Literary Fiction

Scott Harper makes his living flying hunters and fishermen into the wilds of Alaska. However, his current passenger is different, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. Scott’s strange passenger directs him by gunpoint to a remote landing strip in the middle of nowhere, and armed men suddenly surround his plane. Barely able to take off under fire, his aircraft is heavily damaged and crashes deep in the wilderness. With the men in hot pursuit, Scott must navigate the rugged terrain to stay one step ahead.

The long, bloody Civil War is finally at an end when Zee Mimms, the daughter of a Missouri preacher, is tasked with nursing her cousin, Jesse James, back to health after he suffers a near-fatal wound. During Jesse's long convalescence, the couple falls in love, but Jesse's resentment against the Federals runs deep. He has scores to settle.

Love's never easy, even in easier times, like the 1950s and 1960s in the Ohio Valley. The steel industry was booming. Second-generation immigrant families were reaching for the American middle class. And Catholic schools-made feasible by selfless Catholic nuns-promised bigger lives for everyone, including Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine. As they spent years searching for their separate futures, though, they were also stumbling toward love just as their world came crashing down.

Jessica's return to her small hometown is about to get hairy. A chance encounter with Jackson Hart in the days before her friend's wedding seems coincidental-until she stumbles upon the Hart family's mysterious ties to the bride. Coincidence and fate may prove one and the same as Jessica struggles to protect her heart from Jackson and her friends' lives from unbelievable danger.

Life has not been easy for Marta and her daughter, Jannah. On the brink of losing her home and suffering from a broken heart, Marta has lost all hope. James has never gotten over the fact that he wasn’t able to be a father to his own daughter. When he became Marta’s next-door neighbor years later, he was overjoyed to finally be the father he always wanted to be and has worked on building a relationship with Marta and Jannah ever since. Will he ever have the heart to connect Marta with the biological mother she has never known?

Jan Bagan is a Ukrainian YouTuber living in the small, rural town of Nide, which leans against the Russian border. Though he stocks shelves at the only local grocery store at night, his true love is all things combustible. Explosive experiments fuel his modest YouTube channel where his only goal is to make art in the sky. Without any sort of classical training, he uses his senses to recognize and mix the chemicals to reach a satisfying ending.

Essa didn’t ask for rumors to follow her like gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe. However, being known as ‘Oblivion Girl: Destroy of Cities’ was a rumor she could sink her teeth into. With the help of her sidekick, Atticus, the two were doing just fine hunting bounties, fighting pirates, and arguing with Gypsies. And she didn’t even mind when Alita joined the group—even though they constantly fought. This was all, of course, before she knew her brother Eden was still alive.

“Opiate” – to induce sleep; to stupefy; to hijack the brain and change its normal function. Opelika, Alabama – where cars, men, and race collide to unhinge the life of a young woman. Piecing it back together will require figuring out the role she played, and who she really is – or wants to be.

She's brilliant, she's strong. She's funny, beautiful, and a bit unorthodox. She is respected, feared, and loved. BellaRae, the semi-retired psychiatrist all adore and admire in Comfort for the Afflicted: A Deranged Christmas, now, gives us her story. From her arduous childhood to her renewed present day, it is in this account we get a vivid view into BellaRae's vast and layered life. The life which cultivated her into the beloved flame that burns radiant and legendary in this extraordinary journey.

Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet system: In a hospital, young people awaiting heart operations and possible death, live just for today with mischief-making and even love affairs, under the stringent gaze of the old matron, Baba Nastya. Here one of the patients, a young Turkmen, meets a Greek Comsomol boy, a Russian Stalinist with a ‘robotic’ heart, and the lovely but tragic Mary. To whom does the future belong – to the soulless robots or the poetical souls?

Light and dark—this is the cursed birthright placed upon Clara and Natasha by their godfather, Drosselmeyer, whose power and greed hold an entire city in his sway. Charming Clara, the favorite, grows into a life of beauty and ease, while Natasha is relegated to her sister’s shadow, ignored and unloved. But Natasha seizes the opportunity for revenge one Christmas Eve, when Drosselmeyer arrives at the family gala with the Nutcracker, an enchanted gift that offers entry into an alternate world: the Kingdom of Sweets.

Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in The Temple of My Familiar, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie’s own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, they must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.

As a promising young actress, Sun Weishi made the critical decision to pursue her studies in Moscow—with the blessing of her influential adoptive father, Zhou Enlai, and Mao himself. The valuable insights she gained there during World War II, most notably the significance of characters' inner lives, would enable her to excel back in China, where she produced works by Chekhov and Gogol, and other socially progressive dramas, such as an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her striking career as China's first female director of modern spoken drama (Huaju) would be derailed.

Meridian Hill, a dedicated and courageous young activist in the 1960s, works to create peace and understanding through her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, her coworkers quitting and moving to comfortable homes and lives, and others turning to more violent means of achieving change, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity—and that of all her people.

She used to be someone else, but now she’s arrived in Vegas, where she can start again. It won’t do to let the past leak in. It’s the Sixties now. She’s going to become Joan. She makes a list: Buy a new dress (fitted, floral). Dye her hair (dark). Curl it. Buy red lipstick. Buy cigarettes and a lighter, too: Joan, she decides, is a smoker. There’s no need to dwell on why she’s here, what went before. She is just moving forward, one foot in front of the other, becoming that new person. Joan.