American Literature Anthology

Karlie Houston hasn't seen a raise in forever, but the payday loan office she manages is raking in the cash. So why not get what she's rightfully owed by masterminding a heist? Once her lover Sidney's boys hit all the company's locations at one time, there's a fortune to split. But suddenly bodies start dropping - and Karlie better devise the perfect plan to survive.

Winter looms in this place of icy splendor near the top of the world-chilling a heart already frozen by hatred and cold dreams of revenge? Experience and adversity have made the storyteller Chakliux a wise and powerful hunter and a man of great respect. But a tender heart is his weakness. In his village lives the beautiful Aqamdax for whom he yearns, though she is mated to a cruel and dangerous tribesman she does not love. It is Chakliux she runs to under a clear, moonlit sky while the village sleeps.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries are selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic, oral qualities. Listen to these 10 unabridged classics by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, O. Henry, and Willa Cather.

Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence best-selling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and 15 stories, Ghost Summer: Stories is sure to haunt and delight.

A collection of stories from the most famous Western author of all time! Desert Death-Song is a compilation of some of Louis L’Amour’s greatest stories, many of which might otherwise be difficult to find. Whether he was writing under his early pen name, Jim Mayo, or his own, L’Amour’s stories are unforgettable, touching on rough and rugged American ideals, and set in the untamable frontier of the Western United States.

A critic explores the paradox of finding community in “the dozens” while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An email thread between friends on why we need an updated Green Book but for public toilets. All across the nation, “Karens” become illegal overnight. These are just a few of the hilarious worlds contained in Damon Young’s groundbreaking anthology featuring the best, funniest, and Blackest essays, short stories, letters, and rants.

From the award-winning author of Chemistry comes a sharp and poignant short story that follows a young medical student working in clinical research and grappling with the realities of a future in her chosen field.

In Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.

In Kenya, when a young American man falls in love with the sophisticated daughter of an African chief, their marriage is strong. But tradition will soon put their union to the supreme test. Gripping and soulful, A Woman's Worth is a tale of cultural divisions, emotional wounds, and a love that struggles to transcend them.

This exciting three-book series takes you into the heart of turn-of-the-century America, when cattle drives were still a daily way of life for many men…and also for a few women!When Colt, Michael, and Joseph are bequeathed a thriving cattle ranch, the stipulation is that they each need to marry before claiming their share of the inheritance. Before long, three brave, independent mail order brides make their way west, unaware of how startled their handsome Texan fiancés will be when it turns out these women want to participate in all parts of frontier life—cattle drives included. Danger...

New York Times Notable Book author Charles Yu wrote the best-selling novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In his stunning, often humorous, collection Sorry Please Thank You, Yu draws on pop culture and science to make incisive observations about society - and offer touching insight into the human condition. In two of Yu’s remarkable stories, he focuses on a big-box-store night-shift employee with girl trouble and a company that outsources grief for profit.

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

A wonderful collection of stories that captures the spirit of Mexican culture and its peoples.

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past.

In folktales, the trickster can be the wise one or the fool, the one who fools or the one who is fooled. That is why children of all ages enjoy hearing these tales. The psychology of childhood is pretty much the same everywhere, giving these enjoyable stories universal appeal.

The greatest short story writers strive to achieve a single, dramatic effect, a feature which the early masters of this genre perfected. Although the short story came from Europe, it was reborn in America and reached a pinnacle of superb form on these shores by the turn of the 20th century. In so many of our best writers, we hear echoes of a pioneer ethos that sustains the heart of a great literature. Here are 12 of America's best.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.