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Book
Xangans
by Graham Worthington
Xangans are unique; they are the only blogging community who have named themselves after their on-line playground, Xanga.com, The World's Greatest Blogging Community. It is their jungle, their pulpit and endless party, Xanga. Knowing each other well onscreen, yet rarely meeting in real life, they form an Empire on which the Sun never Sets, straddling the world from Detroit to Liverpool, from Toronto to Singapore. Entertaining, quarrelsome, compassionate, bitchy, they have used Xanga to express their talents, their beliefs, their confusions, their pain, their joy, until it has become an essential and enduring part of their lives. I first joined Xanga in 2006. I too flirted with other blogging systems, and saw them swell to vast size, only to dwindled into irrelevance; Xanga has remained the only one in which the written word has ruled and flourished. In this collection of thirty-three blogs, stories and poems by Xangans writing today, some published writers, some - as yet - unknown, we hear the voices of on-line authors struggling to make sense of this world. From the raw cynicism of Lindensmith's "Another Night on the Town" to the life-affirming cheer of Lymne Hamel's "Blessings," we pass through eroticism, through the joys and terrors of love, through the conflicts of religion and the confusions of society, through satire, humor, horror and sentiment.


Book
Zorn
by Graham Worthington
In the year 2035 it's cool to be bisexual - or at least pretend to be - and cool to be young, but to be both and on holiday in France is the coolest of all. Zorn and family are at The Anders Hotel, in the little port of Roknor, whose main attraction in daytime is its crowded beach, and in the evening its many clubs. Rejoicing in recently turning sixteen, Zorn has ten days to find Holiday Love, and isn't helped by the presence of Kevin, a coarse and violent homophobe. But despite their differences, neither can escape life's challenges, and find to their dismay that our joys and sorrows come mixed and inseparable. The mid twenty-first century is a time of looking back, a time laden with much nostalgia for the past, but little money. The Great World Depression of the 2020s has seen to that. It is a time of thumbing through the music, films and fashions of the last century, a time of imitating the lost Golden Age of the 1900s. It is also the era of core language, the final perfection of politically correct speech avoiding the use of such hideously offensive words as "he" and "she," with all their built-in stereotypes, all their dangerous assumptions about gender roles and sexuality. Yet it is a time when, though all has changed, nothing has changed. The sea still surges to the distant horizon, the waves still crash to the beach, and on these daily washed sands new people act out the ancient dramas afresh. Zorn is a story of romance, adventure and coming of age in this post-apocalyptic society.
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Book
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
by Tobias Wolff
Variously funny, frightening, poignant, and exhilarating, these collected stories displays the best American writers at the peak of their powers and the national narrative at its most eloquent, truthful, and inventive. The thirty-three stories in this volume prove that American short fiction maybe be our most distinctive national art form. As selected and introduced by Tobias Wolff, they also make up an alternate map of the United States that represents not just geography but narrative traditions, cultural heritage, and divergent approaches. Contributors and stories include: Mary Gaitskill, "A Romantic Weekend"; Andre Dubus, "The Fat Girl"; Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"; Raymond Carver, "Cathedral"; Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"; Mona Simpson, "Lawns"; Ann Beattie, "A Vintage Thunderbird"; Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl"; Stuart Dybek, "Chopin in Water"; Ron Hansen, "Wickedness"; Denis Johnson, "Emergency"; Edward P. Jones, "The First Day"; John L'Heureux, "Departures"; Ralph Lombreglia, "Men Under Water"; Robert Olmstead, "Cody's Story"; Jayne Anne Phillips, "Home"; Susan Power, "Moonwalk"; Amy Tan, "Rules of the Game"; Stephanie Vaughn, "Dog Heaven"; Joy Williams, "Train"; Dorothy Allison, "River of Names"; Richard Bausch, "All The Way in Flagstaff, Arizona"; and more.
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