' Evening Standard'An astonishing finale to a prescient series . . . Ali Smith brilliantly weaves strands of joy and celebration to end her Seasonal Quartet' Irish Times'A maestra's portrait of her age . . . remarkable' Guardian

A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad).“Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading.”—Kelly Link, author of Get In TroubleONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus ReviewsWith a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

This view of a life-altering moment in our history―captured from one photographer’s Brooklyn rooftop―is a testament to human hope and resilience, and what we’ve learned about living in community.The roof of a New York apartment building, like some New York neighbors, can be elusive―you could live there for years and never see it. The unique constraints of 2020’s quarantine drove photographer and Brooklyn transplant Josh Katz up to his Bushwick rooftop and introduced him to both. What he discovered there astonished him. Families, lovers, dogs, meditators, artists, exercise fanatics, daredevils, drinkers, dancers―in this strange time the world below had found a way to continue ticking on up above, subject to new patterns and distances. And then, there were the pigeon fanciers, who had been up there for decades, watching the neighborhood change around them. Josh reached for his camera.The project grew from a man’s attempt to cope with his own isolation to a tender portrait of his community―captured entirely from his own roof―and a resonant chronicle of how some of us found new hope and space in a life-altering year. Characters as heartfelt as any in the now-classic Humans of New York accompany Josh’s keen observations on urban space, human interaction, and new ways of city living we can bring down from the roof to apply in a post-quarantine world. 100+ color illustrations

Hempel's now-classic collection of short fiction is peopled by complex characters who have discovered that their safety nets are not dependable and who must now learn to balance on the threads of wit, irony, and spirit.

In this collection of short stories, originally published in 1974, Grace Paley "makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant" (Angela Carter, London Review of Books). Her stories here capture "the itch of the city, love between parents and children" and "the cutting edge of combat" (Lis Harris, The New York Times Book Review). In this collection of seventeen stories, she creates a "solid and vital fictional world, cross-referenced and dense with life" (Walter Clemons, Newsweek).

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in literature, film, art, and dance—to arrive at a new synthesis for the young artist struggling against the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of modern fiction. Identifying those trends which she finds most destructive in modern fiction (reportage, the substitution of violence for emotion, and the growing cults of ugliness, toughness, and caricature), Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel.Drawing upon such related arts as filmmaking, painting, and dance, Nin discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as the development of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Young, and Djuna Barnes. In chapters devoted to the pursuit of the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the relationship between the diary and fiction, she addresses the materials, techniques, and nourishment of the arts, and the functions of art itself.