Steve Almond

In this latest volume of Ig's popular Auteur series, New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond (Candyfreak, Against Football) examines the legacy of Ordinary People, Robert Redford's 1980 Oscar winning film, which he sees as a masterpiece of male vulnerability. Almond regards the film as a masterpiece of psychological drama, one of the few films that outshines its own literary source material. The film offered Almond and his brothers a private language, with which they could articulate anxieties and terrors that they couldn't always speak about openly, even as the children of two psychoanalysts. As a man struggling with the demise of his marriage, Almond sees the film as a kind of requiem for the happy, vibrant family he hoped to create. He also sees Ordinary People as a powerful reminder of the values that prevailed before a rising tide of American cruelty, which has celebrated masculine rage and violence as a means to power. The movie isn't just about a grieving family, but a nation that has surrendered its capacity to love openly, to mourn collectively, and to forgive.

“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 trilogyThe 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 BelieversWho 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.

This latest edition of the Cambridge-based literary magazine introduces, in addition to an exciting mix of poetry, ideas essays, fiction, and comics, a new focus on science and on food writing with the new "Zest " section.

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 hell happened to our country.

In (Not that You Asked), Steve Almond documents a life spent brawling with the idiot kings of modern culture. He squares off against Sean Hannity on national TV, takes on Oprah Winfrey, nearly gets kidnapped by a reality TV crew, and winds up in Boston, where he quickly enrages the entire population of Red Sox Nation. Amid the carnage, he finds time to celebrate his literary hero, the late Kurt Vonnegut. These are essays the Los Angeles Times has called rich, fearless and] cutting. Praise for (Not that You Asked) Refreshingly irreverent . . . absurdly funny. The Boston Globe Almond] scores big in every chapter of this must-have collection. Biting humor, honesty, smarts and heart: Vonnegut himself would have been proud. Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Taunting, revealing, irreverent, and earnest. The New York Times Steve Almond has created a distinctive voice and literary persona. Pleasure-obsessed, self-deprecating, horny, hilarious and always dedicated to parsing the messy terrain of the human heart. Forward.com"

Presents a series of traded and shared confessions of John and Jane; their messy sexual and emotional histories, their first shy, callow relationships, their past errors and big loves, their flaws and their passions. This novel features stories that reveal the ways in which both Jane and John have grown and grown up, and changed and not changed.

Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend’s novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.

Steve Almond's stunning first collection of short stories explores the lives of young men in their twenties and thirties, their confusions, their obsessions, their emotional complexities, taking a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence.

This first collection of 12 powerful stories takes a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. A top five Book Sense 76 title.