Valerie Trueblood's Books

Terrarium

New and Selected Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Terrarium

New and Selected Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

Shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Award "Urgent, unnerving and tightly packed short fiction that covers enough ground for a library of novels." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice Valerie Trueblood's writing has been praised by The New York Times as "an exercise in literary restraint and extreme empathy." Selected here are stories from her previous collections—finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award—alongside her newest collection, which lends this book its name. The new stories collected within Terrarium represent an exciting direction for the author: a condensing of narrative and, in some cases, a departure from it into another state of mind. It's hard to describe any of Trueblood's stories as "typical." She does not write about people from a single class, or caste, or geographical area. She has not written a single story emblematic of her work. She does not write stories fantastical or eccentric. Ordinary life, her stories may be saying, is fantastical enough. She is more like Babel than Chekhov. In all her writing, it's clear that Trueblood believes that the short story can carry both the lightest and heaviest of loads. Terrarium highlights the achievement of simply living, the stories within often unresolved but in a state of continuation, expansion. Trueblood's stories aren't merely about their subjects, they're inside them.

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Page Count

432

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1640090746

ISBN 13

9781640090743

Search Party

Stories of Rescue

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Search Party

Stories of Rescue

By: Valerie Trueblood

In the epigraph to this volume, Penelope Fitzgerald tells us: "If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching," and so we discover each story here to follow the arc of a search, just as each also contains a rescue. What is immediately apparent is that it will be impossible to guess the form this rescue will take or even who it is who'll require it. Instead, the astonishingly talented Valerie Trueblood has imbued each story with its own depth and mystery, so rescue comes as a surprise to the reader, who is in intimate sympathy for the soul in extremity. And these are diverse characters whose fates, in lesser hands, might be thought of as hopeless: the fired cop turned security guard, the stolid, 19–year–old nurses' aide who will not be going to art school, the cynical radio producer who is dying of breast cancer and on a plane on her way to Lourdes. In these thirteen stories linked by a common transcendent human genius, the writing is confident and clear and original, and often drop–dead stunning, as if the stories are being told by the most casually eloquent among us.

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Page Count

177

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1619022230

ISBN 13

9781619022232

Seven Loves

A Novel

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Seven Loves

A Novel

By: Valerie Trueblood

This powerful novel about love and memory follows the seven major relationships in one woman's life.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

Back Bay Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0316007609

ISBN 13

9780316007603

Marry or Burn

Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Marry or Burn

Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

From the author of Seven Loves comes this austere, passionately shaped collection of stories that courageously explores the dynamic nature of modern marriage, the life–shattering heartbreak that often accompanies its collapse, and the fickle way in which the boundaries between us can be broken, erased, and newly defined. At her daughter's wedding, an alcoholic widow finds a new beginning when she is swept off her feet by the bride's former secret lover. A man finds himself in a position of terrible power when he discovers his ex–wife's boyfriend with another woman. A woman who killed her policeman husband in a rage struggles to reconcile feelings of emotional worthlessness and a longing for human affection after two decades in prison. A widower of twenty–three years introduces his wary daughters to his new love, a woman whom he has decided to marry one week after meeting, and who once took an axe to a bear to save her husband. Trueblood unites past and present through her characters' complex personalities as she skillfully unravels their tumultuous relationships, giving readers a glimpse into marital circumstances that, though often tragic, will surely ring familiar.

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Page Count

305

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1582435987

ISBN 13

9781582435985

Terrarium

New and Selected Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Terrarium

New and Selected Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Page Count

401

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

164009248X

ISBN 13

9781640092488

Seven Loves

A Novel

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Seven Loves

A Novel

By: Valerie Trueblood

This powerful novel about love and memory follows the seven major relationships in one woman's life.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

Back Bay Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0316007609

ISBN 13

9780316007603

Criminals

Love Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Criminals

Love Stories

By: Valerie Trueblood

Valerie Trueblood is, simply put, one of the finest story writers who is currently working in the American language, as prize committees acknowledge. In this, her beautifully made third collection, each of the fifteen stories asks two defining questions: What kind of love story is this? as well as, Who here is exactly what kind of criminal? In "His Rank," an armed man enters a bar to claim the girl he understands to be his destiny only to be told she has, the weekend before, married someone else. In "Skylab," in which lovers have run away together to work medical relief in Malaysia, the young woman is reading the Koran to learn what it says about adulterers even as she waits for satellite debris to rain down on her. She'll be punished, won't she, for the crime of happiness? And in "The Bride of the Black Duck" a new widow falls in love with an entire complicated family in her neighborhood, with whom she's suddenly, irrevocably plighted her troth: she is theirs, just as they are hers. In Criminals the stories are linked by theme, the characters often tender, movingly, but flawed; that is they are realistic. Love is hard won. When violence erupts it too is utterly convincing. With her keen eye, her fabulous ear and her generous heart, Trueblood's aim is to find characters in moments of true extremity when they are united in passion, connected not only to one another but to themselves. And—as with violence and as in real life—love erupts surprisingly, emerging out of the smooth blue surface of the mundane.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1619027526

ISBN 13

9781619027527

Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

By: Valerie Smith

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Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

By: Valerie Smith

It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.

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Page Count

188

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674800885

ISBN 13

9780674800885

Burnin' Down the House

Home in African American Literature

By: Valerie Sweeney Prince

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Burnin' Down the House

Home in African American Literature

By: Valerie Sweeney Prince

-- Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University

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Page Count

167

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231134401

ISBN 13

9780231134408

Dancing with Uncle Virgil 6x9

By: Valerie MacEwan

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Dancing with Uncle Virgil 6x9

By: Valerie MacEwan

A series of short stories combined to make one big bunch of fiction. Southern stories about Uncle Virgil, Aunt Katherine and a whole host of folks in Fordyce, Arkansas in the late 1970s. A short book of short fiction for those with short attention spans.

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Page Count

116

Publisher

Lulu.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

0359811604

ISBN 13

9780359811601

Seven Loves

By: Valerie Trueblood

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Seven Loves

By: Valerie Trueblood

This powerful novel about love and memory follows the seven major relationships in one woman's life.

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Page Count

112

Publisher

Little Brown

Published Date

ISBN 10

0316145394

ISBN 13

9780316145398

Bloodsuckers on the Bayou

The Myths, Symbols, and Tales Behind HBO's True Blood

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

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Bloodsuckers on the Bayou

The Myths, Symbols, and Tales Behind HBO's True Blood

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

True Blood is more than just an HBO show brimming with sex and gore, or another vampire horror story blown up by big media. Independent detective Sookie Stackhouse is following the classic heroine's journey, seen in epic myth and popular fantasy, from the quests of Isis and Demeter to the struggles of Dorothy Gale or Katniss Everdeen. Beside her, Sam, Jason, Alcide, Eric, and Bill, along with Pam, Tara, and Jessica embark on their own epic quests into darkness seeking freedom and belonging. From the show's mythic structure to the maenads, fairies, demonesses, werewolves, and vampires, True Blood swells from its ancient roots to tackle modern issues and sensibilities in a breathtaking epic...while still breaking taboos and tackling boundaries.

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Page Count

186

Publisher

Litcrit Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0615857809

ISBN 13

9780615857800

Women in Game of Thrones

Power, Conformity and Resistance

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

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Women in Game of Thrones

Power, Conformity and Resistance

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

Game of Thrones, one of the hottest series on television, leaves hundreds of critics divided on how "feminist" the show really is. Certainly the female characters, strong and weak, embody a variety of archetypes--widow queens, warrior women, damsels in distress, career women, priestesses, crones, mothers and maidens. However, the problem is that most of them play a single role without nuance--even the "strong women" have little to do besides strut about as one-note characters. This book analyzes the women and their portrayals one by one, along with their historical inspirations. Accompanying issues in television studies also appear, from the male gaze to depiction of race. How these characters are treated in the series and how they treat themselves becomes central, as many strip for the pleasure of men or are sacrificed as pawns. Some nude scenes or moments of male violence are fetishized and filmed to tantalize, while others show the women's trauma and attempt to identify with the scene's female perspective. The key is whether the characters break out of their traditional roles and become multidimensional.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

1476615543

ISBN 13

9781476615547

Buffy and the Heroine's Journey

Vampire Slayer as Feminine Chosen One

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

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Buffy and the Heroine's Journey

Vampire Slayer as Feminine Chosen One

By: Valerie Estelle Frankel

The worlds of Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and other modern epics feature the Chosen One--an adolescent boy who defeats the Dark Lord and battles the sorrows of the world. Television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer represents a different kind of epic--the heroine's journey, not the hero's. This provocative study explores how Buffy blends 1990s girl power and the path of the warrior woman with the oldest of mythic traditions. It chronicles her descent into death and subsequent return like the great goddesses of antiquity. As she sacrifices her life for the helpless, Buffy experiences the classic heroine's quest, ascending to protector and queen in this timeless metaphor for growing into adulthood.

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Age

Page Count

237

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

078648943X

ISBN 13

9780786489435

Book's by Valerie Trueblood

Terrarium

Terrarium

Search Party

Search Party

Seven Loves

Seven Loves

Marry or Burn

Marry or Burn

Terrarium

Terrarium

Seven Loves

Seven Loves

Criminals

Criminals

Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Burnin' Down the House

Burnin' Down the House

Dancing with Uncle Virgil 6x9

Dancing with Uncle Virgil 6x9

Seven Loves

Seven Loves

Bloodsuckers on the Bayou

Bloodsuckers on the Bayou

Women in Game of Thrones

Women in Game of Thrones

Buffy and the Heroine's Journey

Buffy and the Heroine's Journey

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