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After the Rain: Virginia's Civil War Diary Book 2 (My America Series)
By Mary Pope Osborne. 2001
In the final months of the Civil War, Virginia and her family move to Washington, D.C. where the cold winter…
brings uncertainty and hardship. Virginia takes a job as a servant in a wealthy home to help her family. But, just as things start to improve as her father gets a job, and the war finally comes to an end, the tragic assassination of Ginny's beloved President Lincoln occurs. In this, her second diary chronicling the Civil War, Ginny learns that life is constantly changing. Indeed, even as Lincoln dies, her nephew is born. Throughout, Ginny faces life with hope and courage.Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State
By Sheryl James. 2013
Over the course of its history, the state of Michigan has produced its share of folktales and lore. Many are…
familiar with the Ojibwa legend of Sleeping Bear Dunes, and most have heard a yarn or two told of Michigan's herculean lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. But what about Detroit's Nain Rouge, the red-eyed imp they say bedeviled the city's earliest residents? Or Le Griffon, the Great Lakes' original ghost ship that some believe haunts the waters to this day? Or the Bloodstoppers, Upper Peninsula folk who've been known to halt a wound's bleeding with a simple touch thanks to their magic healing powers? In Michigan Legends, Sheryl James collects these and more stories of the legendary people, events, and places from Michigan's real and imaginary past. Set in a range of historical time periods and locales as well as featuring a collage of ethnic traditions--including Native American, French, English, African American, and Finnish--these tales are a vivid sample of the state's rich cultural heritage. This book will appeal to all Michiganders and anyone else interested in good folktales, myths, legends, or lore.Things We Couldn't Explain
By Betsy Tobin. 2014
Things We Couldn't Explain is a comic story of young love, thwarted desire and the slippery nature of faith. It's…
ideal for readers who have enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars and The Rosie Project. Some things just can't be explained. It's the summer of '79 and the small town of Jericho, Ohio is awash with mysteries. Anne-Marie is beautiful, blind, virginal - and pregnant. Ethan is the boy next door who would do anything to win her heart. But when the Virgin Mary starts to appear in the sunset, the town is besieged by zealots, tourists and profiteers. Can love survive amidst the madness? A comic tale of young love, thwarted desire and the slippery nature of faith... Author Information: Betsy Tobin is the acclaimed author of four novels: Bone House, short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize and winner of a Herodotus Prize in America, The Bounce, Ice Land, and Crimson China, a BBC Radio 4 Book-At-Bedtime and shortlisted for Epic Romantic Novel of the Year. Her books have been published throughout Europe and North America and two have been optioned for feature film. Betsy also writes for stage and radio, and is a past winner of the London Writers' Competition for her short story, Joyride. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now lives in London and Wales with her husband and four children, and teaches writing with Arvon and First Story.I died in 1990, in an automobile accident in Alaska on the Seward Highway. Soon thereafter, I found myself sitting…
on the ground outside my home in south Anchorage. Only my home wasn't there. Actually, the whole subdivision was missing. Because I soon learned that it wasn't 1990 anymore; it was 1963. But how could that be? In 1963, I was a 9-year old boy living in upstate New York. How did I get here, and why? Could I get back the life I knew? I wanted my wife back! Meeting With The Well Known details my journey back to 1990 from 1963. The impossible circumstances, the delicate change of history, and the call of God to challenge the Church's misconception of time. An adventure so incredible, I dare not declare it as true.The Breath of God
By Jeffrey Small. 2011
A murder at the Taj Mahal. A kidnapping in a sacred city. A desperate chase through a cliffside monastery. All…
in the pursuit of a legend that could link the world's great religious faiths.In 1887, a Russian journalist made an explosive discovery in a remote Himalayan monastery only to be condemned and silenced for the heresy he proposed. His discovery vanished shortly thereafter.Now, graduate student Grant Matthews journeys to the Himalayas in search of this ancient mystery. But Matthews couldn't have anticipated the conspiracy of zealots who would go to any lengths to prevent him from bringing this secret public. Soon he is in a race to expose a truth that will change the world's understanding of religion. A truth that his university colleagues believe is mere myth. A truth that will change his life forever-if he survives.Shadow Knights
By Gary Kamiya, Jeffrey Smith. 2010
Pulp History brings to life extraordinary feats of bravery, violence, and redemption that history has forgotten. These stories are so…
dramatic and thrilling they have to be true. In SHADOW KNIGHTS, everyday men and women risk their lives on top-secret missions to sabotage Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Hell-bent on conquering Europe, Hitler had just set his sights on England when Winston Churchill reached into his bag of tricks and invented a secret spy network of ordinary citizens. These schoolteachers, housewives, prostitutes, and farmers abandoned their former lives, trained in covert black ops, and set Europe ablaze. Parachuting into Nazi territory under the cover of night, they destroyed factories, armed resistance networks, and turned Hitler's juggernaut on its head.Devil Dog
By Rodriguez, Talbot. 2010
Pulp History brings to life extraordinary feats of bravery, violence, and redemption that history has forgotten. These stories are so…
dramatic and thrilling they have to be true. In DEVIL DOG, the most decorated Marine in history fights for America across the globe--and returns home to set his country straight. Smedley Butler took a Chinese bullet to the chest at age eighteen, but that did not stop him from running down rebels in Nicaragua and Haiti, or from saving the lives of his men in France. But when he learned that America was trading the blood of Marines to make Wall Street fat cats even fatter, Butler went on a crusade. He threw the gangsters out of Philadelphia, faced down Herbert Hoover to help veterans, and blew the lid off a plot to overthrow FDR.Nostalgia
By Dennis Mcfarland. 2013
This stunning Civil War novel from best-selling author Dennis McFarland brings us the journey of a nineteen-year-old private, abandoned by…
his comrades in the Wilderness, who is struggling to regain his voice, his identity, and his place in a world utterly changed by what he has experienced on the battlefield. In the winter of 1864, Summerfield Hayes, a pitcher for the famous Eckford Club, enlists in the Union army, leaving his sister, a schoolteacher, devastated and alone in their Brooklyn home. The siblings, who have lost both their parents, are unusually attached, and Hayes fears his untoward secret feelings for his sister. This rich backstory is intercut with scenes of his soul-altering hours on the march and at the front--the slaughter of barely grown young men who only days before whooped it up with him in a regimental ball game; his temporary deafness and disorientation after a shell blast; his fevered attempt to find safe haven after he has been deserted by his own comrades--and, later, in a Washington military hospital, where he finds himself mute and unable even to write his name. In this twilit realm, among the people he encounters--including a compassionate drug-addicted amputee, the ward matron who only appears to be his enemy, and the captain who is convinced that Hayes is faking his illness--is a gray-bearded eccentric who visits the ward daily and becomes Hayes's strongest advocate: Walt Whitman. This timeless story, whose outcome hinges on friendships forged in crisis, reminds us that the injuries of war are manifold, and the healing goodness in the human soul runs deep and strong.Hometown Tales
By Philip Gulley. 2001
Stories from a Place That Feels Like Home Master storyteller Philip Gulley envelops readers in an almost…
forgotten world of plainspoken and honest small-town values evoking a simpler time when people knew each other by name folks looked out for their neighbors and people were willing to do what was right--no matter the cost When Philip Gulley began writing newsletter essays for the twelve members of his Quaker meeting in Indiana he had no idea one of them would find its way to radio commentator Paul Harvey Jr and be read on the air to 24 million people Fourteen books later with more than a million books in print Gulley still entertains as well as inspires from his small-town front porchRochester Knockings
By Jennifer Grotz, Hubert Haddad. 2015
"Hats off to one of the most inventive writers of French literature. . . . Hubert Haddad concocts a colorful…
novel, funny and inventive, as clever as the Fox sisters themselves."--Jean-François Delapré, Saint Christophe bookstoreThe Fox sisters grew up just outside of Rochester, NY, in a house that had a reputation for being haunted, due in large part to a series of strange "rappings" or "knockings" that plagued its inhabitants. Fed up by whatever was responsible for the knockings, the youngest of the sisters (who was twelve at the time) challenged the ghost and ended up communicating with the spirit of Charles Haynes, who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar.Thanks to the enthusiasm of one Isaac Post, the Fox sisters became instantly famous for talking to the dead, launching the Spiritualist Movement in the US. After taking Rochester by storm, the sisters moved to New York where they were the most famous mediums of the time, giving séances for hundreds of people.Then, it all fell apart, and the sisters were exposed as frauds. Nevertheless, even today the Fox sisters are considered to be the founders of Spiritualism, one of the most popular religious movements of the past couple centuries (consider the success of Long Island Medium and the hundreds of thousands who visit Lily Dale every year).Rich in historical detail, Rochester Knockings novelizes the rise and fall of these most infamous of mediums. Hubert Haddad was born in Tunisia, and is the author of dozens of works, including the novels Palestine (winner of the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie), Tango chinois, and La Condition magique (winner of the Grand Prix du Roman de la Société des Gens de Lettres).The Life of God (as Told by Himself)
By Franco Ferrucci. 1996
At the center of Franco Ferrucci's inspired novel is a tender, troubled God. In the beginning is God's solitude, and…
because God is lonely he creates the world. He falls in love with earth, plunges into the oceans, lives as plant and reptile and bird. His every thought and mood serve to populate the planet, with consequences that run away from him—sometimes delightfully, sometimes unfortunately. When a new arrival emerges from the apes, God believes he has finally found the companion he needs to help him make sense of his unruly creation. Yet, as the centuries pass, God feels more and more out of place in the world he has created; by the close of his memoir, he is packing his bags. Highly praised and widely reviewed, The Life of God is a playful, wondrous, and irresistible book, recounting thousands of years of religious and philosophical thought. "A supreme but imperfect entity, the protagonist of this religiously enlightened and orthodoxically heretical novel is possessed by a raving love for his skewed, unbalanced world. . . . Blessed are the readers, for this tale of God's long insomnia will keep them happily awake. . . . Extraordinary. " —Umberto Eco "The Life of God is, in truth, the synthesis of a charming writer's . . . expression of his boundless hopes for, and poignant disappointments in, his own human kind. " —Jack Miles, New York Times Book Review "Rather endearing. . . . This exceedingly amusing novel . . . is a continuous provocation and delight; there isn't a dull page in it. " —Kirkus Reviews "A smart and charming knitting of secular and ecclesiastic views of the world. . . . The character of God is likable—sweet, utterly human. . . . The prose is delightful . . . the writing is consistently witty and intelligent and periodically hilarious. " —Allison Stark Draper, Boston Review "'God's only excuse is that he does not exist,' wrote Stendhal, but now Franco Ferrucci has provided the Supreme Being with another sort of alibi. " —James Morrow, Washington Post Book WorldThe Passion of Mary Magdalen
By Elizabeth Cunningham. 2007
"Cunningham weaves Hebrew scripture, Celtic and Egyptian mythology, and early Christian legend into a nearly seamless whole, creating an unforgettable…
fifth gospel story in which the women most involved in Jesus's ministry are given far more representation."--Library Journal"This year's must-have summer reading."--KINK Radio"Lavish and lusty . . . Cunningham's Celtic Magdalen is as hot in the mouth as Irish whiskey."--Beliefnet (chosen as one of this year's "heretical beach-books")"Explodes off the page with its tales of love, hope, power, and redemption--book clubs looking for a great discussion, take note."--TheBookBrothel.comNow in November
By Josephine W. Johnson, Nancy Hoffman. 1962
Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage, this first novel (1934) depicts a white, middle-class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers…
by the Depression and the great drought of the thirties. The novel moves through a single year and, at the same time, a decade of years, from the spring arrival of the family at their mortgaged farm to the winter 10 years later, when the ravages of drought, fire, and personal anguish have led to the deaths of two of the five. Like Ethan Frome, the relatively brief, intense story evokes the torment possible among people isolated and driven by strong feelings of love and hate that, unexpressed, lead inevitably to doom. Reviewers in the thirties praised the novel, calling its prose "profoundly moving music," expressing incredulity "that this mature style and this mature point of view are those of a young women in her twenties," comparing the book to "the luminous work of Willa Cather," and, with prescience, suggesting that it "has that rare quality of timelessness which is the mark of first-rate fiction." Pulitzer Prize Winner1970: "I" Hotel
By Karen Tei Yamashita. 2010
"I Hotel" is the third novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America's struggle for…
civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown. Yamashita's cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning-Genesis
By Laura Watkinson, Guus Kuijer. 2016
One of Northern Europe's most popular writers, Guus Kuijer was fascinated with the Bible from an early age, but was…
never able to believe it, no matter how hard he tried. Now, in prose that is humorous and sometimes irreverent, Kuijer reinterprets the most popular book in the world, making it new again for the twenty-first century and for the first time rendering it accessible to "unbelievers"—that is, to people who are ready to appreciate it as something other than a sacred text. The first volume of The Bible for Unbelievers tells the story of the Book of Genesis as an agnostic novel in which man's curiosity causes creation, not God alone. Kuijer explores the nagging loneliness of the universe before creation. He asks if man and woman are indeed God's handiwork or vice versa. The entire cast of characters in this Bible is imperfect, a little lawless, and at times fumbling and jealous—God included. Kuijer's afterword tells us that no story can "come to life unless the storyteller makes it his or her own." There's a charming invitation in these pages for us all to dare to revisit our founding myths and the roles we play in them. The Bible for Unbelievers is here to draw us into questions that have no answers. It does so not with fear or religiosity, but with joy.The Language of Silence
By Peggy Webb. 2014
Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this…
masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction.Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her "a truly gifted writer." Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past.Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear--the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking--if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children.*writing as Anna MichaelsThe Language of Silence
By Peggy Webb. 2014
Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this…
masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction.Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her "a truly gifted writer." Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past.Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear--the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking--if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children.*writing as Anna MichaelsTime Between Trains
By Anthony Bukoski. 2011
"This collection stands as a lovely and bittersweet tribute to a small corner of America."--The Dallas Morning News In his…
fourth collection, Anthony Bukoski brings to life once again the working-class town of Superior, Wisconsin, telling thirteen well-crafted and linked tales of its immigrant inhabitants. These characters, like the Jewish railroad track inspector in the exquisite title story, occupy a definite place in the community, and the only predicament several of them share is that they are impossibly in love. Anthony Bukoski has published five short story collections, including Twelve Below Zero: New and Expanded Edition (Holy Cow! Press, 2008). He lives near Superior, Wisconsin.Our Hero
By Tom De Haven. 2010
Since his first appearance in Action Comics Number One, published in late spring of 1938, Superman has represented the essence…
of American heroism. "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound," the Man of Steel has thrilled audiences across the globe, yet as life-long "Superman Guy" Tom De Haven argues in this highly entertaining book, his story is uniquely American. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the midst of the Great Depression, Superman is both a transcendent figure and, when posing as his alter-ego, reporter Clark Kent, a humble working-class citizen. An orphan and an immigrant, he shares a personal history with the many Americans who came to this country in search of a better life, and his amazing feats represent the wildest realization of the American dream. As De Haven reveals through behind-the-scenes vignettes, personal anecdotes, and lively interpretations of more than 70 years of comic books, radio programs, TV shows, and Hollywood films, Superman's legacy seems, like the Man of Steel himself, to be utterly invincible.Christmas in Harmony
By Philip Gulley. 2002
Philip Gulley takes us to Harmony, Indiana, at Christmastime as inspiration strikes the inimitable Dale Hinshaw. Always looking for a…
way to increase the church's profit margins, Hinshaw brainstorms a progressive nativity scene that will involve the whole town, complete with a map like those for the Hollywood stars. Neither Pastor Sam Gardner nor the other members of the Harmony Friends meeting express any enthusiasm for this idea, but Dale is unstoppable. Meanwhile, Pastor Sam has his own concerns: he's having his annual argument with his wife, and he's worried that the four-slotted toaster he bought for her may be too lavish a gift. Amidst the bustle of the season, the citizens of Harmony experience the simple joys and sometime loneliness that often go unseen. Sam comes to the realization that Dale, in his own misguided way, is only trying to draw meaning from the eternal story of Christmas. "In this unsettled world, it is good to have this steadiness -- the Christmas Eve service, the peal of the bell. . . .There is a holiness to memory, a sense of God's presence in these mangers of the mind. Which might explain why it is that the occasions that change the least are often the very occasions that change us the most."