Hailed as one of the most important Hispanic writers of his generation, Ilan Stavans is mostly known for his penetrating essays on culture. He is also a celebrated storyteller whose work has been translated into a dozen languages and has garnered numerous international awards. The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories contains three small, masterful gems. The novella "Morirse está en hebreo," is a thought-provoking meditation on continuity and tradition among Mexican Jews that takes place just as a decades-long one-party dictatorship is crumbling down. The volume also features "Xerox Man," an intriguing story about a book thief with a bizarre theological obsession, which was commissioned and broadcast by the BBC and has been widely anthologized. The title story "The Disappearance" is the resonant tale of a Belgian actor who kidnaps himself in an attempt to respond to neo-Nazi groups. Together, these three pieces offer an unforeseen vista of Jewish-Hispanic relations and confirm Stavans' reputation as a lyrical, daring, and original literary voice.Together, these three pieces offer an unforeseen vista of Jewish-Hispanic relations and confirm Stavans' reputation as a lyrical, daring, and original literary voice.

The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories

Literature & Fiction

Stavans, Ilan

Short Stories & Anthologies

TriQuarterly

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir: Stories

Winner of 2006 The Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award Children who anesthetize--and dress up--small wild animals in an ill-fated attempt to cheer their grieving mother; childhood friends who ritually return every year to the site of their near-kidnapping; an awkward teen trying to find his place among the cultural ruins of Greek Mythology Camp; brothers brought together, if not by mutual understanding, by a strange need to steal airport baggage: these are some of the characters who inhabit--and invariably tell--the stories in Joe Meno's Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir. Oddballs and charmers and would-be lovers, they are souls not so much lost as wandering, looking for something better, almost getting laid, trying to explain or, if all else fails, to entertain--and this they unfailingly do. Rarely has fiction so understated produced such hilarity and heartbreak. Novelist, music journalist, and playwright Meno writes squarely in the American tradition of wringing large effects from small change, revealing the subtlety in the broad stroke, and conveying complexity with seeming simplicity. Celebrated for its "unflinching honesty" (Entertainment Weekly) and for its "poetic and visceral style" (Booklist), his work resonates with the unmistakable magic and curious mystery of modern life.

Meno, Joe

Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.

Pacific Tremors

Stern, Richard

United States

Originally published in 1961, this shrewd, smartly written novel follows two American men traveling in Europe. Though both have struck out for the same continent, each man’s methods of and motives for travel lead him to have a very different experience than the other. Underlying it all is the premise that Europe--the contrast, the otherness of it--can be a refiner’s fire, deeply affecting a person’s character. Europe represents a crucial step in Stern’s development as a writer and stands as a witty, sharp point of entry into his writings and the writings of novelists who rose to prominence in the 1960s.

Europe: or Up and Down with Schreiber and Baggish

Quickly Changing River: Poems (Triquarterly Books)

Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim FellowshipWith her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive. Aletheia (Girl in River Water) First I saw your face,The your whole body lying still Hands jutting, eyelids shut  Twin nostrils flare, sheerEfflorescebce when memory cannot speak-a horde of body parts glistening.

Alexander, Meena

Poetry

Blind Speed: A Novel

Finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize 2009!
Not since Don DeLillo and George Saunders has a writer caught the humor and irreverent seriousness of our time like Barkan has through his protagonist Paul Berger, a flawed hero whose so-called fate drives him toward enlightenment just as surely as it propels him to destruction. Berger is stunned when he receives an ominous palm reading from a savvy guru at a health retreat in Iowa, of all places. And now it seems the prophecy is coming true. His fiancée, who is about to leave him, is shot at a historic reenactment of the Revolutionary War in Concord. One of his brothers, an astronaut, dies on 9/11 in the Pentagon. And his more famous brother, a lawyer and politician, kidnaps him in a media campaign to win an election. But is Paul’s life really controlled by fate? Or is the prophecy a lie he has latched onto ever since his band went under, leaving him almost famous yet unknown―a teacher at a community college, struggling to keep his job?
Blind Speed is a wildly entertaining exploration of intersecting lives in which what happens is never solely by chance or choice. Barkan has built a uniquely American satirical novel, a thoroughly twisted journey of discovery that pops and fires from its first shot in Concord to its last rifle blast, which echoes across the heartland. With global warming, 9/11, government and corporate deceit, and ecoterrorism, the novel dives into epic ideas, capturing America in all its dangerous myths.

Barkan, Josh

Deftly moving between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the profane, this collection of short stories is populated by modern children, ancient poets, dying men, and your basic, mundane Greek gods. Windsor turns familiar stories from the Bible and from myth inside out, exploring the feelings of minor characters and looking at events from imaginative perspectives. His prose is rich with detail and emotion and he touches on themes of art and artifice, success and failure, family and its sacrifices, and expectations met or missed. In “ The Last Israelite in the Red Sea,” a follower of Moses who dallies during their Exodus finds it more difficult to walk across the bottom of the temporarily displaced Red Sea without shoes. “ Four of the Times My Sister Cried” follows a young narrator as his family rehearses for his mother’ s death and then, as they must, lives without her. The wry “ The Art of War” has characters from Homer to a courtesan talking shop about the battle of Troy from their perspectives. Set as a series of short pieces, “ The Fleshly School of Poetry” tells of lessons learned and lessons taught. With its explorations of expectations, “ Meet the Author” gives readers intimate portraits of various plans or coping mechanisms people put up when death draws close. “ The End of the World” approaches the Rapture with a humorously practical spin: wouldn’ t the angels need a plan to ensure that it goes smoothly? “ In Parting” explores some of the troubles with family, especially when a sister’ s child turns out to be a marionette. The geographically explicit “ Three Mediums in San Francisco” touches on frustrated and imagined eroticism. The collection ends with “ The Hilton Epiphany,” a fitting closer in which divinity comes to an unlikely person in an unlikely place.

Visit Me in California: Stories

Windsor, Cooley

Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa.

Stranger's Notebook: Poems

Stone, Nomi

A collection of poems that features a stranger who arrives at an ancient community that is both at home and estranged on the island. It tells how the people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. It describes the daily lives of the Jews of Djerba and the Muslims next door.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the TriQuarterly publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by TriQuarterly

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the TriQuarterly publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir: Stories

Pacific Tremors

Europe: or Up and Down with Schreiber and Baggish

Quickly Changing River: Poems (Triquarterly Books)

Quickly Changing River: Poems (Triquarterly Books)

Blind Speed: A Novel

Visit Me in California: Stories

Stranger's Notebook: Poems

Stranger's Notebook: Poems