Dzanc Books: 412 books

Set in New York City and Prague in 1992, Kafka’s Son follows a first-person narrator who is a documentary filmmaker. In a New York synagogue, he meets an elderly Czech Jew named Jiri, once the head of the famous Jewish Museum in Prague, with whom he discovers a shared love of Kafka. Inspired by this...

Michael Pearson writes about his travels to places of literary import: Frost's Vermont, Faulkner's Mississippi, Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, Hemingway's Key West, Steinbeck's California, and Twain's Missouri.

A psychological mystery. Joel Stabler kills his beloved brother Danny in what appears to be murder in the name of mercy. When Joel's lawyers assign a psychologist to determine his sanity at the time of the shooting, the full story of Joel's family's past, and the long line of mental illness in that history,...

"The stories of this collection occupy the gray borderland where betrayal mixes with trust, violence with affection, humiliation with lust. The effect is quietly haunting."--Publishers Weekly

A trip to the salvage yard reveals infidelity and theft. An unlicensed entomologist celebrates his freedom with a compulsive liar while a manhunt ensues on the streets outside the bar. Packed with heart, honesty and humor, Between Wrecks offers a glimpse into rural life from one of America's keenest observers.

A collection of personal essays written between 1976 and 1983 for The Dallas Times Herald. They have a universality and a timelessness that makes them suitable for a much wider audience than the population of one urban area of Texas. What jumps out in these essays is not so much the actions within, so much as Bryan Woolley's reactions to these actions and events.

“Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat.” -Blake ButlerPRAISE“This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter...

David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer’s block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back harder. So when his agent suggests maybe a lighter sophomore novel, maybe something genre that they can sell real quick and buy him some more time...

You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor-this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam.

In Everyday Psychokillers spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror.

With fictions from four previous collections, as well as eight new fictions covering the past decade, Olsen has put together a fantastic overview of his lengthy and critically acclaimed history as an author.

Still Pitching is the coming-of-age story of growing up in New York in the ’50s revolving around Steinberg’s passion for baseball.

Time Done Been Won’t Be No More: Collected Prose by William Gay is a collection of short stories, essays, memoirs, and an interview. Gay is well known for his fiction but he is also widely published with his essays, mostly dealing with music, and his memoirs. This is the first collection that includes...

At heart, these stories explore generational intersections, with teenagers confronting the moments that will foment their directions to adulthood, and adults searching out opportunities for change in their present lives, gazing back on their own defining experiences in order to help chart new courses.Jeff...