What would you do to save the life of someone you loved?Isabelle Falcone has been asking herself that question ever since her brother was born. He’s always been ill and no one has any answers for her. When her family’s healer leaves, she has to find the strength to get help outside of the city she calls home. With only her frail brother by her side, will she go to the last people that may be able to save him? They’ll ask a high price, one she might not want to pay. But for her brother’s life, anything is worth it. Isn’t it? Views: 6
London, 1817 Devon, the Earl of Malton, is a hero for his deeds at the
Battle of Waterloo. But he suffers terrible nightmares, and drinks himself to sleep most
nights. A habit he vows to break when he awakes one morning to find a woman sharing his
bed, no memory of how she got there, and her angry brother at his door. Cathleen is
mortified when her wastrel brother and his greedy wife propose a blackmail scheme
involving the earl, but as a penniless war widow she’s at their mercy. She goes along
with the plan and sneaks into Devon’s bed one night, and ends up comforting him through
a night terror. Charmed by her beauty and kindness, Devon determines that rather than
pay the blackmail, he will offer his hand in marriage to Cathleen. Although she is
deeply attracted to the stoic earl, Cathleen cannot understand why Devon would want to
marry her. What she doesn’t know is that Devon owes her a debt that can never fully be
repaid… Views: 6
A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference.In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create.Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.10 illustrationsReview“Fairyland is [a] daughter's compassionate, clear-eyed reckoning with [the] truths that defined her singular girlhood at the dawn of the gay liberation movement.” (Alexandra Styron - *New York Times Book Review*)“In Alysia Abbott’s gorgeous account of her 1980s San Francisco childhood, a whimsical gay poet becomes an intelligent father, his motherless daughter a forceful and articulate young woman, and a rich, dizzy fairyland is shuttered by a plague. As a chronicle of the moment when the San Francisco of Armistad Maupin became the city of Harvey Milk, when gay and experimental poetry flourished in California, Fairyland is vivid and indelible. As the portrait of a conspiracy of love between a father and a daughter, it is heartrending, a brilliant addition to the literature of American memoir.” (Honor Moore, Author of *The Bishop’s Daughter*)“The striking photo on the cover of Fairyland looks like it could have been taken one hundred years ago. It gives a sense of the otherworldly childhood that Abbott recounts in this memoir about growing up with her openly gay, single father in San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. The memoir doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history. Her memoir is funny, strange, and sweet— she remembers playing dress-up with her father's flamboyant friends, learning about sex and gender without a mother, being immersed in art and creativity and, finally, watching as the AIDS epidemic decimated the life she knew.” (New Yorker)“A vivid, sensitively written account of a complex but always loving relationship. This is not only a painfully honest autobiography but also a tribute to old-fashioned bohemian values in a world that is increasingly conformist and materialistic. I couldn't put it down!” (Edmund White, author of *A Boy's Own Story*)“At once a father-daughter love story, a testament to survival, a meditation on profound loss, and a searing chronicle of a complex coming of age, Fairyland is a beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.” (Dani Shapiro, author of *Devotion: A Memoir*)“Generous, precise, and deeply moving, Fairyland is a love story that not only brings a new generational perspective to a history we’re in danger of forgetting, but irrevocably shifts the way we think about family itself.” (Alison Bechdel, author of *Are You My Mother?*)“Clear-eyed and heartrending, Fairyland captures a singular time and place in American history. It also captures something much more important: what it means to be truly loved—and to love truly. A beautiful book.” (Andrew McCarthy, author of *The Longest Way Home*)“Insightful and well-crafted, this book is useful both as a memoir and as a historical portrait of one of America's oldest gay communities.” (Library Journal)“Alysia beautifully remembers the innocence of the age between the disappearance of the Beats and the onset of AIDS.” (San Francisco Chronicle)“As a chronicle of American culture, Abbott's story matters.” (Boston Globe)“Starred review. She writes up to a standard that would do any writer-parent proud. If there's plenty of emotion in her recollections, they lack all sentimentality, sensationalism, and special pleading. Like Ira Wagner's, Growing Up Amish (2011), a tale of another radically different, unusual upbringing, Fairyland is written in shiningly clear, precise prose that gives it literary as well as testimonial distinction.” (Booklist)“What makes this story especially successful is the meticulous way the author uses letters and her father’s cartoons and journals to reconstruct the world she and her father inhabited. As she depicts the dynamics of a unique, occasionally fraught, gay parent–straight child relationship, Abbott offers unforgettable glimpses into a community that has since left an indelible mark on both the literary and social histories of one of America’s most colorful cities. A sympathetic and deeply moving story.” (Kirkus Reviews) About the AuthorAlysia Abbott's work has appeared in Real Simple, Salon, and TheAtlantic.com. She is a graduate of the New School's MFA program and was a contributing producer at WNYC radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. Views: 6
Michael Barclay, an artist with a promising career before him, came home from the Civil War a broken man on the edge of despair. Wounded and sure his life as an artist is over, he's ended his engagement to his beautiful muse, Bella. Views: 6
17- year- old Ana Maria Tei’s life has always been perfect: loving parents, good grades, and a future so bright it outshone the sun. But now words like “separation” and “divorce” are sending her world plummeting to hell. Determined to keep her family intact, Ana plans a family-bonding trip from Vienna to Tuscany. Except fate has other plans. Ana’s parents and siblings are killed in a car accident on their way to pick Ana up from school.Enter Grim, aka Ernest. He promises to relinquish the four souls if Ana agrees to trade her soul for theirs and serve a lifetime as his novice. In order for Ana to graduate from her Reaper’s Novice station to a Soul Collector graduate, Grim puts her to test. To her horror, she finds out becoming a Reaper’s Novice didn’t happen by chance. It was preordained, and she is forced to make a choice: save her family’s souls or come to terms with who she really is and complete the task set for her. Views: 6
The first short story collection from a writer who calls to mind such luminaries as Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Nathan EnglanderWhen The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction. In this astonishing book, Sayrafiezadeh conjures up a nameless American city and its unmoored denizens: a call-center employee jealous of the attention lavished on a co-worker newly returned from a foreign war; a history teacher dealing with a classroom of maliciously indifferent students; a grocery store janitor caught up in a romantic relationship with a kleptomaniac customer. These men's struggles and fleeting triumphs--with women, with cruel bosses, with the morning commute--are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as when a would-be suitor tries to take his sheltered, religious date on a tunnel... Views: 6
BLASTED EDENScattered remains have been salvaged from the abandoned cities that withstood the atomic onslaught at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, but the secrets of pre-Dark tech buried in the mass grave of civilization are known to only a few. Possessing understanding and the unshakable will to survive, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists face each day armed and ready for the enemy called Deathlands, whose formidable power has yet to claim victory over the human spirit....DEFENSIVE PERIMETERIn this raw, brutal world ruled by the strongest and the most vicious, an unseen player is manipulating Ryan and his band, luring him across an unseen battle line drawn in the dust outside Tucson, Arizona. Here a local barony becomes the staging ground for a battle unlike any other, against a foe whose ties to pre-Dark society present a new and incalculable threat to a fragile world. Ryan Cawdor is the only man living... Views: 6
When Katherine Gale steps onto the white-sand beach, all her pent up longings say it is time to live boldly—to love boldly. She walks the lonely shore, and love sings in her heart. It draws her to the Miss Iris, an old fishing boat she is destined to own, and it stabs deep when diver, Lee Thorpe, walks into her life. It all feels so terribly right. . . but something feels terribly wrong. When the peril she left behind invades her new life, and the Miss Iris reveals secrets from a mysterious past, paradise shows its thorny side. A night of terror sends Katherine on the only course she can take, but the blue waters run red while Lee searches for Katherine's path in the sea. Views: 6
