Jessica Talvert came to New Orleans looking for her roots and the mystery of her past. But some secrets were meant to stay buried. Little did she realize her arrival in the sultry city would spell her own doom. Feral, dangerous, and oozing lethal charm, he captured Jessica with a kiss, but the Cajun rogue, Gabriel Benoit, is not what he seems. Danger follows him, exciting her beyond imagining, until she's swept into a world she never dreamed existed. Rating: Contains graphic, explicit sex and violence, profanity, and harsh language Views: 24
In 1972 a gold bullion convoy is hijacked in Marseilles. The security trucks and hijackers are swiftly rounded up, but a ton of gold has disappeared. More than twenty years later, Daniel Jacquot receives an unexpected gift from an old fisherman. At the same time, a Marseilles lawyer called Claude Dupont receives an equally unexpected gift from a dying gangland boss.Both gifts point the way to the missing gold and pit Jacquot and Dupont against the Polineaux and Duclos familles, two of the oldest and most feared crime syndicates on the Côte d'Azur.When the Marseilles police become involved following a series of gruesome murders, the investigation is headed by Chief Inspector Isabelle Cassier. An old friend and sometime lover of Jacquot's, Isabelle discovers that the years haven't lessened her longing for the maverick Marseilles cop, and that her feelings for him are far from professional.Together they embark... Views: 24
After a three-year long engagement, Clarissa Mark's is getting married. She promised her fiancé that she'd sell her company Lariat Games, the 80-hour workweeks would cease, and she would settle down and become a devoted wife and mother. Views: 24
Ryan Ceres is a real-estate developer, whose single passion--his love--is renovating derelict buildings and turning them into pristine, gleaming shops, offices, and apartments. The long-abandoned Windsor Machine Works seems like just the project for Ryan, or it would be if it were in a better part of town, but he feels compelled to take it on nonetheless. All seems well, until he comes across the ugly, misshapen, drunken squatter, Winnie, in one the rooms. Because she is not simply a squatter, she is the Domovoi , the spirit of the building, and she doesn't want to change. M. K. Hobson is a fabulous writer; her prose is beautiful and focused, and she gracefully brings alive her subjects. This is a story to read again and again, not just to appreciate the subtleties of the story, but simply to delight in Hobson's craft. This is undoubtedly the strongest story in this month's F&SF . Patrick Samphire Views: 24
With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 15, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They come to blame their mother for their family's dislocation and one day the two run off together—to the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then utterly gone.Faced with the unraveling of the family she thought she could hold together through blind love, Gwartney begins the painful—and universal—journey of recognizing her own flawed motivations as a mother. Live Through This chronicles Gwartney's frantic efforts to recover the beautiful, intelligent daughters she cherishes. The triumph of her story is its sensitive rendering of how all three women have dug deep for forgiveness and a... Views: 24
"If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So said Thomas Mann of the work of PeterAltenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of writing, Altenberg’s signature short prose straddles the line between the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire and the Feuilleton—a light journalistic reflection of his day—Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman’s new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turnof-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millennium of email.ReviewThe freest soul of the epoch. —Karl Kraus In his small stories his whole life is mirrored. And every step, every movement he makes confirms the truth of his words. Peter Altenberg is a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses. —Franz Kafka If it be permitted to speak of "love at first sound," then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose. —Thomas Mann Some [of Altenberg’s pieces] are like steel projectiles, so tightly enclosed in themselves, so complete and precise in their form; and like projectiles, they pierce the breast; you are struck and you bleed. Some are like crystals and diamonds, sparkling in the multicolored reflections of the light of life, gleaming with captured rays of sunlight and glittering with a hidden inner fire. Some are like ripe fruits, warm with the waft of summer, swollen and sweet. —Felix Salten Altenberg seems singular even when compared to his nearest literary kin: less austere and allegorical than Baudelaire, and more involved with society than Robert Walser, his short prose approaches form in ways that are uncannily relevant now. —James Guida, *The New Yorker*About the AuthorPeter Altenberg (akaRichard Engländer, 1859-1919) born into a well-to-do, assimilated Viennese Jewish family, took advantage of a medical diagnosis of "over-excitation of the nervous system" and a consequent "incapacity for gainful employment" to devote himself heart and soul to the life of the Bohemian poet. Author of eleven books published during his lifetime and two more after his death, Altenberg also pioneered the verynotion of loose-fitting leisure attire, designed a line of necklaces, favored sandals, walking sticks and slivovitz. His long list of literary admirers included Karl Kraus, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler and George Bernard Shaw. Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Robert Musil¢s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Heinrich Heine¢s Travel Pictures, Peter Altenberg¢s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology published by Penguin Classics. Views: 24
Respected political leader Harry Tresmayne has been found murdered beside a lonely road on Cape Fear. Harry’s friend, Matthew Livesey, is drawn to investigate the truth, and the more Livesey learns about Harry’s private life, the more reasons for murder he finds. Views: 24
