Junkman And Other Stories

Junkman and Other Stories brings into razorsharp focus life lived on the edge. The stories are filled with sex and death, love and hate, the desperate dreams and transparent hopes of lowlifes, riffraff and rogues.

Even before they immigrate to America, Hanna and her family dream of the new life they will have there. "You will see, Hanna," Papa said. "There are streets of gold." But when they arrive, they find life very different from what they had imagined. Their apartment is small and Hanna and her brothers must sleep on a mattress on the floor. Mama spends her days knitting shawls and sweaters to sell on the streets but no one stops to buy. And Papa can find no work. Hanna looks everywhere for the gold Papa promised them but it is not to be found. What will happen to their dream of a new, better life in America? One day a seemingly insignificant find on a slushy street leads to an opportunity for a brighter future. And like many others before them, Hanna and her family realize that through small steps and hard work they can make their American dream come true.

When Mrs. Sorensen’s husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch.” In “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. “Dreadful Young Ladies” demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination. In “Notes on the Untimely Death of Ronia Drake,” a witch is haunted by the deadly repercussions of a spell. “The Insect and the Astronomer” upends expectations about good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, love and longing. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella “The Unlicensed Magician” introduces the secret magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead—with thematic echoes of Barnhill’s Newbery Medal–winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. With bold, reality-bending invention underscored by richly illuminated universal themes of love, death, jealousy, and hope, the stories in Dreadful Young Ladies show why its author has been hailed as “a fantasist on the order of Neil Gaiman” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). This collection cements Barnhill’s place as one of the wittiest, most vital and compelling voices in contemporary literature.

Stories by an experimental writer. In A Non-Unified Field Theory of Love and Landlords, one reads: "Tiny space dust and space grains of sand rain / Down on the earth by the millions each minute / And interplanetary and interstellar comets ast / Eroids and meteoroids are more numerous than a / Ll the fish in all the seas of the world and y / Ou might discover a comet and become famous ..."

Ranging widely in subject matter--from a musician's destructive narcissism to the strange effects a persistent Norwegian has on a bachelor's love life--the stories in this collection also vary in style. Both elegantly insightful and highly adventurous, these tales are inventive, deeply comic, sometimes very unsettling, and completely engaging.

A new anthology of short fiction features twenty-two diverse tales that explore the magical fragility, memory, nostalgia, and translucent quality of life beyond middle age.

This book contains the definitive treatment of the stories, texts, and music of Turandot, Gianni Schicchi, The Barber of Bagdad, Thaïs, Eugen Onegin, Prince Igor, The Golden Cockerel, Elektra, Orfeo ed Euridice, Lakmé, Les Huguenots, Così fan tutte, The Seraglio, Les Troyens, Don Pasquale, La Juive, Manon, Falstaff, Louise, Pelléas and Mélisande, The Bartered Bride, Die Fledermaus, Romeo and Juliet, Der Rosenkavalier, Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, Wozzeck, L’Heure Espagnole, and Boris Godounov. The foremost authority on opera presented in the comprehensive volume all that the opera-goer, radio listener, music-lover, and confirmed operamane will wish to know about them. It is unique as both guide and armchair companion. Ernest Newman’s gigantic grasp of his subject is clear at every turn, as are his sheer writing ability and wit. He larded his treatment of the operas with biographical and historical materials acquired in a long lifetime of study and writing. This is the first volume of the trilogy of books (the other two being The Wagner Operas and Seventeen Famous Operas) with which Ernest Newman wished to replace his much earlier book, Stories of the Great Operas.

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