Sweet Land Stories

Sweet Land Stories
Author: E.L. Doctorow
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2004-05-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1588364062

One of America’s premier writers, the bestselling author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and World’s Fair turns his astonishing narrative powers to the short story in five dazzling explorations of who we are as a people and how we live. Ranging over the American continent from Alaska to Washington, D.C., these superb short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick townhouse in rural Illinois (“A House on the Plains”), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (“Baby Wilson”), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (“Walter John Harmon”), and sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages to a kind of bruised but resolute independence (“Jolene: A Life”). And in the stunning “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” you will witness a special agent of the FBI finding himself at a personal crossroads while investigating a grave breach of White House security. Two of these stories have already won awards as the best fiction of the year published in American periodicals, and two have been chosen for annual best-story anthologies. Composed in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.

Sweet Land

Sweet Land
Author: Will Weaver
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0873517024

Includes "A Gravestone Made of Wheat", the basis of the independent film Sweet Land.

Sweet Land of Story

Sweet Land of Story
Author: Pleasant DeSpain
Publisher: august house
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2000
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780874835694

Thirty-six true, tall, and traditional tales, primarily from the nineteenth century or earlier, selected by a professional storyteller and divided by the region of the United States from which they originated.

A Gravestone Made of Wheat

A Gravestone Made of Wheat
Author: Will Weaver
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2012
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0873518802

The feature film Sweet Land was based on this short story about a Norwegian American farmer and his German immigrant common-law bride. Excerpted from Sweet Land: New and Selected Stories.

Sweet Land of Liberty

Sweet Land of Liberty
Author: Thomas J. Sugrue
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 738
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812970381

Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.

Sweet Land of Bigamy

Sweet Land of Bigamy
Author: Miah Arnold
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012-06-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1440541612

When Helen Motes finds herself on a Utah mountaintop getting married to a besotted young Indian poet, she can't quite figure out how she became a bigamist, and she certainly doesn't want to be one. Helen worked hard to create the stable middle-class life her childhood denied her, so sabotaging her first (and decidedly still legal) marriage wasn't part of her life plan. Yet with her original husband away in Iraq, and her new husband ready to agree to everything she ever wanted, deciding which husband to keep proves to be torture. How Helen's life led her to this point--and what she plans to do with these two "keepers"--are the driving questions behind Miah Arnold's heartfelt debut about an unlikely bigamist and her circle of family, friends, and husbands. Weaving in multiple continents and unforgettable characters, The Sweet Land of Bigamy is a funny and surprisingly touching exploration of what marriage can be.

Oh My Sweet Land

Oh My Sweet Land
Author: Amir Nizar Zuabi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2014-07-19
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1472589408

They call it a civil war, but there is nothing civil in this. Nothing civil at all. They came from Damascus, from Halab, from Banias where the bombs fall day and night and the wounded children look like sleeping angels. Now they live in camps and abandoned buildings in Lebanon or Jordan. Now Syria is just a distant memory, a home forever lost. This urgent and extraordinary play explores the crisis in Syria through the stories of its two million refugees. Oh My Sweet Land received its UK premiere at the Young Vic Theatre, London, on 9 April 2014.

Sweetland

Sweetland
Author: Michael Crummey
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1472115872

For twelve generations, the inhabitants of a remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement. They have each been offered a generous compensation package to leave the island for good. There’s just one proviso: everyone must go. Gradually, all of the residents surrender to the inevitable. All of the residents, that is, but one: old Moses Sweetland. Motivated in part by a sense of history and belonging, and concerned that his somewhat eccentric great-nephew will wilt on the mainland, Moses resists the coercion of family and friends in order to hold onto the only place he’s ever called home. As his options dwindle, Moses Sweetland concocts a scheme to remain the island’s only living resident. Cut off from the outside world, with the food supply diminishing and weather shredding away the last evidence of human habitation, Sweetland finds himself, finally, in the company of ghosts . . . Written with incomparable emotional power and depth, Sweetland is a story about loyalty and courage, about the human will to persist even when all hope seems lost.

All the Time in the World

All the Time in the World
Author: E.L. Doctorow
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2012-01-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812982037

From a master of modern American letters comes an enthralling collection of brilliant short fiction about people who, as E. L. Doctorow notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.” Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous classics, All the Time in the World is resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow.

The Book of Daniel

The Book of Daniel
Author: E.L. Doctorow
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-11-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762955

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.