Steve Almond

"The scorpion hunts while the rest of us dream. That's why he knows all the secrets of the world." It's 1981 in Sacramento, and 13-year-old Lorena Saenz has just been paired with Jenny Stallworth for the science fair by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different worlds. The unlikely friendship they form will draw their families into a web of secrets and lies, one that sends Lorena on an unforgiving odyssey through the desert, past the gates of a religious cult in Mexico, and into the dark heart of America's criminal justice system. A sweeping social novel, All the Secrets of the World introduces readers to a cast of indelible characters while illuminating the moment in our national history when the call for law and order became the dominant force within our public life. For fans of both Little Fires Everywhere and Breaking Bad, Steve Almond's long-awaited debut novel is a propulsive tour de force--the sheer scope, moral complexities, and piercing insights mark a writer at the height of his powers.

All the Secrets of the World

Candyfreak Counter Display 6-Copy contains:

A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

Candyfreak

Stories

My Life in Heavy Metal

Drooling fanatic, n. 1. One who drools in the presence of beloved rock stars. 2. Any of a genus of rock-and-roll wannabes/geeks who walk around with songs constantly ringing in their ears, own more than 3,000 albums, and fall in love with at least one record per week. With a life that’s spanned the phonographic era and the digital age, Steve Almond lives to Rawk. Like you, he’s secretly longed to live the life of a rock star, complete with insane talent, famous friends, and hotel rooms to be trashed. Also like you, he’s content (sort of) to live the life of a rabid fan, one who has converted his unrequited desires into a (sort of) noble obsession. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life traces Almond’s passion from his earliest (and most wretched) rock criticism to his eventual discovery of a music-crazed soul mate and their subsequent production of two little superfans. Along the way, Almond reflects on the delusional power of songs, the awkward mating habits of drooling fanatics, and why Depression Songs actually make us feel so much better. The book also includes: • sometimes drunken interviews with America’s finest songwriters • a recap of the author’s terrifying visit to Graceland while stoned • a vigorous and credibility-shattering endorsement of Styx’s Paradise Theater • recommendations you will often choose to ignore • a reluctant exegesis of the Toto song “Africa” • obnoxious lists sure to piss off rock critics But wait, there’s more. Readers will also be able to listen to a special free mix designed by the author, available online at www.stevenalmond.com, for the express purpose of eliciting your drool. For those about to rock—we salute you!

A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

"Steve Almond is one of our finest literary provocateurs. His stories are without equal in their beautiful terrible honesty. Stylish and finely wrought, these are tales with the force of life itself.

God Bless America

If you're one of the millions of Americans lying awake at night, asking yourself, How did we get here? you need to read Bad Stories. In a short, sharp lamentation, New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond explains why the election of a cruel con artist was not only possible, but inevitable.

What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Bad Stories

Argues that not only is American football hazardous to players' health, and especially to their brains, but also that American support of the sport encourages violence, prejudices, and other ethically troubling behavior.

One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

Against Football

"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 Believers Who 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.

Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions

(Not that You Asked)

Julianna Baggott

A two-sided look at modern love-- and lust-- by two bestselling writers at the top of their form. Two rambunctious, romantic flameouts. One boring wedding. One heated embrace in a quiet coatroom. This is not exactly the recipe for true love. John and Jane's lusty encounter at a friend's wedding isn't really the beginning of anything with any weight to it; even they know that. When they manage to pull back, it occurs to them that they might start this whole thing over properly. They might try getting to know one another first, through letters. What follows is a series of traded confessions-- of their messy histories, their past errors, their big loves, their flaws, and their passions. Each love affair, confessed as honestly as possible, reveals the ways in which Jane and John have grown and changed-- or not changed-- over the years; the people they've hurt, the ones still bruised. The ones who bruised them.Where all of this soul-baring will take them is the burning question behind every letter-- a question that can only be answered when they meet again, finally, in the flesh.

A Novel in Confessions

Which Brings Me to You

A second story collection by the author of Candyfreak captures the colorful lives of such characters as a young magazine editor forced to endure a bizarre blind date, a couple positive that have received implants by space aliens, a young boy desperate to please his father with his baseball skills, and others.

The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories

Presents a compilation of original essays that explore the moral dilemmas of modern-day America, ranging from aquatic onanism to the consumption of ham for Chanukah.

Not that You Asked

Two lonely, lived-in, thirty-somethings. One boring wedding. One heated encounter in a quiet cloakroom.It's not exactly the recipe for love. And John and Jane's time in a cloakroom clearly isn't the beginning of anything real; even they know that. When they manage to pull back, literally, it occurs to them that they might start this whole thing over, properly. They might try getting to know one another first. But they live on opposite sides of the country. So they agree to write.And they do. What follows is a series of traded and shared confessions- of their messy sexual and emotional histories, their first shy, callow relationships, their past errors and their big loves, their flaws and their passions. Each story of a love affair - confessed with striking honesty - reveals the ways in which both Jane and John have grown and grown up, changed and not changed, over the years; the people they hurt, the ones still bruised, the ones that bruised them. Where all of this confession will take them is the burning question behind every letter - one that can only be answered when they meet again, finally, in the flesh...This is a remarkable novel - indeed a tour-de-force - in its extraordinary well-observed insights into the way we live now, of mating and dating in a post-feminist time, of the negotiations between the sexes in the challenging world of equal but different. Written by a man and a woman, it is not only remarkable, it is unique.

In his entry in Ig's Bookmarked series, best-selling author Steve Almond takes on John Willams's classic American novel, Stoner.

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked

Cris Mazza

Megan Giddings

Rick Moody

Stephen Dixon

Edward Gauvin

Weston Cutter

Thomas Owen

Jesse Damiani

Richard Peabody

Rae Bryant

Kyle Noe

Lindsay Lusby

Andrew Roe

Morgan Elliot

Marjorie Maddox

Jason Olsen

Chad Simpson

Moira Egan

David Everett

Billie Tadros

David Wagoner

Ogun Afariogun

Jill Birdsall

Nathan Blake

Carlyn Davis

Matt Ferner

Suzanne Hopcroft

Don Hucks

Len Kuntz

Alexis Covato

B. J. Lloyd

Bird Marathe

Jacob Oet

Joseph A. W. Quintela

Chas Schroeder

The Size Queens

Michael Shum

Vallie Lynn Watson

John Silbey Williams

Britt Gambino

Chelsey Clammer

Gabriela Romeri

Vipra Ghimire

Lisa A. Dulin

Mark Farrington

"Eclectic selection of work from both emerging and established writers...." (The Washington Post), Eckleburg is a collection of stories, poetry, translations, and artwork by award-winning and emerging talents such as Rick Moody, Stephen Dixon, Cris Mazza, and Eckleburg's 2013 Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction winner, Jill Birdsall. Eckleburg No. 18 is a textual and graphic innovation for both the traditionalists and nonconformists.

The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review No. 18

Jonathan Lethem

Mary Ruefle

Edward Carey

Daniel Wallace

Caitlin Horrocks

Matthew Zapruder

Dean Young

Paul Lisicky

Rikki Ducornet

V. V. Ganeshananthan

Donald Revell

Tomaz Salamun

John Hilgart

Literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, and the strange.

Unstuck

How does Steve Almond get himself into so much trouble? Could it be his incessant moralizing? His generally poor posture? The fact that he was raised by a pack of wolves? Frankly, we haven’t got a clue. What we do know is that Almond has a knack for converting his dustups into essays that are both funny and furious. In (Not that You Asked), he squares off against Sean Hannity on national TV, nearly gets arrested for stealing “Sta-Hard” gel from his local pharmacy, and winds up in Boston, where he quickly enrages the entire population of the Red Sox Nation. Almond is, as they say in Yiddish, a tummler. Almond on personal grooming: “Why, exactly, did I feel it would be ‘sexy’ and ‘hot’ to have my girlfriend wax my chest? I can offer no good answer to this question today. I could offer no good answer at the time.” On sports: “To be a fan is to live in a condition of willed helplessness. We are (for the most part) men who sit around and watch other men run and leap and sweat and grapple each other. It is a deeply homoerotic pattern of conduct, often interracial in nature, and essentially humiliating.” On popular culture: “I have never actually owned a TV, a fact I mention whenever possible, in the hopes that it will make me seem noble and possibly lead to oral sex.” On his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut: “His books perform the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination.” On religion: “Every year, when Chanukah season rolled around, my brothers and I would make the suburban pilgrimage to the home of our grandparents, where we would ring in the holiday with a big, juicy Chanukah ham.” The essays in (Not that You Asked) will make you laugh out loud, or, maybe just as likely, hurl the book across the room. Either way, you’ll find Steve Almond savagely entertaining. Not that you asked. “A pop-culture-saturated intellectual, a kindly grouch, vitriolic Boston Red Sox hater, neurotic new father and Kurt Vonnegut fanatic… [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)

Nathan Leslie

This print anthology will compile the best fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that onine literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize anthology, The O.Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories.

Best of the Web 2008

From the New York Times–bestselling author and Dear Sugars columnist, an arousing story collection exploring modern love in the age of hook-up culture. Steve Almond’s My Life in Heavy Metal presents twelve passion-fueled stories—including his Pushcart Prize-winning story “The Pass”—that take a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. These are powerful and resonant stories of love and lust that bring to life a generation’s search for connection in a fragmented world. In the title story, an El Paso newspaper clerk assigned to review the heavy metal bands playing local arenas is drawn in by the primal music, fueling a torrid affair with a Mexican-American woman that will change him forever. In “Geek Player, Love Slayer,” a thirty-three-year-old woman harbors a secret crush on the young computer repairman in her office-until her ardor is unleashed at an after-work party. In “Valentino,” two teenagers in their last summer before college experience a sexual awakening inspired by the romantic legend of a movie star from long ago. A book The Guardian called “hip social satire,” My Life in Heavy Metal captures the moments when the fires of passion burn over and subside into embers of pain and longing. “[A] gifted storyteller . . . [Almond] writes with a loose, anthropological humor.” —The New York Times Book Review “Fourteen delightful debut stories.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Robert Pinsky

The new Resistance Issue of Pangyrus Literary Magazine features many of the artists who've lit up the stage during Resistance Mic!'s first and second seasons at the OBERON in Harvard Square: Robert Pinsky, Steve Almond, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Kazim Ali, Kim Stafford, Brenda Hillman, Regie Gibson, Anne Champion, Krysten Hill, Jennifer Jean, Tim McCarthy, and many more. Full of hope, outrage, humor and insight, the magazine is the necessary companion to impossible times.

The Resistance Issue

Pangyrus Five

Steve Almond

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