short stories, american

"Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer lyrical, deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness. Two identical twins watch their bodies and lives diverge as one of them takes up competitive bodybuilding. A part-time mermaid struggles with her fluid sexuality and turbulent romantic past when she finds herself working at her ex-girlfriend's child's birthday party. An up-and-coming sociologist studies factitious disorders in a group of young women, observing their daily lives and attempting to understand their experiences of self-harm. A ballerina must choose between motherhood and her art. The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women--social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers--who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don't. Plucky yet vulnerable, knowledgeable yet needy, Ashley Wurzbacher's vividly-imagined characters invite us to ask: What does it mean to be happy? When every choice entails a loss, how can we feel like we're doing the right thing?" --.

Collects thirty-three short crime, mystery, and murder stories from the nineteenth century, featuring works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London.

A collection of nineteen short stories that feature vampires with unique personalities.

A collection of thirty-seven short stories by African-American writers which reflects four themes such as remembering, affirming, revealing the divided self, and moving on. Includes many aspects of the black experience in America.

Contains a collection of twenty-six stories about the supernatural by American authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and H. P. Lovecraft; and includes brief biographical profiles on each author.

Contains five fictional stories that depict teenagers in urban settings who have to deal with a variety of personal issues, such as peer pressures, substance abusing parents, sexual encounters, teenage pregnancy, and more.

Contains five stories about teens facing personal issues, including dating violence, stalking, making friends, and more.

Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide career biographies of twenty-five American short story writers active in the years between 1910 and 1945; each with a list of principal works and a bibliography.

Profiles more than thirty American short-story writers from the period 1880-1910, presenting primary and secondary bibliographies and illustrated biographical essays that chronicle each writer's career in detail.

Contains alphabetically arranged essays that provide biographical and critical information aboutthirty-six significant American short-story writers active before 1880; each with a list of principal works and a bibliography.