Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean's reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life. Here you'll fi...

'I haven't read a book this dark and frank and sublimely written in a while. Maybe since Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.' Alden Jones Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American lunacy as Cormac McCarthy; Joy Williams; and Charles Portis; Robin McLean's Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory. With detours through time; space; and myth; not to mention into the mind...

The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.Robin McLean...

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States.Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a dec...

Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American absurdity as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean’s Pity the Beast is a mind-melting feminist Western that pins a tale of sexual violence and vengeance to a canvas stretching back to prehistory, sideways into legend, and off into a lonesome future.Millennia ago, Ginny’s family ranch was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it’ll all be peacefully un...

“if you read this after I am deadIt means I made it”-“The Creation Coffin”The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski.In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death. He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein. He writes ...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterBurning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.From the horse track to the flophouse, these are dispatches from the edge.Gritty Poetry: Raw, unflinching, and darkly funny poems ...

Fifty remarkable short stories from a range of contemporary fiction authors including Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more, selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists.Contributors include Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, T.C. Boyle, Kevin Brockmeier, Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Peter Ho Davies, Janet Desaulniers, Junot...

In three novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on an American journey as he leads us through the wondrous landscape of the human heart.In this "richly allusive and wickedly funny" collection, Jim Harrison offers "three delightful studies of unique individuals battling inventively against society's demands for conformity" ( Library Journal).Julip follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail—h...

The stories in Battleborn all unfold in Watkins's home state of Nevada, from down south in Nye County and Las Vegas, to Reno, Lake Tahoe, and the Blackrock Desert, the site of Burning Man. We are introduced to a very specific small town America, to those homes and lives off the highway - the ones travellers and writers usually drive past on their way to somewhere else.While the locations are ordinary, the characters and Watkins' telling of their lives are anything but. The...

In 1978, six Vietnamese refugees were pulled from the sea just off California. In San Diego, a little girl's matter-of-fact innocence masks the ghostly traumas that still haunt her: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland; the memory of a brother who drowned; the heartbreaking spectacle of her parents trying to make a new home, their struggle backlit by the memory of a forbidden love when they were young. lê thi diem thúy has revealed a world of great beauty and enormous sorrows. The...

A girl who eats dreams, a woman who chooses the apes, and a barbarian hero rendered as a collage. These are just a few of the people readers first met online thanks to the explosion of webzines. Ellen Datlow, editor of Omni Online>, Event Horizon, and SciFiction, led the charge into the brave new world of online science fiction. Digital Domains collects some of the best and most controversial of those stories—in print for the first time.