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Compiled from the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series, these stories always amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories diversify how we observe holidays and challenge traditional associations with holidays such as Christmas. However, the underlying rituals - which make us pause, feel, love, and act - remain in place. No author in this anthology means for a holiday to be the main focus, yet the holiday makes the story work. Many of the stories display family tensions that add a wild-card element to holidays. Characters also may feel forced to buy into a holiday's assigned emotion - fear on Halloween, gratitude on Thanksgiving - whereas experience leads in another direction. Maybe it's a holiday's time of year, or maybe it's the baggage the holiday arrives with (or that we hand to it). For whatever reasons, each holiday has its own atmosphere. Each story serves to complicate the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

Holidays --- Short stories, American. --- Short stories, American

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On the centennial of William Maxwell's birth, here is the second volume in a two- volume collected edition that reveals the full range of an extraordinary literary voice, a voice that John Updike has called one of the wisest in American fiction . . . as well as one of the kindest. In 'Later Novels and Stories', Maxwell deepens his connection to his signature subject matter even as he broadens his canvas. 'The Chteau' (1961) describes the most subtle and bittersweet encounter of American naivet and Old World mystery since Henry James. 'So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), widely considered Maxwell's greatest work, is part memoir, part fictional re- creation of a crime of passion, and, in the words of Charles Baxter, an unobtrusively perfect example of literary art of the highest humility and generosity. Here too is the story collection 'Billie Dyer' (1992) and eleven other works of short fiction some never before collected. The volume concludes with forty brief improvisations fairy tales Maxwell wrote for his wife and the essay Nearing Ninety (1997), his moving valediction to a lifetime of reading and storytelling.

Short stories, American.

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Short stories, American

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Short stories, American --- #GSDBL

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Written upon the author's return from combat deployment to the Middle East with the DC Air National Guard, this title features nine stories that portray desperate characters driven to make desperate choices. Always on the edge of a dark and unpleasant reality, its characters survive by embracing fantasy, humor, violence, and sometimes redemption.

Short stories, American