American Literature Anthology

Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.

The Best American Short Stories 2021 immerse the listener in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King’s final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy’s gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience.

Akashic Books’ acclaimed series of original noir anthologies has set a high standard for portraying cities and their neighborhoods in all their dark and violent splendor. Now, Mexico City Noir surpasses that standard with phantasmagorical tales of double-dealing, corruption, violence and self-delusion.... This collection is such a varied literary feast.

Here is the preface to twelve magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Meticulous, funny, eccentric - Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless. The closing of Brandon College, the institution she'd spent more than fifteen years at, changes everything. Forced to find another position, Mary finds herself at an experimental college in rainy Oregon.

A rural town finds itself under the authoritarian sway of a tree that punishes children. A pair of old friends navigate their fraught history as strange happenings escalate in a Mexican restaurant. A pair of narcissistic friends wreak havoc on an activist community. An aloof young man finds himself living through his lover’s memories. And a day of LARPing takes a cosmic turn.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

Did Mark mean what Alison Lind hoped? Was her boss declaring his passion for her? Did he really feel the same way she secretly felt for him? Apparently not. Instead of asking her to be his lover, he was asking her to be temporary nanny to his baby niece. Not an ounce of desire in sight. Or was there? Living together, spending time in intimate surroundings, created a sensual tension too powerful to ignore. How long before this strictly business relationship turned into a strictly passionate predicament?

This exciting collection presents two previously unpublished stories by SF legend Octavia E. Butler. A Necessary Being precedes the events of Survivor, Butler's third (famously disowned) installment in her Patternist series, and includes characters from it, focusing exclusively on the Kohn, aliens who build their social hierarchies on the blueness of their fur. In Childfinder, a black woman with the gift of identifying children with latent psychic ability refuses to share her skill with an organization of white telepaths.

To Chinese American teenager Chuntao, New Lake is a beautiful haven where she can hunt for treasures once swallowed up by a big flood. But when she’s caught scavenging by her biology teacher, a woman whose own past has been swept away, Chuntao is faced with an imponderable question: Which world was better - the ideal one she never knew or the destroyed one that now belongs to her?

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.

A thoroughly engaging collection of great classic tales by the very best American authors. 1. 'From Beyond' by H. P. Lovecraft 2. 'The Mysterious Card and the Card Unveiled' by Cleveland Moffett 3. 'Pigs Is Pigs' by Ellis Parker Butler 4. 'The Club of One-Eyed Men' by Arthur Somers Roche 5. 'Afterward' by Edith Wharton 6. 'The Furnished Room' by O. Henry 7. 'A Descent into the Maelström' by Edgar Allan Poe 8. 'Regret' by Kate Chopin 9. 'The Terrible Old Man' by H. P. Lovecraft 10. 'The Dumb Man' by Sherwood Anderson

A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them.

Flexin' & Sexin' is back with it's second installment of urban erotic tales. This anthology is jammed packed with sexy street tales featuring some of today's hottest urban & erotic authors. This book is filled with sex, drama, and violence with amazing twist, leaving you shocked.

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants.

Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history.

Veteran authors Ashley and JaQuavis offer up their first solo efforts, and they're hotter than ever! Along with Ayana Ellis, they introduce listeners to some "real sistas" who know how to get what they want at all costs. For these women, if it's dangerous it just means the payout will be that much sweeter.

Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor.Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this diverse collection of short stories.

Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals.