Brian Sousa leaves sentiment and saudade behind in Almost Gone, a linked collection spanning four generations of a Portuguese immigrant family. In this hardscrabble world, the youth struggle with the secrets left behind by their elders, as their parents fought through the pain and joy of assimilation. Told through various perspectives, Almost Gone is a working-class tale of survival that finds no easy answers, but cuts straight to the bone.
Library News: Short Stories 
Post-divorce dating is one more cause for celebration (or a quick call in to the police) in Beth Bosworth's revelatory new book, The Source of Life and Other Stories. The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father's abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. In other stories Bosworth's narrators--a mother left to care for her son's suicidal dog, an editor haunted by a dog-eared manuscript--seem to grab hold of the reins and run off with their fates. Meanwhile Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion.
Reality is just another stumbling block for Bosworth's characters, who might help themselves but don't always choose to. There are leaps of faith here, nonetheless, as the collection dispenses a kind of narrative psychotropic for survival and redemption, with a chaser of humor mixed in.
Though Hugh Sheehy's often tragic, sometimes gruesome stories feature bloodied knives and mysterious disappearances, at the heart of these thoughtful thrillers are finely crafted character studies of people who wrestle with the darker aspects of human nature--grief, violence, loneliness, and the thoughts of crazed minds.
Sheehy's stories shine a spotlight on the bleak fringes of America, giving voice to the invisibles who need it most. A dismal assistant teacher spiking her coffee after school is suddenly locked in a basement with a student who has just witnessed his father's murder. A seventeen-year-old girl at a skate rink whose name no one can remember is motherless, friendless, and sure she will be the next to go. The heartbroken victim of a miscarriage dreams of her fetus's voyage through the earth's plumbing. The estranged addict son, certain of his innate goodness, loses himself in a blizzard and fails his family again.
Sheehy's characters learn that however invisible they may feel and whatever their intentions, their actions incur a cost both to themselves and those around them. They struggle to tame or come to terms with the forces they meet--the tragedies--that are far larger than their small existences. In this debut, Sheehy illuminates the all-but-silent note of adult loneliness and how we cope with it or, perhaps, just move past it.


Roddy Doyle has won acclaim for his wry wit, his uncanny ear, and his remarkable ability to fully capture the voices and hearts of his characters. Bullfighting, his second collection of stories, offers a series of bittersweet takes on men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Moving from classrooms to graveyards, from local pubs to bullrings, these tales of taking stock and reliving past glories feature men concerned with loss--of their place in the world, of their power, virility, health, and ability to love.
Cabell Library PR6054.O95 B85 2011
Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.
Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.
In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection--and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.
A father's life is upended by his son's night terrors--and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of "empty-nest syndrome"; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes--on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there's something off, something sinister, in his late parents' house.
Dan Chaon's stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm--in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.
Cabell Library PS3553.H277 S73 2012
Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.
"The Death of Bonnie and Clyde" and Other Stories follows the trail of its wayward characters down the Delta back roads, crossing paths with Hernando DeSoto--hands bloodied by the indian slaughters--hitchhikers and thieves, UFO's, concrete finishers, naked fishermen, a lusty cheer squad caught and confessing in the midst of a killer tornado, and trash telescope salesmen on the day after Christmas-all saintly guardians of the human heart. From the Florida Coast up through the Carolinas and over to Arkansas' Ozarks, Bonnie and Clyde blazes a trail of love and deceit, hard liquor and the revelation of what it's like tp be free and wild and in love on this earth.
Cabell Library PS3607.I45 D43 2011
Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.
As in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, place is at the center of Cynthia Morrison Phoel's debut collection of linked stories. Quirky, remote, and agonizingly intimate, the ragged village of Old Mountain is home to a cast of Bulgarian townsfolk who do daily battle with the heat or the bitter cold, with soul-crushing poverty, with petty disagreements among themselves--all the while attempting to adapt to changing times and keep up with their neighbors. Money is tight in this valley of run-down Communist blocks and crumbling plaster houses, but community is tighter.
When a largely unemployed father in "A Good Boy" trades his much-needed summer earnings for a hulking satellite dish, everyone knows about it. The same way everyone knows about the shop lady who rests her finger on the scale to drive up the price of cheese in "Galia." In "Satisfactory Proof," a budding mathematician completes a prestigious master's degree in number theory but fails to recognize the patterns of care and compassion everywhere around him. And in the concluding novella, "Cold Snap," as the town endures freezing temperatures and waits for the central heat to be turned on, the characters we have already met make a satisfying encore appearance--as the brittle cold pushes them to the edge of reason.
Cabell Library PS3616.H59 C65 2010
Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.
