But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents’ arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes she’s lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren’s too short, drive-by appearance. Once close, the two sisters haven’t been able to move past a falling out which took place three years before. When Brenna notices the strange man getting closer, she panics and takes refuge in the Griffin home, befriending their four-year-old daughter, Summer, who is waiting out the party upstairs. As family and friends search for Brenna, her absence helps her father realize the importance of family, even as her presence in the Griffin home unwittingly sets in motion healing for a mother’s heart.

    Gracie Logan had been best friends with Harris since they were in junior high. Growing up, he had been the popular guy in town who all the women swooned over.And she had been stuck in the friend category forever. Keeping her lips sealed about her crush, she decided to continue being the one thing he needed most--a friend.Harris Bates was home for the holidays. One look at Gracie and knew he could no longer fight what he had known for years. She was the one for him. Sparks began to fly, and they can’t ignore the intense attraction between them. Will they act on what is brewing between them? One thing they both knew was that nothing will ever be the same again.The Christmas Secret is a steamy, holiday BWWM romance. For readers who love sexy, friends to lovers romance, this is for you. This novella is reserved for mature readers only.

    On the cusp of her fortieth birthday and with her only child almost grown, it's time to start putting herself and her marriage first. But when the butterflies in her tummy turn out to be morning sickness, Maren’s world is flipped upside down with an unplanned, high risk pregnancy—one she's ashamed to admit is unwanted.Overnight, everything changes and the ripple effect of the baby she's so unsure of is felt in every corner of her life. Her perfect life slowly disappears. Her teenage daughter looks for attention in the wrong places. Her best friend inexplicably blows up and stops speaking to her. And worse, her once doting husband pulls away when she needs him the most.Just when she's sure things couldn't possibly be worse, a shocking discovery rocks Maren's world. Faced with a devastating deception, a truth she can no longer ignore, and an impossible choice, can Maren stop her life from completely unraveling? Or is All We Never Knew too much for love to overcome?

    With the Nazi Party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland’s towns and cities of their Jewish populations. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland has become a moral quagmire—a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.Blending folklore and fact, Helen Maryles Shankman shows us the people of Wlodawa, a remote Polish town: we meet a cold-blooded SS officer dedicated to rescuing the creator of his son’s favorite picture book, even as he helps exterminate the artist’s friends and family; a Messiah who appears in a little boy’s bedroom to announce that he is quitting; a young Jewish girl who is hidden by the town’s most outspoken anti-Semite—and his talking dog. And walking among these tales are two unforgettable figures: the enigmatic and silver-tongued Willy Reinhart, Commandant of the forced labor camp who has grand schemes to protect “his” Jews, and Soroka, the Jewish saddlemaker and his family, struggling to survive.

    The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In "Free Ham," a young dropout wins a ham after her house burns down and refuses to accept it. “Has my ham done anything wrong?” she asks when the grocery store manager demands that she claim it. In "Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph," a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy "North Of." In “The Idea of Marcel,” Emily, a conservative, elegant girl, has dinner with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, Marcel. In a night filled with baffling coincidences, including Marcel having dinner with his idea of Emily, she wonders why we tend to be more in love with ideas than with reality. In and out of the rooms of these gritty, whimsical stories roam troubled, funny people struggling to reconcile their circumstances to some kind of American Ideal and failing, over and over.  The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn’t Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies? All homes are not shelters. But then again, some are. Welcome to the home of Marie-Helene Bertino.

    Mary Miller's BIG WORLD is the second book and first work of fiction to come out of Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a publishing arm of the independent literary journal Hobart. The characters in Mary Miller's debut short story collection BIG WORLD are at once autonomous and lonesome, possessing both a longing to connect with those around them and a cynicism regarding their ability to do so, whether they're holed up in a motel room in Pigeon Forge with an air gun shooting boyfriend as in "Fast Trains" or navigating the rooms of their house with their dad after their mother's death as in "Leak." Mary Miller's writing is unapologetically honest and efficient and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's stories were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke.

    They are illustrated with glorious papercut sculptures specially created by Su Blackwell. The characters and the kingdoms they inhabit emerge from the pages through a series of exquisite paper sculptures. Each tale has a unique visual flavor: while Sleeping Beauty is blue and dreamy, The Princess and the Pea is green and summery. The magic and otherworldliness of traditional fairytale collections meet glorious, contemporary paper constructions in The Fairtytale Princess, which makes a charming addition to the shelf of bedtime stories.

    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.Jane Austen's classic story of love, manners and muslin, retold in an entirely new way.

    She doesn't enjoy baking, never goes to Starbucks, and wouldn't be caught dead in yoga pants.So what does Valley like?Sex. And lots of it.Her poor husband David is having a hard time keeping up (pardon the pun).If she has her say, they'll soon be turning 6 Juniper Court into a swinger paradise. And Valley doesn't give one f*ck what the neighbors think.

    In these 115 titled chapters, a man, who learns he has a 5-year-old son, is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. This is a book that tears down the boundaries in relationships, sentences, origin and identity, no matter how quickly its narrator tries to build them up.“In Matt Salesses’s smart novel-in-shorts, a newly-minted father flees telling his own story by any means necessary—by sarcasm, by denial, by playful and precise wordplay—rarely allowing space for his emerging feelings to linger. But the truth of who we might be is not so easily escaped, and it is in the accumulation of many such moments that our narrator, like us, is revealed: both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.”– Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods“Matthew Salesses has written an extraordinary and startlingly original novel that explores connection and disconnection, the claims and limitations of the self, and the shifting terrain of truth. Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.”–Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country“Matthew Salesses’ I’m Not Saying, I’m Not Saying is an absolute stunner of a novel. Told is short, sharp vignettes with prose that is taut, yet overflowing with meaning, this is the story of a year in the life of a complex and haunted, cobbled together family. The beauty of Salesses’ writing here lies in his fearlessness, the emotional blows to the heart and head and gut he’s willing to deliver, as if to say: This, this is life! And we are all, in one way or another, survivors.”– Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It“I’m not Saying, I’m just Saying renders the messiness of life, family, love in its myriad complex forms—romance lost and found, blood ties, squandered, unrequited—via 115 micro-stories that add up to a pointillist masterpiece.”– Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter

    It's her ex-husband, Charley Blackwell: a man she hasn't seen for nearly a quarter of a century. What's baffling is that Charley seems to think they are still married, and has no recollection of his current wife, Hannah. When medical tests reveal shocking findings, Frankie finds herself reluctantly caring for the man who left her twenty years earlier, while Hannah is relegated to the sidelines. How can Frankie forgive the man who abandoned her when she needed him most? And how can Hannah cope with the impending death of the man she's loved for the past twenty years - especially now she is faced with the shattering truth that he has never stopped loving his first wife, Frankie?

    Bright new aqua-plants are generating electricity for the streetlights; news can be easily had on the radio-viz; and in Gundisalvus' Land, the war is over and the soldiers are beginning to trickle home. Amongst these is Lt. Benjamin Braddock, survivor of the massacre that ended the war, and begrudgingly ready to return to a world that, well, doesn't seem to need him any more than it did in peacetime. His friends have homes and families to return to, while he's got nothing but his discharge papers and a couple of unwanted medals. Oh, and one new thing: the furious ghost of his commanding officer. Fortunately, since the officer's family is so vehemently adamant that Braddock join their rich and carefree fold, he doesn't have much time to fret about being haunted. But the secrets of the war are about to catch up to them all. "A steaming heap of self-indulgent drivel" - the author

    In reality TV form, this series follows the lives and loves of those who work at Captive Films. Hot, successful, playboy Riley Johnson, whose business success far exceeds his success in love. Movie star, Keatyn Douglas, whose epic love story has spawned a series of books and movies. And Dawson Johnson, who joins Captive with a tragic past. Expect lots of drama, sex, and tabloid-worthy events.Released in serial format much like a TV series, the first season contains 6 episodes. If you prefer to read it all at once, all episodes are available as Captive Films: Season One. Season 1 Episode 1This series is meant for readers 18+.

    She has memories to hold on to. Who will win this clash of wills?As newly minted CEO of the Pennington’s enterprise, I’m thrust into the big shoes my late father left for his only son. My first task: Convince a certain stubborn metaphysical shop owner to sell the last piece of property needed to build our new superstore.But she isn’t giving in.I’m prepared to take Gretchen Laughlin down, until I meet her. Then, it all falls apart. Those bewitching mossy eyes, that snappish tongue, and her utter lack of intimidation has me torn and twisted, leading me to make a choice... the legacy or the girl.I can’t have both. Or can I?There’s only one way to find out.

    She is no longer a mother to her daughter since she can hardly get herself out of bed every day.But suddenly faced with her mother's threat to file for custody, Miriam finds seven items on a piece of paper dragging her back into the world. The challenge of the list that her mother wrote brings her back to therapy and support group, amongst other things. Her only hope to rejoin the living is to relive the past and finally speak about that tragic night, so she can move forward and build a better life for her and Penelope.Armed with her sister as an ally and Oliver, the handsome stranger from the grocery store, she sets herself to the task. Will she prevail in her grieving process? Or will new events cause her to crumble and ultimately forfeit custody of her daughter? *broken glass image by edailhan.deviant art.com*