Craig is strangely mournful and angry at equal turns. His exasperated wife, Gina, is on the brink of an affair. At the center of it all is seventeen-year-old Amanda: adored niece, rebellious daughter, and stubborn stepdaughter. She’s also pregnant.Told in alternating points of view by each member of this colorful New England clan, and infused with the quiet charm of the Cape in the off-season, The News from the End of the World follows one family into a crucible of pent-up resentments, old and new secrets, and memories long buried. Only by coming to terms with their pasts, both separately and together, do they stand a chance of emerging intact.

    Debra, an unhappy billionaire’s wife, decides to resurrect the 18th-century trend of hiring a man to live on their property as an ornamental garden hermit. An elderly serial killer, bored by her dull nursing home existence, finds a deadly new purpose when her high school nemesis ends up living down the hall. In 1953 a young couple drives to Makeout Point where instead of an evening of heavy petting, they find mountain lions, a man with no gaps in his teeth, and the opportunity to kill Henry Kissinger. Within these pages, a man tries to date after losing his wife to The Salem Witch Trials, a Wi-Fi router gains sentience, a series of cardboard boxes oozing with smoky-sweet baked beans mysteriously appear at a woman’s front door, and a Chuck E. Cheese is haunted by the spirit of Princess Diana.Boldly strange, deliciously satirical, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, Penny Pinching Tips for the Morally Bankrupt swings from the grim and ghastly to the exquisite and lovely. This one-of-a-kind book takes the reader on a surreal journey through the compulsory despair of daily life and concludes that the only sensible reaction to that much pain is laughter.

    He's falling for a lie. Is their love strong enough to survive the truth?With a hot new look, and an even hotter new social media career, Gwen is barely recognizable from the overweight, awkward girl she’d been the last time she spent a summer in the resort town of Cedar Springs. And that’s exactly what she’s counting on. Gwen knew there was a chance she’d run into the boy who broke her heart all those years ago, but she wasn’t prepared for the man he’d become—or the fact that he doesn’t remember her at all.It’s been ten years since Ian McCormick has been back in town and he’s more than ready to put his family drama behind him, start a new business and maybe even have a little fun. And what better way to enjoy summer at the lake than with the gorgeous brunette he can’t stop thinking about?It was just supposed to be a fun little experiment for her followers. A test to see if looks really do matter. Would Ian be interested the new and improved version of her after all these years?It was perfect. At least until all the feelings she thought were long dead, come rushing back. And once the plan is in motion, she can’t back out. With their hearts on the line, can Gwen continue to play a game that could devastate them both and destroy the only real chance at love she’s ever had?

    Now suddenly she's entangled in it? In addition to harboring a pregnant runaway, she's been enlisted to transform scruffy bachelor cowboys into husband material for a reality dating show. Including her ex-boyfriend, and the only man she's ever allowed herself to love, Owen McGregor.Owen is still devastatingly handsome, and the passion between them hasn't faded with time. Unfortunately, neither have the issues that drove them apart. But that doesn't mean Meg is ready to turn him into the perfect man for someone else! Because despite their past, Meg suspects that Owen is still the one.

    In “Long Distance,” a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned, while maintaining the secret of his own complicated sorrow. Beautifully written, with a wry intelligence and a lively comic touch, The Age of Grief captures moments of great intimacy with grace, clarity, and indelible emotional power.

    Forced to transfer schools mid-year, she wasn't trying to make new friends. In that same month, sophomore Nate Wilson's girlfriend broke up with him. Searching for someone to fill the void left by his first love, he meets Emi in his art class. Nate knows he wants Emi from the moment he sees her. Emi knows she needs Nate after one night together. A life-long friendship is born, and a pact is made to ensure that nothing will come between them. This novella is the prequel to the Emi Lost & Found series. After the 3-volume series was published, readers wanted more. This is for them – the story of how Nate and Emi met – and although it’s a prequel, it can be enjoyed before or after the series.

    The selected stories--Arthur C. Clarke's "Playback", Frederik Pohl's "Lovemaking", and Thomas M. Disch's "Cephalatron" (later "Fun with Your New Head")--were published in the December 1966 issue. Asimov's story, on the other hand, was rejected, so he submitted it to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was published in April 1965. It has since been anthologized several times and was included in Asimov's collection Nightfall and Other Stories (1969).In the very distant future - about a trillion years in the future - humans have long since abandoned physical form and they exist as energy entities spanning space. The results are quite powerful.This is the story of how two of these entities, known only as Ames and Brock, tire of artistic competitions using manipulations of energy and decide to look for a creative way to manipulate mass.

    But families don’t just grow, they grow old, and the clan’s matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy’s beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother’s loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy’s college days. And they didn’t count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids.The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called “full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [ Jane] Austen’s own” (The New York Review of Books), and she is at her best in this intensely human, profound, and honest novel about the intrusion of old age into the relationships of one loving but complicated family. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a radiantly compassionate look at three generations, all coming of age together.

    Grab a mug of hot chocolate, sit back and enjoy a fairytale New York Christmas.... When Londoner Penny decides to visit her best friend Kate in New York for the festive season, the surprise appearance of a previous suitor sends her plans for a relaxing, carefree visit into complete disarray. When she and Mike last saw each other, the timing couldn't have been worse. But when Mike decides to show Penny the very best of what a snowy, festive, New York has to offer - resolving to make it a fairytale Christmas - will she be able to resist his charms this time round? And will finding one other again turn out to be the greatest Christmas gift?

    In one narrative, a man wakes up one morning to find the odor of dead fish won't go away, but no one else can smell it. In another, a couple's visit with friends to watch the Academy Awards has the protagonist envying his friends' lawn and lifestyle. In these and eleven other stories, Christopher Meeks balances tragedy and wit. As novelist David Scott Milton explains, "In this collection, Christopher Meeks examines the small heartbreaks of quiet despair that are so much a part of all our lives. He does it in language that is resonant, poetic, and precise.... If you like Raymond Carver, you'll love Meeks. He may be as good--or better."

    He's everything I ever wanted. And he doesn't know how I feel. I have three weeks left to tell him before he leaves this place forever… There’s only one way I know how to do that. I have to give him what I've never given anyone. I'm going to ask him to be my first… Matt Girard is the guy every girl wants. Rich, handsome, and popular, his future is brighter than the sun. Evie Baker comes from the wrong side of town. She loves Matt desperately, but he only sees her as his tomboy best friend instead of the young woman she's blossomed into. Until one fateful night when a reckless dare changes everything… This is the prequel story to Hot Pursuit, Book 1 in the Hostile Operations Team Series.

    And those knitting needles aren't just for craft projects. To most people, Gin Bombay is an ordinary single mom. Then again, they don't know she's from a family of top secret assassins. Somewhere between leading a Girl Scout troop for her kindergartner--would nooses count for a knot badge?--and keeping their puppy from destroying the furniture, Gin now has to take out a new target. BUT YOU CAN PICK THEM OFFExcept this target has an incredibly hot Australian bodyguard who knows just how to make her weak in the knees. But with a mole threatening to expose everything, Gin doesn't have much time to let her hormones do the happy dance. She's got to find the leak and clear her assignment...or she'll end up next on the Bombay family hit list.

    Her husband leaves her for another woman, and her best friend announces an unplanned pregnancy at the age of forty-one. Bernie's behavior goes from acting out to out-of-hand, and she finds herself in trouble at home, out of work and banned from the mall after a confrontation at the cosmetic counter.When her mother discovers her father's book of cryptograms, Bernie realizes his encoded lessons in living might be exactly what she needs to survive. From dealing with her family's grief and bonding with her best friend's thirteen-year-old daughter, to dieting, dating and mindless almost-sex with the landscaper, Bernie discovers what her father always knew.In life, you either choose to sing a rainbow, or you don't.For Bernie, the singing is about to begin.

    Catherine was reading a novel. So begins Room on the Sea, André Aciman's scorching and elegiac love-story about a middle-aged man and woman who meet in the bullpen of jury selection and spend a sultry summer’s week trespassing ever further into each other's hearts.What begins as a flirtation quickly evolves into something deeper, something Paul and Catherine must carry on in secret—and with the understanding that anything more than a casual crush is out of the question. But as the week draws to a close, the end of their rendezvous comes into focus, and Paul and Catherine are forced to decide whether to act on their feelings or leave the fantasy of what could have been to the annals of the past.By turns scintillating and philosophical, Room on the Sea is a compulsively listenable story of love, fate, and last chances.©2022 Andre Aciman (P)2022 Audible Originals, Inc.

    THE ONE! Though the name of her celebration and wedding cake business is up in lights, Bronte Ludlow doesn't care for the trappings of success. All that matters to her is her company, her independence and her heritage,The Dower House. Home to her ancestors since the seventeenth century, no way will she part with it to ‘a man with too much money and no soul’. Nico Ferranti’s only passions are money and power... He's a man who stopped believing in romance long ago and Bronte's a romantic, yet the attraction sparking between them like fireworks over the Piazza del Popolo stuns Nico. When Bronte's brother is badly hurt in a car accident in Rome, Nico whisks Bronte to the Eternal City. He wants her and he wants The Dower House and Nico Ferranti always gets what he wants. But Bronte’s heart has already been broken by one ruthless charmer and although tempted she isn’t about to give up either her heart or her home to the charismatic Italian without a fight!