Simplify

From the author of the acclaimed novel Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, come twelve haunting stories about people caught somewhere between love and madness. Simplify mines the often surreal terrain of people on the margins of life: from the man with a photo of Elvis bleeding on his wall in "Comeback Special," to the profoundly troubled boy genius of the title story "Simplify," to the family that must traverse "The Distance Between Us" to finally get to the truth about their son the murderer, each story hums with sharp drama, mystery, wonder, and startling humor. Simplify, the first collection of short fiction by Tod Goldberg, portrays a world where redemption, hope, and violence are never too far apart.

Literature & Fiction

Goldberg, Tod

Short Stories & Anthologies

OV Books

Powerful stories of a woman caught in the long shadow cast by the love of her motherThe tightly linked stories of Corrina Wycoff's gripping debut collection follow the life of Elizabeth Dinard. Raised in poverty by a schizophrenic single mother who self-medicates with heroin, Elizabeth experiences a childhood fraught with emotional and financial insecurity, as well as darker exploitations.Now living a fragmented and desperate adulthood, she continually attempts to outrun her brutal past but proves unable to let go of her love for the charismatic, lawless mother who continues to haunt her. In her struggles as she ages, leaves home, moves through lovers, loses her mother to suicide, and eventually becomes a single mother herself, Elizabeth's gritty determination to simply survive--to exist--is an enormous, if bittersweet, victory.

O Street

Wycoff, Corrina

Literary

Thirty acclaimed writers of international fiction explore the stranger in tales of cultural clashes and bonds. These stories of disparate experience travel beyond politics and multicultural manners to become an essential discussion of otherness.
Contributors include Nathan Englander, Laila Lalami, Ana Menendez, Josip Novakovich, Wanda Coleman, Tony d'Souza, Samrat Upadhyay, Mary Yukari Waters, Luis Alfaro, and Amanda Eyre Ward, as well as other accomplished writers from Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, some published for the first time in the United States.

A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Josip Novakovich

Ana Menéndez

LAILA LALAMI

Rashad Majid

Carolyn Alessio

Diane Lefer

Various, Authors

United States

“Allison Amend is a gifted storyteller, whose view of contemporary life is often wonderfully acute, original, and surprising.”—Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs: a Novel
Allison Amend’s writing is both thoughtful and entertaining, with a strong sense of humor throughout.
Allison Amend was born in Chicago, Illinois, on a day when the Cubs beat the Mets 2–0. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While there, she learned never to live downwind from a pig farm and how to put English on a cue ball. She lives in New York, writing and teaching fiction.

Things That Pass for Love

Amend, Allison

An emotionally powerful book; it is organic, surprising, and edgy in a way that will appeal to male readers as well as female readers. It has the potential to be groundbreaking in its raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family. Billy Lombardo is interested in the beauty of words. He is also a great observer of the world around him, and he is exquisite and precise in getting that world onto the page.
Billy Lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, a Chicago Tribune “Best Fiction of 2005” selection. His novel Man With Two Arms is due from The Overlook Press in 2010.

How to Hold a Woman

Lombardo, Billy

Contemporary

Tod Goldberg's stories are not like faceted jewels. They are like glinting barbed wire, actually, roped across the field where you are reading, racing, wondering what's next, and then pierced with longing, regret, or revelation. His new collection kept me reading like that racing to find out what would happen next to these people only Tod Goldberg could create.” Susan Straight Tod Goldberg is a gifted writer, a surveyor of the soul, and Other Resort Cities is powerful fiction. He catches his characters at moments of great stress, then reveals their depths to us with compelling insight and great empathy. He sure as hell knows the details that convince. These are inventive and fresh stories that might have been merely clever in lesser hands, but Goldberg’s talent and compassion extends dignity even to the most fucked-up and misbegotten lives.” Daniel Woodrell This is an excellent, compulsively readable collection. Goldberg knows and loves the cities of which he writes, and he brings their unsung citizens to life in a brilliant and affecting way.” Mary Yukari Waters Darkly funny and ferociously readable, Other Resort Cities is a book you'll want to spend your entire holiday reading. Because of the subtle crime plots that give each story momentum, Goldberg's book doubles as an ideal choice for mystery-lovers.”Tucson Weekly In ten seductive new stories, the author of Simplify and Living Dead Girl encounters the ruthless, vulnerable people who inhabit resort cities, along with their misdemeanors and felonies. A mobster hides out in Las Vegas posing as a rabbi; a casino cocktail waitress adopts a Russian teen in an attempt to outrun her loneliness; a disturbed husband sets up a Starbucks in his living room; a retired sheriff looks for his first wife's remains in the Salton Sea. Vibrant, moving, and often profound, Other Resort Cities is Goldberg at his best. Tod Goldberg is the author of seven books, including the novels Living Dead Girl (Soho Press), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Fake Liar Cheat (Pocket Books/MTV) and the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin). His short story collection Simplify (OV Books) was a 2006 finalist for the SCIBA Award for Fiction and winner of the Other Voices Short Story Collection Prize. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert campus.

Other Resort Cities

Piv and Robin are not such an unlikely match. Piv, a small-time hustler in Thailand, and Robin, a twenty-something backpacker from the United States, have always dreamed big dreams. What begins as a traveler's affair in Sukhothai quickly intensifies, and the young lovers envision an idyllic future together, traveling the world. Their plans are thwarted in Bangkok, however, when Robin runs out of money, her credit is denied, and she may have to leave Asia and Piv behind. Desperate, Piv turns to Abu, a charismatic businessman acquaintance, for help. Thus begins Piv and Robin's foray into exotic animal smuggling. Soon they find themselves amid an international crime ring that may have even darker underworld ties stretching from Kenya to Russia. Under the scrutiny of the traffickers who employ them, with investigators hot on t heir trail and idealistic dreams unraveling fast, Piv and Robin must face the consequences of their individual struggles for identity, as well as the cost of their mutual desires.

Currency (America's Haunted Road Trip)

Zolbrod, Zoe

From D. H. Lawrence to Philip Roth, acclaimed male writers have depicted sex from the perspective of female characters. Now, women writers from Aimee Bender to Jennifer Egan engage in provocative fictional cross-dressing, exploring sexuality from the male point of view. With a foreword by Steve Almond, this provocative collection includes work from twenty-six women in all, including Bender, Egan, Susan Minot, Elizabeth Benedict, Alicia Erian, and Diane Williams. Edited by Gina Frangello, Stacy Bierlein, Cris Mazza and Kat Meads—four women with a great deal of experience as editors (Other Voices Magazine, OV Books, anthologies) and authors.

Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience

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