Dzanc Books: 412 books

Greenwich Village, 1959. Claire Bishop sits for a portrait-a gift from her husband-only to discover that what the artist has actually depicted is Claire’s suicide. Haunted by the painting, Claire is forced to redefine herself within a failing marriage and a family history of madness. Shifting ahead...

A collection of stories about baseball, Hitting Into the Wind contains the tale of a minor league player who fears that he will never make it, an umpire experiencing marital problems, and a man who collects old baseballs.

Short stories by the author of Men Under Water show thoughtful, conflicted protagonists pushing for balance in their personal relationships and finding hints of meaning in the acutely perceived oddities of contemporary American life. Living primarily on the fringes of academia, media and the arts,...

A trio of uncollected stories from early in TC Boyle's career, Rock and Roll Heaven shows all of the qualities that have people excited about Boyle from the beginning--great ideas, dazzling writing full of wit, black humor and wisdom. These three stories were published in journals but have not been included...

On St. Helena island in 1821 a mysterious doctor removes Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis from his corpse while in the next room his loyal lieutenants brag about their dead emperor’s merciless cruelty. Fifty years later the search for this itinerant appendage leads through Victorian London to ante-bellum...

This exceptional book of short stories, chosen for inclusion in the prestigious Illinois Short Fiction Series, contains Gerber's powerful tale "I Don't Believe This," which won an O. Henry Award.

Fifteen stories previously published in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and The Sewanee Review, Gerber's work discovers her roots in a background predominantly Jewish. Her female look at daily lives is a nice placement alongside a Philip Roth.

This is the poignant story of a loving, gentle man, "antique" by virtue, "an antique man" by profession. It is the story of his lingering death, of his transcendent courage, of the agony and solitude of those who must watch-his wife and two daughters. It is everyone's story in that it tells in specific...

Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women’s dorm...

Merrill Joan Gerber holds the record of having sold more short stories to Redbook Magazine than any other writer. This selection of twenty-five linked tales, published in Redbook from 1964 to 1991, chronicles the passionate (domestic) adventures of Janet, Danny and their three daughters.

The novel that takes his initial offers 14 ways of looking at Baumbach's poet-protagonist, an intellectual's Bukowski, 14 narrative variations on the distorting mirror, calling into question the validity, even the importance, of truth in memory.

Babble is a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost childhood. Babble depicts our world through metaphors, using dreams, memory and cultural fantasy. Three sections of this were published in Esquire.

Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley...

The setting is Belfast in the 1970s. Marius Moonston, age thirteen, is out and the streets are filled with danger and excitement—especially for Marius, whose pocket is burning with the money he has pilfered from his sister. Ricocheting through the story is the nature of deceit and truth, commerce,...