"Is it true that Neanderthal women have natural charm? How do you cope with a spouse who's a charismatic kleptomaniac? Does it matter if the souvenir you bring home from Africa is another human being? What can a wife do if all that remains of her husband is what he left in the bathroom that morning? Never mind waking up one morning as a giant insect. What about metamorphosing into your mother? David Galef's My Date with Neanderthal Woman, the winner of Dzanc Books' first Short Story Collection Competition, responds to these and other questions: thirty-three visions of lives that--let's hope--are far from your own."--Page 2 of cover.

From the author of The Bear, the enthralling story of two women separated by millennia, but linked by an epic journey that will transform them both. Forty thousand years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself. In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women's lives. Haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving, The Last Neanderthal asks us to reconsider all we think we know about what it means to be human.

So I may be in the Last Single Man Standing competition with my cousins, but five minutes around Kinsey was all it took to take myself out. Who cares about bragging rights when you’ve just found the woman you’re going to marry? Sure, she may work for my biggest competitor. Sure, she’s not dating right now. Sure, she’s my sister’s best friend and I’ve been sworn off her. But somehow she agrees to go on six fake dates to help me save face in this competition. What does the guy who never uses his words have to say to convince the girl of his dreams that they’re perfect for each other? Each book in the Last Man Standing series is STANDALONE: * Mama's Boy * Neanderthal * Mansplainer

This book proposes a study of a new postmodern prose fiction genre, the short-short story. Considerations of generic classifications and boundaries are followed by an historical overview and analysis of short fiction from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, especially under the influence of the Russian Anton Chekhov, who is regarded as the father of the modern short story. The postmodern short-short story is seen as emerging from this trend, a hybrid genre with characteristics of the narrative language of her prose genres such as the short story and the journalistic writing. The cluster of features, such as condensation, lack of character development, surprise endings, etc., which is seen as characteristic of the short-short story, are discussed, and ten examples are summarized and analyzed, including two traditional short stories for contrast. It is seen that the short-short story may be further broken into what is called “the new sudden fiction” and the even shorter and more radical “flash fiction.”

** WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2021 ** 'Beautiful, evocative, authoritative.' Professor Brian Cox 'Important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.' Yuval Noah Harari Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside clichés of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination, perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance.

"Over the past ten years or so, "Short-shorts" or "Flash Fiction" has emerged as an increasingly popular and visible genre within fiction. David Galef's Brevity offers a guide to the genre for creative writing students by combining discussions of the various approaches and methods within the genre, examples of the form, and prompts for students to develop their own writing. Galef includes examples of the short-short genre from such writers as Collette, Donald Barthelme, and Borges. He examines the ways in which these authors drew on the form and how compression and other techniques are able to produce works of power, humor, or insight. Galef argues that developing one's skills in the short-short form can also carry over to other forms of writing. Galef, a writer and longtime creative-writing instructor, guides the reader through these stories and techniques and also provides exercises based on the content or technique employed in the stories" --

A small tribe of Neanderthals find themselves at odds with a tribe comprised of homo sapiens, whose superior intelligence and agility threatens their doom.

How does our perspective change after the first reading? What distortions emerge through repetition? How do we determine what's worth rereading and what is the role of such repetition in our lives? What are the gains and losses? This work investigates the rereading of texts from various genres.

Writings: Papers, Reviews, Articles, Short-Shorts, Thoughts is a collection of texts about contemporary trends in literature and film that the author has written over the years. "If I had to sum up the book, I would say it is about art." The journey starts with an analysis of the monster Leviathan and its representation in the Bible and in the secular world. Two movie reviews are then presented: "Eyes Wide Open" and "De Lama Lamina." There is an essay on Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"; a paper on "Autopoiesis and Queer Theory"; and three more movie reviews of "Little Miss Sunshine," "Far From Heaven" and "The Scarlet Letter" by Wim Wenders. To close the book, the author includes a paper on "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris; an answer to Joyce Carol Oates' "The Art of Suicide"; an article on short-short story; one more movie review of "Silver Linings Playbook"; a review on Elton John's concert in Belo Horizonte and two short-short stories. About the Author Jose Flavio Nogueira Guimaraes grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Brasilia. He now lives in Belo Horizonte, a town surrounded by mountains and the third largest city in Brazil. He majored in law and English, and holds a master's degree in English literature. He has been an ESL teacher for 25 years. He has published "The Short-Short Story: A New Literary Genre."

A preeminent geneticist, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine, hunts the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes to answer the biggest question of them all: how did our ancestors become human? Neanderthal Man tells the riveting personal and scientific story of the quest to use ancient DNA to unlock the secrets of human evolution. Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA, Svante Pääbo. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our ancient relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of where language came from as well as why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Pääbo redrew our family tree and permanently changed the way we think about who we are and how we got here. For readers of Richard Dawkins, David Reich, and Hope Jahren, Neanderthal Man is the must-read account of how he did it.