Uriel, the winery's young widower, steers clear of complicated relationships. He prefers the lonely comfort of his vineyard and his horses. Until he is reminded of his love affair with Amanda Scanlon, a relationship that ended when she abruptly left the country years ago under a cloud of mystery. When, due to a family crisis, Amanda returns to Sonoma, she tries to mend the broken relationships left behind. In addition, she seeks the truth about her parents' complicated history and her own parentage. But Amanda's unveiling of the past has devastating consequences. In the midst of California's beautiful Sonoma Valley, the Scanlon family struggles to overcome harsh realities with dignity and grace. Both Amanda and Uriel stretch to take care of their families, who are facing immigration issues, marital crises, and illness. While navigating these challenges, the couple must decide if they trust themselves to love again, or to finally let each other go. A Sonoma local, author Joanell Serra's debut novel is captivating, poignant, and uplifting, demonstrating how seeds planted long ago continue to grow. Sometimes into a strangling weed, sometimes offering a bountiful harvest.

    Having a fear of germs is inconvenient when you’re on a road-trip adventure. However, needing to know what it’s like to have a mom, and to finally see the beach means more than anything to an eleven-year-old.Some twenty years later, a man Sandy never wanted to see again shows up at her doorstep. When Sandy’s best friend places an ultimate life-changing decision in her hands, Sandy must venture back down the road, this time with the father she hates.Making these decisions will be much easier with Justin, a long-time friend, by Sandy’s side. Yet, Justin’s help only leads to continued mixed emotions Sandy has been fighting for some time.Sandy is searching for what she lost, but will she accept what she finds? A journey rich in history, the truth, and determining forgiveness with a touch of humor is the portrait of life.

    It was selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition and is currently available from Caketrain Press.

    A pizza shop worker goes on a series of visceral dates with her gynecologist; a slighted lover coughs up a forgotten childhood toy; an artist unknowingly becomes the subject of an intrusive admirer’s lust; a woman has a heated staring contest with the world’s oldest man. Powerful and precise, Rivas’s stories highlight the unreality within the real, simultaneously evoking humor, outrage, and awe.Contest judge Rigoberto González writes: “With this marvelous collection of short stories, Rivas places her finger on that pressure point, where adventure and dangerintersect, where fantasy and reality cross wires, and where desire ebbs and flows to the delight—or chagrin—of her female protagonists. Each story, unpredictable and startling,leaves a lasting impression. A Bright and Pleading Dagger is truly a compelling and unforgettable journey into the dark but poignant experiences of women.”

    Pete is an exchange student from Italy with a chronic case of poverty. She needs a baby-daddy, he needs a place to live, so they decide to help each other out by engaging in the time-honored device used by people in need the world over: a marriage of convenience. She’s beautiful and smart, he’s a gorgeous and talented musician, surely they can live together as husband and wife for one academic year? In a one-bedroom on the Upper West Side? With her old-fashioned granny living on the first floor, Pete and Daisy move into a tiny, rooftop apartment, ready to be roommates, husband and wife in name only, for nine months. Real life has a way of getting in the way, though, of messing with the best laid plans... Come along for the journey of Pete Santangelo and Daisy White and their turbulent and very sexy romance, and see how two strangers can become best friends and fall in love. See how a modern American family is born.

    What I got instead is heartbreak and a divorce. With my life a shambles, I hit the road and begin a voyage of self discovery and growth. When my keyboard reveals a world of sensual fantasy and dark desires, I don’t know whether to leap into the unknown or play things safe. What I do know is that I’m worth a second chance. I may be forty-five, but I’m not ready to give up on love.

    In these stories, the reader moves among young men and women: pianists, historians, book illustrators, architects; women who are composed and inimitably sassy; and men who are magnetic, adventurous in love, or fiendishly elusive. They are people who are experiencing, often for the first time, the starting, enriching, and maddening complications of adult life.

    Justine Larbalestier has collected 11 key stories--many of them not easily found, and all of them powerful and provocative--and sets them alongside 11 new essays, written by top scholars and critics, that explore the stories' contexts, meanings, and theoretical implications. The resulting dialogue is one of enormous significance to critical scholarship in science fiction, and to understanding the role of feminism in its development. Organized chronologically, this anthology creates a new canon of feminist science fiction and examines the theory that addresses it. Daughters of Earth is an ideal overview for students and general readers.Content: 1. The Fate of Poseidonia - Clare Winger Harris, 19272. The Conquest of Gola - Leslie F. Stone, 19313. Created He Them - Alice Eleanor Jones, 19554. No Light in the Window - Kate Wilhelm, 19635. The Heat Death of the Universe - Pamela Zoline, 19676. And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side - James Tiptree Jr., 19717. Wives - Lisa Tuttle, 19768. Rachel in Love - Par Murphy, 19879. The Evening and the Morning and the Night - Octavia E. Butler, 198710. Balinese Dancer - Gwyneth Jones, 199711. What I Didn't See - Karen Joy Fowler, 2002

    A masseuse breaks her rich client's wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.

    Legendary doyenne of the fabled Palm Springs getaway, she can always tell from the moment the women arrive, which ones will be problems.This group will not disappoint: a burned-out Fifth Avenue retail executive...a striking former model and Chicago socialite... an overweight Texas housewife on the brink of her second divorce and her beautiful, teenage daughter...and a CEO who, unhappy with recent plastic surgery, is secluded in her room.Fortunately, Madame Demidova can rely on her Assistant Director to help manage the herd, not knowing that this valued employee is poised to make an audacious move.Lust, ambition, secrets, betrayal, competition for the ownership of the world's premier spa and a chance to snag the uber-eligible man who unexpectedly arrives on the scene are all on the menu at The Spa at Lavender Lane.

    But this soon changes. Every day a new dilemma arises, pulling her into the chaos, and as she gets to know her neighbors she discovers comedy, cruelty, and even tragedy. Do you know what’s going on in your neighborhood?

    Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines the complexities of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and explores the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change through their own actions. The dramatic climax and tragic choices made grow from the gulf of incomprehension between middle-class and poor Jamaicans and provide penetrating insights into the roots of violence in impoverished communities.

    The characters -- rootless, often en route to someplace else -- find themselves variously attracted to or repelled by unfamiliar landscapes where every object seems strange and every emotion is heightened. Living according to alien rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unexpected ways: in the title story, a young woman who has been involved in an affair with an Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death; the protagonist of 'Outside the Eastern Gate' returns to her childhood home in Delhi to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother.

    It exposes the silences in families and the parts of ourselves we rarely reveal. A daughter asks her mother to shut up, only to shut her up for good; an exhausted wife walks away from the husband who doesn’t understand her; on holiday, lovers no longer understand each other away from home. The underlying themes of loneliness, secrets, family and displacement and also the desire to belong to someone, to some place; a yearning for love, intertwine these stories. The collection includes The Jam Maker, which has just been awarded the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize 2020.

    In the Event of Contact chronicles characters profoundly affected by physical connection, or its lack.Among them, a scrappy teen vies to be the next Sherlock Holmes; an immigrant daughter must defend her decision to remain childless; a guilt-ridden woman is haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend; a cantankerous crossing guard celebrates getting run over by a truck; an embattled priest with dementia determines to perform a heroic, redemptive act, if he can only remember how; and an aspirational, angst-ridden mother captains the skies.Amid backgrounds of trespass and absence, the indelible characters of In the Event of Contact seek renewed belief in recovery, humanity, and the remains of wonder.