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Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow is one of the best books on writing I've ever read. It's also the funniest by a country mile. --Richard Russo, author of the North Bath trilogy
The long-awaited craft book from Steve Almond, based on three decades of writing, failing, and trying again. In Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, Steve Almond shares the insights gleaned from three decades as a beloved teacher and mentor, and a considerably less-beloved literary rabble rouser. His tone is irreverent. His ideas are iconoclastic. And his approach is stubbornly, radically, empathic. The goal is to explode the well-meaning but misguided myths that hold us back from writing our deepest and most honest work, to awaken the joys of storytelling while also confronting how grueling the process can be. Truth features chapters on plot, character, and chronology, but travels far beyond the earnest aims of most creative writing books, with essays about humor, sex, obsession, and writer's block, as well as prompts to generate new work and a rollicking Frequently Asked Questions section. You'll never think about writing the same way again.
A breathtaking success . . . dazzling. --San Francisco Chronicle
[A] rollicking, wide-ranging, unpredictable novel--part crime story, part coming-of-age, part satire, part deadly serious. --Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer finalist for The Great Believers Who pays for the secrets we keep? For the lies we tell ourselves? Lorena Saenz has just been paired with Jenny Stallworth for a school project by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different backgrounds. Jenny is pretty and popular, and Lorena is quickly drawn into the family's picture-perfect suburban lifestyle. Jenny's mother, Rosemary, is glamorous, but needy--she treats Lorena like a friend, if only to break up the monotony of lonely afternoons. Jenny's father, Marcus, spends his days teaching and his nights wandering the desert, absorbed in his research on the scorpions of Death Valley. Outwardly, they are the perfect family, poised for success in 1981 Sacramento at the dawn of a glorious American decade. Lorena finds her access intoxicating and alluring, a far cry from her life in the small apartment she shares with her single mother. But the veneer is shattered when Marcus disappears. The prime suspect: Lorena's troubled older brother, Tony. To uncover the truth, Lorena must embark on an unforgiving odyssey into the desert, into the secrets and lies of the Stallworth family, and the dark heart of America's criminal justice system. A shape-shifting social novel, All the Secrets of the World is a propulsive tour de force from a writer at the height of his powers.
Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer John Williams. It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.
In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America's soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.
Steve Almond's collection My Life in Heavy Metal presents twelve passion-fueled stories (including his Pushcart Prize-winning story The Pass) that take a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. These are powerful and resonant stories of love and lust, that bring to life a generation desperately searching for connection in a fragmented world.
In the title story, an El Paso newspaper clerk assigned to review the heavy metal bands playing local arenas is drawn in by the primal music, fueling a torrid affair with a Mexican-American woman that will change him forever. In Geek Player, Love Slayer, a thirty-three-year-old woman harbors a secret crush on the young computer repairman in her office-until her ardor is unleashed at an after-work party, with unexpected consequences. In Valentino, two teenagers spending their last summer together before heading off to college experience a sexual awakening inspired by the romantic legend of a movie star from long ago.
By turn tender and raw, visceral and other-worldly, the stories of My Life in Heavy Metal capture the moments when the fires of passion burn over and subside into embers of pain and longing. It is a dazzling debut by a vibrant new writer.
AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS, CANDYFREAK AND AGAINST FOOTBALL - In the BESTSELLING, BAD STORIES, Steve Almond will help you understand, What the hell just happened to our country?
I was enlightened and spellbound by Bad Stories, outraged and consoled.--Cheryl Strayed - A welcome change of pace from its mostly wonky competitors.--Washington Post - Unfold some timely insights and avenues into the despair stalking American public life.--Publishers Weekly - Almond holds up literature as a guide through America's age-old moral dilemmas and finds hope for his country in family, forgiveness, and political resistance.--Booklist Online
Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices--from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin--to help explain the roots of our moral erosion as a people.
The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment, sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class, immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at providing clarity. It's the book you can pass along to an anguished fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what the just hell happened to our country.
Now a major motion picture starring Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff.
A pair of romantic flameouts meet at a dull wedding and wind up entwined in a deserted coatroom. Shockingly, Jane and John decide not to have sex.
Instead, they embark on a far more dangerous endeavor: sharing the stories of their past love affairs. They tell each other everything, aiming for radical honesty over polished seduction. Jaded as they may be, these two sense that they just might be soulmates.
Which Brings Me to You, cowritten by bestselling authors Julianna Baggott (Pure, Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders) and Steve Almond (Candyfreak, All the Secrets of the World), is poignant and meaningful...fresh and intriguing...a great story.--Booklist. It has been brought to the screen by director Peter Hutchings (The Hating Game).
A breathtaking success . . . dazzling. --San Francisco Chronicle
[A] rollicking, wide-ranging, unpredictable novel--part crime story, part coming-of-age, part satire, part deadly serious. --Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer finalist for The Great Believers Who pays for the secrets we keep? For the lies we tell ourselves? Lorena Saenz has just been paired with Jenny Stallworth for a school project by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different backgrounds. Jenny is pretty and popular, and Lorena is quickly drawn into the family's picture-perfect suburban lifestyle. Jenny's mother, Rosemary, is glamorous, but needy--she treats Lorena like a friend, if only to break up the monotony of lonely afternoons. Jenny's father, Marcus, spends his days teaching and his nights wandering the desert, absorbed in his research on the scorpions of Death Valley. Outwardly, they are the perfect family, poised for success in 1981 Sacramento at the dawn of a glorious American decade. Lorena finds her access intoxicating and alluring, a far cry from her life in the small apartment she shares with her single mother. But the veneer is shattered when Marcus disappears. The prime suspect: Lorena's troubled older brother, Tony. To uncover the truth, Lorena must embark on an unforgiving odyssey into the desert, into the secrets and lies of the Stallworth family, and the dark heart of America's criminal justice system. A shape-shifting social novel, All the Secrets of the World is a propulsive tour de force from a writer at the height of his powers.
WINNER, PATERSON FICTION PRIZE
FINALIST, FOREWORD BOOK OF THE YEAR
OUTSTANDING COLLECTION, THE STORY PRIZE
LONGLIST, FRANK O'CONNOR INTERNATIONAL STORY PRIZE
BRONZE MEDALIST, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER
From a gifted storyteller who delivers always enjoyable, often hysterical stories (New York Times Book Review) comes a meditation on the American Dream and its discontents. In his most ambitious collection yet, Steve Almond offers a comic and forlorn portrait of these United States: our lust for fame, our racial tensions, the toll of perpetual war, and the pursuit of romantic happiness.
In the exuberant title story, a hapless would-be actor, desperate to escape the drudgery of his existence, lands the role of a lifetime. In Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched, reprinted in Best American Short Stories, a psychoanalyst with a secret gambling addiction squares off over the poker table against a damaged ex-patient. In First Date Back, a young woman becomes the target of a traumatized soldier's misguided hopes for love. And A Dream of Sleep, the collection's final story, presents a grief-stricken refugee who tends the graves of a forgotten cemetery, only to have his fragile peace shattered by an unwelcome visitor.
Each of these thirteen stories is an urgent investigation of America's soul, its particular suffering, its injustices, its possibilities for redemption. With deft sleight of hand, Almond, a writer who knows us as well as we know ourselves (Houston Chronicle), leavens his disappointment and outrage with a persistent hope for the men and women who inhabit his worlds. God Bless America offers us an astonishing vision of our collective fate, rendered in Almond's signature style of precise strokes . . . with metaphors so original and spot-on that they read like epiphanies (San Francisco Chronicle).
