American Short

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. This book illuminates the US's core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, renowned marine biologist and co-founder of the All We Can Save climate initiative, compiles the best science and nature writing of the year.

Zora Neale Hurston is best remembered today for her work as a novelist, but she was also an accomplished dramatist, short story writer, and folklorist. That range of interests and styles is on full display in this collection.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist movements constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics. Comparing political trends across different countries, this compelling audiobook debates what the long-term consequences of this challenge could be, as it turns the spotlight on the bewildering effect of populism on today's political and social life.

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

When terrorists with the technological capabilities to hack The White House security system take the President of the United States hostage, it's up to an elite group of counterterrorism operatives to take back The White House and secure the president. The Pentagon has brought former counterterrorism agent Vince Ludlum in to lead this operation. The catch: Ludlum is a wounded warrior trying to escape his tragic past, until now....

In Holler, Child’s eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something—hope, reconciliation, freedom. In “Cutting Horse,” the appearance of a horse in a man’s suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In “Holler, Child,” a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side.

In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.”

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture.

Kyron Santos, Kaylin's older brother, was used by Tasha Macklin to get back at Trae for his infidelities, a relationship that ultimately ended in pregnancy, murder, broken relationships, and mistrust. No one knew about the court-ordered sessions that Kyron was forced to attend. At least not until Mari, his woman who stuck by him throughout the majority of his prison bid, dropped the recordings off to Trae Macklin, Tasha's husband.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

This classic collection includes seven life-changing stories with ironic twists of fate, which can inform the young about their choices in life and recall the choices older people have made between success and happiness, duty and pleasure, and much more. Includes a short, final summing-up chapter, envoi.

अमेरिकन जीवनात रुजताना आणि इथं येऊन आपली भारतीय ओळख कायम ठेवून या दोन्हीच्या संगमातून 'इमिग्रंट' अस्तित्वाला वेगळा आकार येत जातो. हे होत असताना इथल्या जगण्यातल्या वेगवेगळ्या पैलूंच्या डोळस निरीक्षणातून उतरलेली ही 'अमेरिकन ड्रिल्स' आहेत.

A new collection of inspiring personal philosophies from another noteworthy group of people This second collection of This I Believe essays gathers seventy-five essayists—ranging from famous to previously unknown—completing the thought that begins the book's title. With contributors who run...

The 1925 New York edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time trails readers through the years before, during, and after World War I. The collection’s first two stories, “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” introduce Hemingway’s semiautobiographical character Nick Adams as a child. In total, seven stories portray the young man’s coming of age. All fourteen, including interspersed vignettes, embody the themes that Hemingway would return to throughout his career: alienation, grief, loss, and separation, as well as the regenerative powers of nature.

Here is the original manuscript of Raymond Carver's seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver is one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature - his style is both instantly recognizable and hugely influential - and the pieces in What We Talk About..., which portray the gritty loves and lives of the American working class, are counted among the foundation stones of the contemporary short story.

A profound portrait of contemporary Pakistan from the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali In seven searing, atmospheric stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices...

The American Dream is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means. In this fascinating short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present.

In James William Gardner’s new collection of short stories, the listener will gain authentic insight into the fascinating world of the American south. With humor and sensitivity, the writer grapples with important cultural themes. His characters live and breathe, places become real, tradition is revealed and you may never feel the same way about the south again.