Short Family

Best-selling author Kiana Davenport (The Spy Lover, Shark Dialogues) is pleased to offer a special-edition bundle, featuring the first three volumes of her prize-winning Pacific stories, many of which have appeared in the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prizes, and The Best American Short Stories. Set across the Pacific, in islands where the author has traveled and lived, the stories comprise tales of love, lust, racism, family, murder, rape, the search for identity, and the universal search for human dignity.

Viciria is an actual person who lived. She is real and her son, Marcus Nonius Balbus, actually became the first citizen of Herculaneum. Before this wealthy resort city was buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, she was known as The Witch. At title well-earned for sure. But why? What could happen in her life that could change such a gentle creature? Find out in the accompanying short story to Threatened Loyalties also by J F Ridgley.

Growing up homeschooled in Berkeley, California, Beatrice Quinn is a statistical genius who has dreamed her whole life of discovering new mathematical challenges at a school like Oxford University. She always thought the hardest part would be getting in, not convincing her parents to let her go. But while math has always made sense to Beatrice, making friends is a problem she hasn’t been able to solve. The compromise? The Connecticut Shakespearean Summer Academy.

These are some of the stories of Manorsfields' residents, their relatives and their caregivers. There is humor, poignancy, even romance, but above all they demonstrate that life is very often stranger than fiction.

In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children’s game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half brother. A mother, pining for her children, feasts on loaves of challah to fill the void. A new couple navigates a tightrope walk toward love. And on a trip to a Texas water park with their son, two fathers each confront a personal fear.

In An Amish Family, beloved author of Amish romance Kathleen Fuller invites listeners into the lives of four Amish families. Building Trust: Grace Miller and Joel King are in love. They’ve dated secretly for the past year, and when he proposes marriage, Grace eagerly agrees. But when she tells her parents about the wedding, she’s shocked when her father tells her she can’t marry Joel. Can Grace get to the bottom of her father’s animosity toward Joel so they can have the happily ever after she’s always dreamed of?

Holly, North Carolina - where it’s Christmas year-round and miracles can happen. A good thing for the O’Connor family - four local siblings, four sexy stories, four unique journeys to happily ever after.

Gifted empath and security expert Landon Love has spent a lifetime trying to keep everyone at arm's length, never wanting to know what people personally think about him. His gift of sensing emotions isn't one he'd wish on anyone...ever. Beautician Alexis Love has been called many things by her family. Mother Nature on crack is the most accurate, thanks to her unusual DNA. The weather and the vibrations of the earth are her playground.

For an imperial assassin, assignment as a courtesan in the Floating World seems like a waste of her talents...until killers target her clan sisters. In the legendary Floating World, wars are waged with wit, the strongest soldier can be bound with threads of silk, and flesh is the currency by which life, death, and freedom can all be purchased. Half-elf Jie bemoans her temporary assignment as a Night Blossom in the most sought-after house, even if it's the perfect cover for her real work as an assassin in the emperor’s service.

Struggling with depression and feeling lost after the birth of her daughter, Florence St. George began experimenting with a small lump of clay on her kitchen table. Pot by pot, bowl by bowl, she discovered that as her hands became busier, her mind grew calmer. In just a few years, Florence went from complete beginner to contestant on The Great Pottery Throwdown, discovering some important lessons along the way: that pottery is the perfect antidote to internet overload, that creativity doesn't have to be expensive, and that the hands-on process can ground you like nothing else.

Cada familia es un catálogo de las atrocidades de la historia. Y de sus sueños. Cada familia decide la extensión de su memoria: las ramas marchitas de su árbol genealógico, las raíces desaparecidas, la vida completa del sobrino o del tatarabuelo sucinta en tres cuartillas, las réplicas que se reprodujeron por esquejes –cortándose del árbol principal- y terminaron siendo eso, réplicas.

Bea's parents think she can accomplish absolutely anything—and she's determined to prove them right. But at the end of seventh grade, on the same day she makes a gutsy play to send her softball team to the league championships and Xander, the boy she likes, makes it clear that he likes her too, a scandal shakes up her world. Bea's dad made a big mistake, taking money that belonged to a client. He's now suspended from practicing law, and another lawyer spread the news online. To make matters worse, that other lawyer is Xander's dad.

Nic Schuck follows up his debut novel, Native Moments, with a gritty tale of family drama. Mostly set in the fictional lumber town of Sullivan, Florida, a sleepy forgotten place on the Florida-Alabama border, Panhandlers, a novel in stories, follows Hank Ackerman as he grows up in poverty and attempts to escape the same demons that haunted his father. Sometimes dreams are all people have and it’s those dreams of far-off places that can be the difference in embarking on a life of adventure or being complacent in the life you were born into.

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans 25 years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality.

In this addictive short story collection, 24 very different women reach a pivotal moment in their lives. A widow is liberated by a new job but keeps it secret from her family. A date in suburbia has dramatic results. A seamstress takes revenge on an unsuspecting customer while in France, a mother is promised 'fantastic news' - and lets her imagination run away with her.

Another Friday night in the small fishing village along the New Jersey coast. A return to see how everyone has fared in the last five years and who's made the right and wrong decisions in their life. Check back in with Willie, April, Tommy, George, Frankie, Gary, Billy, Jimmy, and Garrett 10 years after the events of the original Belford Stories!

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.

These stories attest to the generous compass of Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words. In this collection, filled with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other.

Karen Neulander, a successful New York political consultant, has always been fiercely protective of her son, Jacob, now six. She's had to be; when Jacob's father, Dave, found out Karen was pregnant and made it clear that fatherhood wasn't in his plans, Karen walked out of the relationship, never telling Dave her intention was to raise their child alone. But now Jake is asking to meet his dad, and with good reason: Karen is dying.