He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.Lockwood --Alief --610 North, 610 West --Shepherd --Wayside --Bayou --Lot --South Congress --Navigation --Peggy Park --Fannin --Waugh --Elgin

    A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love.

    Feel the sparks fly off the hot romance and action-driven pages of these EXCLUSIVE TITLES—unavailable separately in ebook format anywhere else!From sweet to sensual, they’ll satisfy your most indulgent fantasies as you fall in love with an array of billionaire beaus in this contemporary romance collection by some of today’s hottest New York Times, USA Today, and International bestselling authors.Quench your book-boyfriend addiction with page-turning stories overflowing with decadent luxury, heart-warming love, heated adventure, steamy scenes, and happily-ever-afters.Featuring billionaires from bad boys to Marines and CEOs to cowboys, this set will take you around the country and jet-setting around the globe with intense, passionate men who always get what they want and fulfill the desires of the women they crave.Relish each journey in this LIMITED-TIME collection PACKED with novels and novellas that will provide over one hundred hours of reading. Grab your copy today before these hot billionaires fly off into the sunset!

    Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

    Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from a young mother living among the elite in Pyongyang whose son misbehaves during a political rally, to a former Communist war hero who is deeply disillusioned with the intrusion of the Party into everything he holds dear, to a husband and father who is denied a travel permit and sneaks onto a train in order to visit his critically ill mother. Written with deep emotion and writing talent, The Accusation is a vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state, and also a hopeful testament to the humanity and rich internal life that persists even in such inhumane conditions.

    Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its portrayal of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about some of women's most intimate experiences.One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another woman nervous about her biological clock "forgets" to take her birth control and confronts the reality of becoming a single parent. A new mother with postpartum depression finds comfort with a much younger man. A psychologist who studies infant laughter faces her best friend's tragedy.Together, these twelve empathetic stories reveal pregnancy and new motherhood in all its anxiety and absurdity, darkness and wonder.

    Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from long-erased places.With an eye towards decolonizing tropes inherent in our favorite tales of love, Babalola has created captivating stories that traverse across perspectives, continents, and genres.

    In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated pains and loves of a family.The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, re-imagined from the perspective of female characters. Just as Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” responds to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Galchen’s “The Lost Order” covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” while “The Region of Unlikeness” is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph.” The title story, “American Innovations,” revisits Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.”By turns realistic, fantastical, witty, and lyrical, these marvelously uneasy stories are deeply emotional and written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer like none other today.

    Readers cannot resist journeying with her into realms-dangerously dark or illuminatingly revelatory-they could never imagine without her as their guide. From ghost stories in the tradition of M. R. James to darkly poetic tales to moving fictional examinations of the most basic of human emotion-fear, love, hate, loneliness-Monette's pen produces stories that are invariably unforgettable . . .

    Leland isn’t just his boss, though. He’s the son of the company’s CEO. And Brian has fallen in love. Hurt by too many stolen kisses and nooners at seedy hotels, Brian finally broke off their secret affair two weeks ago. Leland isn’t ready to let Brian go and he isn’t above seducing Brian — again — to give them both what they really want for Christmas: each other.This free short story was originally written for the Goodreads M/M Romance Group's 2010 holiday event and appears in the event's Stuff My Stocking: M/M Romance Stories that are Nice and… Naughty anthology.

    Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.

    Yann Martel's title story (described as "unforgettable...a truly stunning piece of fiction"*), won the 1991 Journey Prize to universal acclaim. The intensely human tragedy that lies at its heart is told with a spare, careful elegance that resonates long after it has ended--and is matched through all the stories by an immediacy an dazzling freshness.

    But the once-popular Kendell is recovering from a marriage-gone-wrong, and she regrets turning Tyler down for high school prom. On their road trip to deliver a refurbished camper, Kendell rediscovers all the reasons she liked Tyler, but it might be too late to rekindle their friendship.ANTIQUES ROAD TRIP by Sarah M. EdenKelsey is living out her dream for the weekend as she participates in a reality show contest by living on a 19th century film set. The contestant who wins the show receives a trip to England and $100k, more than enough to get her through grad school. When she meets Devon, who was coerced by his sister to participate, friendship blossoms. When things go wrong for Kelsey, Devon is there to help, and she soon realizes that winning the contest isn’t what she most desires.WOULDN’T IT BE NICE by Ranee` S. ClarkWhen Jacqueline's boyfriend Colin drops out of their long-planned road trip with friends to put his job first—again—it's the final nail in the coffin of their dying relationship. But then Hudson, her best friend’s brother, takes Colin's spot for the road trip, and Jacqueline’s disappointment in her ex takes a back seat to the chance for reestablishing the close ties she once had with Hudson. When their friendship detours into romance, it forces Jacqueline to question her reasons for breaking up with Colin and her future with Hudson.HEAD OVER HEELS by Annette LyonTristan is proud to be an entrepreneur, running a popular singles’ lifestyle blog. So when she gets an offer to cover a singles convention in Las Vegas, she needs to find a way to get there from another freelance job in Salt Lake without breaking into her personal savings. Her friend sets her up with a co-worker who happens to be driving that way, and Tristan is more than surprised to come face-to-face with a man she has a lot in common with, not to mention seems to click with right away. The two decide to play a prank on Tristan’s friend, and pretend that they are smitten with each other, but soon, the lines between pretend and reality start to fade.TWO DOZEN ROSES by Heather B. MooreDayna reluctantly takes time out of her busy work life to drive her mother up the Pacific Coast Highway from California to her brother’s home in Oregon. Strangely enough, they keep running into two brothers who are traveling the same route in honor of their sister’s memory. The older brother Garrett is a merciless flirt, but the younger brother Roman is who captures Dayna’s attention. Soon she realizes that the brothers are extremely competitive, and she’s just become their next target.TRY, TRY AGAIN by Aubrey MaceSarah’s secret crush on Justin takes a sudden turn when he breaks up with his girlfriend and declares that he’s interested in Sarah. She believes he’s just on the rebound, and they slowly drift apart. Six months later, Sarah still can’t stop thinking about what might have been. She ropes her friend into taking a road trip to visit Justin, hoping for a second chance. When Justin sees her, he wants answers, and Sarah has to decide if she’s brave enough to finally tell him the truth.

    In a selection of eighteen stories discovered by one of L'Engle's granddaughters, we see how L'Engle's personal experiences and abiding faith informed the creation of her many cherished works. Some of these stories have never been published; others were refashioned into scenes for her novels and memoirs. Almost all were written in the 1940s and '50s, from Madeleine's college years until just before the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. From realism to science-fiction to fantasy, there is something for everyone in this magical collection.

    Not stories of triumph over adversity, but something completely other. Described in language that is brilliantly sardonic, Woods's characters return repeatedly to places where they don't belong—often the places where they were born. In "Zombie," a coming-of-age story like no other, two young girls find friendship with a mysterious woman in the local cemetery. "Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street" describes a lesbian couple trying to repair their relationship by dropping acid at a Mensa party. In "A New Mohawk," a man in romantic pursuit of a female political activist becomes inadvertently much more familiar with the Palestine/Israel conflict than anyone would have thought possible. And in the title story, Woods brings us into the mind of a queer goth teenager who faces ostracism from her small-town evangelical church.In the background are the endless American wars and occupations and too many early deaths of friends and family. This is fiction that is fresh and of the moment, even as it is timeless.