Short stories and short-short stories about traveling rock musicians that focus on the unseen, less than glamorous side of touring as a struggling rock band—the personal tolls, the grueling poverty, the gnawing hunger for fame, and the small and unlikely moments of redemption. These characters are slowly realizing that their dreams are slipping away, that age and hard living have worn them down, that their funky, rootless, rock & roll lives have not taken on the grandeur they’d envisioned.

Men and women in Europe and the United States struggle to find love and meaning.

In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors® New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors. These exciting and unique author profiles are essential to your holdings because sketches are entirely revised and up-to-date, and completely replace the original Contemporary Authors® entries. For your convenience, a soft-cover cumulative index is sent biannually.

A new collection of very short stories selected by Flash Fiction editor James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro. All of the stories in this book are exceptionally short, revealing themselves in no more than 300 words. With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think.

An evocative memoir of growing up on a family farm in rural North Dakota, on land her family had worked for generations, reflects on her desire to escape the difficult life, her relationship with and admiration for her father, and the influence of place on personal identity.