the university of alabama press us (744 résultats)

Paperback. Etat : New. Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts is a deluxe, commemorative edition of a beloved collection of ghostly stories from famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham's home state of Alabama. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home in Selma, Alabama, Kathryn Tucker Windham traveled the South, visiting the sites of spectral legends in Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, among other places. In Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts, a sequel to her landmark Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham introduces readers to thirteen more of Jeffrey's ghostly acquaintances, each with the charm and universal appeal that has created hundreds of thousands of Jeffrey fans.   Among the other hair-raising tales in this collection, Windham spotlights the apparitions of academia. From the three Yankee soldiers who haunt the University of Alabama's Civil War-era Little Round House to the Confederate soldier who resides in the University Chapel at Auburn University, Alabama's institutions of higher learning seem to have more than a few paranormal pupils.   Photographs of the sites about which Windham writes are one of the best-loved features of her series of "Jeffrey the Ghost" books. Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen features the image of a beautiful child who, though not photographed in life, reappeared long enough to be photographed with his bereaved father's borrowed camera. Bewitched readers will find the startling photograph of the child in the next-to-last chapter, just pages before he book's photograph of Windham's own spectral muse, Jeffrey.   This commemorative edition returns Windham's thrilling classic to its original 1982 keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author's children. First Edition, First Edition, Facsimile of the First with New Material ed.

Paperback. Etat : New. Would you have been able to withstand the psychological repercussions of being a part of the Manhattan Project? How would you survive the Japan-US transpacific crossing in an ocean-freighter? What are the pros and cons of living your life out of an 18-wheeler? How did we get to be homeless, living off recycled plastic and freebies from Calori-Mart? To be so rich that we obsess over the idea of becoming soda? Some of us live unmoving in plots of dirt or under beds. Others are duty-bound to search for husbands lost in the mountains of Japan. We dwell in the same spaces as Virginia Wolff and we sleep in BandBs previously occupied by too many people for peace of mind, all while plummeting to our deaths when the Golden Gate Bridge finally snaps. Still, we continue telling stories. Welcome to our lives. Welcome to those stories.

Paperback. Etat : New. To solve a love-triangle murder, a Taiwanese novelist takes a California road trip with her friend's son into the heart of the ÉmigrÉ Chinese literary world, where rumors swirl, money talks, and memoirs, novels, and translations compose the source material for a twenty-first-century Rashomon. Cycling through nested literary forms and genres, and fiction and reality, Daydreamers unravels a mystery set against the greater mystery of American identity, by means of the stories immigrants make of their pasts, presents, and desired futures in a protean new world.

Paperback. Etat : New.

Paperback. Etat : New. This work is a collection of innovation fictions that range widely in form and style. Alexandra Chasin's remarkable stories employ forms as diverse as cryptograms (in ""ELENA=AGAIN"") and sentence diagrams (in ""Toward a Grammar of Guilt"") to display her interest in fiction as a form constituted by print on the page, every bit as much as poetry. In ""They Come From Mars,"" the words are arrayed on the page like troops, embodying the xenophobic image of invading armies of immigrants and illegal aliens that animates the narrative. One story incorporates personal ads (""Lynette, Your Uniqueness""), another is organized alphabetically (""2 Alphabets""), while another leaves sentences unfinished (""Composer and I""). A number of stories take metafictional turns, calling attention to the process of writing itself. The last piece in the collection plays with genre distinctions, including an index of first lines and a general index. Set in New York, New England, Paris, and Morocco, these tales are narrated by men and women, old and young, gay, straight, and bisexual; one narrator is not a person at all, but a work of art. Each of these deft, playful, and sometimes anarchic fictions is different from the others, yet all are the unmistakable offspring of the same wildly inventive imagination.

Paperback. Etat : New. The mysterious houseboat Veronica motors across a postapocalyptic freshwater lake, inhabited by a black-haired witch and her young male ward. They explore an unfolding world of shape-shifting moons, vampire moths, and submerged witch cemeteries-a world where voluntary imprisonment holds its own appeal and the heart yearns for the delicate dance between blood and power, beauty and terror. Neither a pirate nor a mere witch, she is an artist, a master of water and time who shapes reality with her baffling powers. This lyrical and compelling novel beckons readers to explore the enigmatic depths of its prose, inviting them to traverse the waters of wonder and bewilderment. Embrace the bewitching allure of The Houseboat Veronica and lose yourself in its enchanting embrace.

Paperback. Etat : New. The stories in Victoria Lancelotta's Ways to Disappear excavate the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation. Populated by the grieving and the exultant and those who see no difference between the two, by men and women who are only a little bit broken and boys and girls who can't wait to be, by souls untethered, rootless, yet bound by blood and flesh, Lancelotta's characters are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they each inhabit, by turns strange and commonplace. In language lush and jagged, never sentimental, these stories scrutinize the exhaustion and enchantment of the everyday: houses seething with resentment and devotion, cars dream-full and hurtling the children in them into a world they think they know but can't imagine; front porches, back yards, luxury hotels, and truck stops. Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they've healed, but to be sure they're still there.

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Paperback. Etat : New. The Pillow Museum gathers 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world where the burden on women and families has become absurd and even funny. From the first sentence, Claire Bateman's gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar and also unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic.

Paperback. Etat : New. A love song in three movements A love song in three movements, As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body. A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest. A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he's killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother. An organ donor's body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria-desolation, peace, despair, rapture.

Paperback. Etat : New. Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy's School is a curse on life in a dying university system and an incantation for transforming the material of one's academic humbling into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood. The novel incorporates a variety of forms, including a dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade, a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student, a review of a found-footage horror movie that's also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory, an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that's really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother, and more. The whole functions as a caustic ritual. School overshares and withholds, cites and dÉtournÉs, chants and channels as it invokes the dead fathers of deconstruction for the black mass that occurs painfully and parodically across the pages. A hand-biting tale, one that chews off the finger instead of kissing the ring, School is a deeply unprofessional book about intellectual professions with reference to endless debt and neoliberalization, coercive seduction rites and fetishizations of authority, and the realization of a life in which you have not lost-and, yes, you deserve the full horizon of possibility.

Paperback. Etat : New. Asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a morally bankrupt world.

Paperback. Etat : New. There is a sense that, if only the pieces could be put together in the right way, some answer to a spill of unasked questions would become clear. There is Only One Ghost in the World follows the stories of a multilayered voice broken into fragments, an intimate witness that both delicately and bluntly reveals the best and the worst in all of us. The intricately woven voice(s) embark on a kaleidoscopic investigation into the loneliness of modern American life and family relationships, exploring the truths and lies we tell one another, and why, with empathy, grief, and humility. There is spiritual significance and consequence to these investigations, knit with the opaque vein of exploring language itself, the practice of etymological study wielded as one tool of unearthing. Inherently political, there is an unavoidable violence in this work, as stories travel from the oil-slicked beaches of California and the alleys of New Orleans to the steps of the Capitol. Here: the raw nerves of gender and identity; here: the lessons of heartbreak; here: true myths and old rumors; here: legacies of art and incisors of seasons. Incompletable Venn diagrams, sibling porn stars; addiction and climate change, the lyrics of disco and taxonomy of slot machines; last meals and unearthed mummies. There is Only One Ghost in the World is a book about what happened just before you woke up, and what happened just after. And what happened next.

Paperback. Etat : New. Hilary Plum's grave and elegant novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This is an elegy for those two deaths and the war itself. In They Dragged Them Through the Streets Hilary Plum gives form to the anger and troubled idealism of the American home front's experience of today's wars. Moving freely in time among multiple narrators who are seldom named or clearly identified, They Dragged Them Through the Streets highlights the trauma of being unable to hold on to what matters in life, to find a way to alter or influence what cannot be controlled. Poverty, madness, despair, the deep bonds and boundaries of friendship, love, family, national politics, the national obsession with war, addiction, idealism, nostalgia, grief-these all have a place in Plum's reckoning. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation's conflicts.

Paperback. Etat : New. A hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation; Maldon is an adjunct literature instructor at a prestigious East Coast university, with a deteriorating heart condition and no insurance. She finds herself caught between the demands of her job and the needs of her body, triggering economic and emotional strains that cause her to fantasize about taking her own life. But Maldon, who has pledged to safeguard her mother ever since their arrival in the US on a refugee ship from postwar Vietnam, has vowed to forgo suicide for as long as her mother is living. In time, her heart worsens rapidly, and she ventures cross-country to a place called Cloud for the operation that may save her life. In Cloud, Maldon is joined by old friend planet Neptune, who is hermaphroditic, peculiar, and has agreed to accompany Maldon through the operation.Swimming with Dead Stars is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of our existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all.

Paperback. Etat : New. A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate?a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray's stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird. Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

Paperback. Etat : New. After burning up the blacktop in New Mexico with The Fast Red Road and rewriting Indian history on the Great Plains with The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones now takes us to Montana. Set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon, is laid bare through the eyes of those who witness it: his near-death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the unnecessary death of one of his best friends. But through Doby there emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States Government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian Agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians. And the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history hurtling towards him. Jones's beautifully complex novel is a story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be: the power of one moment, the weight of one decision, the inevitability of one outcome, and the price of one life.

Paperback. Etat : New. A new edition of a classic and controversial novel; Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf--rape, pederasty, sexual excess--exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.

Paperback. Etat : New. The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.

Paperback. Etat : New. These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact. ""The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions"" is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In ""Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight,"" Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to create a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. ""Hyperfictions"" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from the former Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts? This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human - and awake - in the post-millenium.

Paperback. Etat : New. Meditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested-the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable  Winner of FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize   The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won't eat your soup. In "The Teeth, the Way I Smile," a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In "Smelly Smelly," a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In "You, Your Fault," we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other-including the parts that fixate on arson and murder. Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.

Paperback. Etat : New. Imagine a world where the American government signed a conservation act to ""restore all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains,"" which means suddenly the Great Plains are Indian again. Now fast-forward fourteen years to a bowling alley deep in the Indian Territories. People that bowling alley with characters named LP Deal, Cat Stand, Mary Boy, Courtney Peltdowne, Back Iron, Denim Horse, Naitche, and give them a chance to find a treaty signed under duress by General Sherman, which effectively gives all of the Americas back to the Indians, only hide that treaty in a stolen pipe, put it in a locker, and flush the key down the toilet. Ask LP Deal and the rest what they will trade to get that key back--maybe, everything.

Paperback. Etat : New.

Paperback. Etat : New. One of the best-known and widely shared books about the South, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey has haunted the imaginations of generations of delighted young readers since it was first published in 1969. Written by nationally acclaimed folklorists Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, the book recounts Alabama's thirteen most ghoulish and eerie ghost legends.Curated with loving expertise, these thirteen tales showcase both Windham and Figh's masterful selection of stories and their artful and suspenseful writing style. In crafting stories treasured by children and adults alike, the authors tell much more than ghost tales. Embedded in each is a wealth of fact and folklore about Alabama history and the old South. "I don't care whether you believe in ghosts," Windham was fond of saying. "The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts."Millions of readers cherish memories of being chilled as teachers and parents read them unforgettable stories like The Unquiet Ghost at Gaineswood about the ghost of Evelyn Carter, who fills this Demopolis antebellum mansion with midnight musical lamentations because her body wasn't returned to her native Virginia, and The Phantom Steamboat of the Tombigbee about the wreck of the steamboat Eliza Battle, which caught fire on the way to Mobile and sank one February night in 1858. People who live along the river say the flaming steamboat wreck still rises on cold nights, its cotton cargo blazing across the waves while its terrified survivors cry for help from the icy water.The title's "Jeffrey" refers to a friendly ghost who resides in the Windham home and who served as Windham's unofficial collaborator in this work and the subsequent books in this popular series, all of which are now available in high-quality reproductions of their spooky originals.

Paperback. Etat : New. Winner of FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction PrizeA novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona. Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven's wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It's also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes. In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.

Paperback. Etat : New. Third Edition. This revised and expanded third edition extends Ostrom's analysis to account for the most resent developments in American politics, including those of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Paperback. Etat : New. The Bitter Half disrobes the reality of gender, performing a striptease of masks and prosthetic devices, the subtle articulations and miscues of desire. A spit-curl lovingly tucked behind a diamond stud earring, hair brushed pageboy-style, a bibliographic collection of mastectomy scars: Toby Olson's characters swarm with sexual multiplicity, each offering for exhibit a cyclorama of titillating identities. This game of poses, of one self revealed within another, opens in a jail in Depressionera Pearce, Arizona. Chris Pollard, a consultant in the field of prison escapology, has arrived to investigate the case of an inmate who's broken out of every prison in which he has been detained. The two develop an evasive fondness from a distance - an attention to cowlicks and thin lips from between bars. Their relationship remains concealed among levels of identity, Russian Matryoshka dolls, a mystery within a mystery. Revealing their mutual attraction inch-by-inch, ""The Bitter Half"" uncovers a topographical map of seductions, of stratified assumptions and amorphousness. Toby Olson's latest work of fiction is rich in strangeness and erotic delight, a delectation to be enjoyed one layer at a time.

Paperback. Etat : New. Torment and Tequila in Belle Epoque Mexico is the first English-language collection of selected fiction of the major Mexican author and political figure José López Portillo y Rojas (1850 - 1923). López Portillo y Rojas's career spanned the late nineteenth century to the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution. Included in this collection, the novella Nieves is one of the most frequently cited nineteenth-century Mexican literary works.

Hardback. Etat : New.

Paperback. Etat : New. Enter a world where time stands still and summer never ends. In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it's July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them. Otis and Joy, intrepid siblings, work with their family and friends to oppose a formidable adversary: The Owners. These cunning and ruthless old men, driven by insatiable greed, hold the town hostage, exploiting its resources and dividing its people. In this powerful #OwnVoices narrative, Tannery Bay is a captivating tale of Black Joy and Queer Joy and the ways in which family is both biological and chosen, where love transcends boundaries, and where art is a vehicle for change.