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Books > Fiction > Special features > Short stories
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Acts of God
(Paperback)
Ellen Gilchrist
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R371
R348
Discovery Miles 3 480
Save R23 (6%)
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first
volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book
Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning
and visceral new collection. In "Fine Just the Way It Is," she has
expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple
generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a
ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate.
"Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she
drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys
smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of
life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep
irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded'
guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of
grief."
Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation
but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply
sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh
place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth
-- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes,
Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection
of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her
exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a
profoundly compelling collection.
Award-winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher, presents a terrifying tale of hidden worlds and monstrous creations…
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their
settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on
life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running
through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal
with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has
long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories
about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status,
once again, as a master of the form.
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