You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Kercheval recalls her life as a young girl living in Cocoa, Florida, in 1966, watching as her mother slipped into a Valium-induced state of apathy, her father became a workaholic, and her older sister tried to shoulder the burden.
No one looks at structure like Jesse Lee Kercheval. She builds a work of fiction just as an architect would design a house--with an eye for details and how all parts of a story or novel interconnect. Even with the most dynamic language, images, and characters, no piece of fiction will work without a strong infrastructure. Kercheval shows how to build that structure using such tools as point of view, characterization, pacing, and flashbacks. Building Fiction will help you envision the landscape of your fiction and build great stories there.
A series of interlinked short stories chronicles the world of Alice, a girl raised in Florida, who finds love with the scion of a family of Norwegian-Wisconsin farmers, her beloved Anders, and their family as they confront the joys, sorrows, and challenges of life together in Wisconsin. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.
"After her husband's sudden death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. Their dreamlike affair is disrupted when Roland vanishes, deported to a German camp for people without identity papers. But coincidences, dreams, and visions eventually reunite them with the promise of a bright future. Set primarily in France between the world wars, the narrative moves easily between the present and the past and among Ginny, Roland, and the important people in their lives. These intertwining stories raise questions of fate and the meaning of family, identity, and happiness."--Library Journal
In Cinema Muto, Jesse Lee Kercheval examines the enduring themes of time, mortality, and love as revealed through the power of silent film. Following the ten days of the annual Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy, this collection of ekphrastic poems are love letters to the evocative power of silent cinema. Kercheval’s poems elegantly capture the allure of these rare films, which compel hundreds of pilgrims from around the world—from scholars and archivists, to artists and connoisseurs—to flock to Italy each autumn. Cinema Muto celebrates the flickering tales of madness and adventure, drama and love, which are all too often left to decay within forgotten vaults. As reels of Mosjoukine ...
Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas de Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale—Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets. Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas de Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.
A newlywed gazes upon the wreckage of the Titanic. A young woman becomes the protégé of a Parisian hotelier. An old woman meets an angel in a ghost town. With arresting imagery and heart-wrenching storylines, these short stories from a master writer use humor and imagination to weave together themes of loss, dignity, tenacity and acceptance.
Jesse Lee Kercheval writes with wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty in these autobiographical poems. Tracing the timelines of her life forward and backward, she offers a moving examination of the role of family and the possible/probable/hoped for existence of God - and how our perceptions of the divine can be transformed from a kindergartner's dyslexically scrawled doG loves U to the ever-present but oft-ignored Dog Angel of the title. Ranging from a cross-country drive to bury her mother's ashes at Arlington National Cemetery, to a family vacation in Spain, to an imagined final exam given by her children, Kercheval explores the vagaries of love, loss, faith, grief, and joy with a calm, convincing wisdom that permeates this resonant and wonderful collection.
Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval A bilingual collection, The Invisible Bridge / El Puente Invisible brings together many of the luminous, deeply philosophical poems of Circe Maia, one of the few living poets left of the generation which brought Latin American writing to world prominence.
What happens when your dream mission to Mars is a reality TV nightmare? "Ebenbach is more at home in the minefield of ambiguity than most of us are in our houses." ―Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars--in exchange for a lifetime of research--was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the odd protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth the constant surveillance, which is carefully edited into a TV ratings bonanza on Earth. But it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Tempers begin to fray; unsanctioned affairs blossom. When perfectly good equipment begins to fail, the Marsonauts are faced with a possibility that technology simply cannot explain. Irreverent, poignant, and perfectly weird, David Ebenbach's debut science-fiction outing, like a mission to Mars, is an incredible outing you will never forget.