Closing Time And Other Stories

A collection of bleak short stories of loss and pain"--Provided by publisher.

Named a New York Times Notable Book Winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize Winner of the Anne Frank Prize These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22. In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22. Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

From Award-winning author and storyteller Jack Ketchum, a collection of bleak stories of loss, and pain. This is the author's newest collection, and includes his Bram Stoker Award-Winning novella - Closing Time.Also included:ReturnsDamned If You DoStation TwoElusivePapaThe FountainDo You Love Your Wife?At Home With the VCRThose Rockports Won't Get You Into HeavenOlivia: A MonologueBrave GirlHonor SystemLighten UpHotlineMonsterConsensualSeascapeSnarl, Hiss, Spit, Stalk

Dorothy Whipple's key theme is `Live and Let Live'. And what she describes throughout her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple's novels were set in an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy. Like George Eliot, like Mrs Gaskell, like EM Forster, Dorothy Whipple describes men and women in their social milieu, which in her case is the inter-war period, and shows them being all- too human. But her books are not nostalgia reads either, any more than reading George Eliot or Forster is a nostalgia read, nor are they old-fashioned or simplistic. Her prose, it is true, is pure, uncluttered, straightforward, pared down to the bone and never labours the point; her subtlety is the reason why so many people - generally those who have not read her - overlook her excellence.

In this new collection, Chioniso and other stories, we are once again reminded how Shimmer Chinodya mines his experience for nuggets. Playing with his doppelganger, Godfrey, he looks back on life in Harare, and in Zimbabwe, over the last decade, exploring it from a familial perspective. How does a father cope with a rebellious daughter or a wife he perceives as wayward? How does one mediate traditional gender roles? What to do when status in the form of a car undermines the stability of a marriage? How does one manage a friendship with a new farmer? What moral compromises are demanded by new wealth and political cronyism? And what is the effect of religion on our lives? Have we become more caring and compassionate, or does piety provide a mask, to disguise greed and ambition, and justify a contempt for the poor? This collection of stories will make you laugh, but it will also challenge you to reconsider what it means to be Zimbabwean in the 21st century.

The five imaginative stories in this short collection delves into worlds and characters undergoing change. In here you will find the mind-bending "Dreams Of Memories Never Lived," the unique and startling apocalypse "With Wings The End," the funny and sweet "Love And The Dead In The Life Of Jack Joy Merryman," a nation filled with turmoil in "The Unjust, Dust, And Hope," and the eternal bar of the afterlife in "Closing Time."