At seventeen, the realm of faerie is the only world Celeste knows, and she aspires to become as close to a faery as a human may. But daunting revelations made by her dying mother knock her plans off course. Orphaned and anxious to establish where she fits in, Celeste’s convictions waver.
Is she the human princess her mother raised her to be, or is she the human faery she longs to become? Is she to avenge the wrongs done to her parents by an evil sorceress?
Is she to honor a betrothal she’s known nothing about? Or should she keep at the side of the true love that recently walked into her life?
Celeste chooses to be the avenger of her parents, even if it means having to acknowledge her rightful place in the human dimension.
Urged by the faery, Nahia, and championed by the faerie court and her true love, Celeste sets out to expose the deceitful sorceress, Arantxa. She trusts that nothing can keep her from returning to the realm of faerie, nothing that is, until the identity of her betrothed becomes known.
Jackson Levee, an ambitious young college instructor and writer, saves nine-year-old twin girls, Hadley and Haley, from drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. He writes a poem titled "After the Rescue" based on the incident and receives critical acclaim and a wide readership as the result of an appearance on a popular national television talk show.
The twins mature into beautiful but troubled young women. Jackson's success leads him to a professorship at an esteemed university in the Carolina mountains where meets LaVeda with whom he has a temporary happy marriage, but his ascendant star falls soon thereafter. Hadley marries a womanizer and discovers through a chance meeting that she is gay, loses the relationship, and sinks into alcohol and drug abuse. Haley suffers a depressive episode and afterwards begins an unfulfilling affair with her older supervisor, subsequently marrying an army reservist who is horribly wounded in the Iraq War and whose PTSD threatens everything.
Through twenty-five years, Jackson's, Hadley's, and Haley's recklessness in sex, love, marriage, and life produces wild and horrific results. They struggle to transcend their misfortunes and realize their destinies.
From the author of House Arrest and On Hurricane Island comes a thrilling new activist novel that begs the question, “How far is too far?”
He was nine when the vines first wrapped themselves around him and burrowed into his skin. Now a college botany major, Jeremy is desperately looking for a way to listen to the plants and stave off their extinction. But when the grip of the vines becomes too intense and Health Services starts asking questions, he flees to Brooklyn, where fate puts him face to face with a group of climate-justice activists who assure him they have a plan to save the planet, and his plants. As the group readies itself to make a big Earth Day splash, Jeremy soon realizes these eco-terrorists’ devotion to activism might have him—and those closest to him—tangled up in more trouble than he was prepared to face. With the help of a determined, differently abled flame from his childhood, Zoe; her deteriorating, once–rabble-rousing grandmother; and some shocking and illuminating revelations from the past, Jeremy must weigh completing his mission to save the plants against protecting the ones he loves, and confront the most critical question of all: how do you stay true to the people you care about while trying to change the world?
"What do you want from me?" she says. "You have to go to Paris," he replies, but only because he doesn't know exactly what he does want from his new bride. Everything?
Lucas Amado is a husband, a grad student, a dreamer, a young man not wholly convinced about anything in the world but his love for Callie and their baby son, Johnny. But love, he finds, is a risky business.
When things start to go bad in his marriage Lucas is approached by Marla Tupo, a cheerful, attractive and mystifying older woman he meets at his provisional blue-collar job. What at first seems a harmless affinity soon deteriorates into a mutual dependence that changes everything. In recounting his struggle to save his marriage and sanity, Lucas wonders if human life is of any consequence in this dark and lonely universe.
Mr. Galaxy's Unfinished Dream resides at the intersection of realism and dream where belief and unbelief mingle, and where saints, psychopaths, and ordinary people give us glimpses into the darkness and light of the human heart and mind
Readers who are intrigued by the psychological and spiritual forces that shape human experience will be challenged and find much to ponder in this novel. Lovers of literary fiction and allegory will discover in R. García Vázquez an author whose writing Bookish Creature describes as "utterly captivating and closer to poetry than prose."
Set in the 1980s in the rural community of Bidarkee Bay, Alaska, a fictional area the size of a small state with a population of barely 20,000, Wander is the story of Patrice "Pete" Nash, a young broadcast reporter who finds herself facing the winter alone after her husband, Nate, accepts a job on "the slope." As Pete pursues the next big breaking news story, she strikes up a friendship with the new guy in town, the Ivy League-educated Ren, who recites poetry and lives in the family-owned, vacant inn. Their friendship offers a glimpse of a different kind of life - one that seems to Pete to offer everything marriage to the country-raised Nate does not. But unbeknown to Pete, Ren has come to Alaska for his own dark reasons - to end his life. By the time, Nate returns home, their lives have been irrevocably changed. One man is dead, two others missing and a third forever lost to them.
From the unforgiving surf of Costa Rica to hidden vineyards in the South of France, the stories in Perfect Conditions span the globe, and the characters often struggle to find control in unrelenting circumstances: a deep sea fisherman discovers he may not be allowed to return home when his contract expires; a young woman mourns the death of a dear friend she cannot save; a newlywed couple embark on a disastrous honeymoon. Unflinching stories from an award-winning writer.
Vanessa Blakeslee's writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Globe and Mail, Kenyon Review Online, among many others. Her novel Juventud won the 2015 Bronze Medal, was a finalist for Foreword Review's Book of the Year, and a runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her short story collection Train Shots won the 2014 IPPY Gold Medal in Short Fiction.
The Saldaña family is your stereotypical family from Mexico who immigrated to Bakersfield, California to pursue the American dream of white picket fences, color televisions, and the wealth of opportunities. They are a tightknit, honest family who, after years of hard work and perseverance, seemed to have carved out a spectacular life for themselves. Then one fateful day everything changed when their eldest son was accused of a heinous crime wherein he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the darkest recesses New Quantico State Prison. Anatomy of Felon is a tale of what happens to that son in prison and how he goes from being an exemplary high school student and class nerd to an inmate in one of the toughest penitentiaries in the world. Once incarcerated, this self-proclaimed “nobody” learns to navigate the pitfalls of homicides, suicides, prison gangs, and really bad food, all the while plagued by a dark force that threatens to overtake the facility. Luckily for him, no matter how bad things get or how many times he’s betrayed, there’s one person who never gives up on him. This is a story of haters and hero’s, dark forces and unconditional love, and family.
“A Child of Arthur” is an autobiographical novel with an inspirational message. It will appeal to adult readers of all ages. The story is this: In 1980, depressed, disillusioned, and emotionally paralyzed by recent loss and betrayal, actress Grace Archer returns to a mountain village in Switzerland she once held dear. During a life-threatening event on that mountain, she is rescued by Klaus Urhaber—a mysterious man who seems to know more about her than she herself knows. With him, she embarks upon a romantic, dangerous journey. Her quest leads her to answers to questions many of us face today: What do you do when hope fades? Where do you go when you no longer believe in the future?
Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon...Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Mumbai Matinee depicts the life and culture around the city of Mumbai through 8 interconnected stories. Key scene sketches accompany the narrative to spark the reader's imagination.
Ajay doesn't know what to expect when he moves to the bustling city of Mumbai. He himself hails from North India, and the culture shock of the dynamic city takes a bit of getting used to. He's captivated, though, and Ajay falls in love with the colorful metropolis and its many inhabitants. In the city, he will find love, friendship, and community--but also danger and the threat of disaster.
It all begins in 1993, when Ajay comes to Mumbai on a short internship assignment. He is caught in the shock wave of the 1993 serial bombings. Despite this brush with death, Ajay is determined to learn the secrets of the city.
After graduation, he comes back and finds new stories in the city's streets. Ajay meets an interfaith couple who teach him about the power of love, a local labor leader who is more than he seems, and a dynamic acting teacher who could become something more. He also suffers another close call more than a decade after the bombings. Still, for every troubling experience, there's one that pushes Ajay beyond his comfort zone and spurs him to embrace all his adopted city has to offer.
PFC Bell, a newly-minted U.S. Army MP, quickly discovers that there’s more than a war going on along QL 4, the main road from Saigon into the Mekong Delta. It’s old-fashioned crime and corruption. He doesn’t want to get involved, just serve out his time and go home, but life for an American MP in Vietnam in 1970 doesn’t work that way. QL 4 leads Bell deep into a swamp of deception, mayhem, and death that insinuates its way both into towns the MPs patrol each day and into the old French villa where they live.
A Captivating Exploration of Mourning and West Texas
Hunter’s friend Ty survived war in the Middle East only to succumb to cancer at home. On a quest with his college buddies and Ty’s father, Hunter journeys from South Texas into the mountains and desert of West Texas to bury his close friend. During this trek, they’ll drink, hunt, party, and encounter unexpected people and enthralling landscapes as Hunter deals with his grief, compounded by his struggle with depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
The West Texas Pilgrimage is a love letter to West Texas and the wild culture that defines it. Author M. M. Wolthoff vividly depicts the regional landscape, exploring intriguing stops along the way and the authentic context of music, food, and language integral to this generation of Texans, while frankly and thoughtfully addressing relationships, mourning, and mental illness, with characters as unforgettable as the region itself.
