Essays

How do American girls see themselves and their lives today? What are their dreams? Jenny, Laura, and Martha McPhee take readers into the world of girls today, in this beautiful book of original photographs and life stories culled from the sisters' interviews with girls across America.

Selected short fiction, nonfiction, poetry & prose from The Association of Rhode Island Authors: Martha Reynolds, Jill Fague, Theresa Schimmel, Debbie Kaiman Tillinghast, David Boiani, Steven R. Porter, Kevin Duarte, Hank Ellis, Barbara Ann Whitman, Judith Boss, R.N. Chevalier, Mike Squatrito, Jack Nolan, Jess M. Collette, Richard Maule, Michael Geisser, Emily Tallman, Belle DeCosta, Joann Mead, Alexander Smith, Pete A. O'Donnell, Abraham Simon, and Bary Fleet.

Something is going on out there. Almost simultaneously, many of our finest writers are experimenting with a new nonfiction form: brief pieces that are literary and personal rather than informational, complete in themselves, and short--very short. Although the form has not had a name until now, the writers who are attracted to it include the known--Tim O'Brien, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Ondaatje--as well as just-discovered voices in the field of creative nonfiction, a genre that is transforming the essay.

Delights and surprises await the reader in this rich gathering of Shorts. From Diane Ackerman's fascination with hummingbirds, to Andrei Codrescu's idiosyncratic view of nostalgia, to Albert Goldbarth's free-wheeling riff on the universe, each Short--ranging from several paragraphs to 2,000 words--becomes a sharply focused lens on an outer world or an inner sensibility.

In Short, reflecting almost every way in which nonfiction can be written, is for all readers (and writers) who thrive on imaginative play and aesthetic satisfaction. Pick up this book; open it up. See if you can resist it.