Short Marriage

When Ava Barnes’s boyfriend, Justin, proposes after a whirlwind romance, the young couple embarks on a quest that will test their love. For generations, engaged couples in Ava’s family have traveled into the Everglades to retrieve the egg of the magnificent frigate bird in order to bake it into a marriage cake. Those who succeed live happily ever after, while those who fail are destined for heartbreak. With Ava’s beloved grandmother gravely ill, never has the marriage tradition meant so much.

In Couples That Work, INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri rejects conventional one-size-fits-all solutions and instead focuses on how dual-career couples can tackle and resolve the challenges they face throughout their lives - together. She identifies three key phases of exploration and personal growth in every couple's work-life journey, showing how partners must navigate these together to strengthen their bond.

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.

Buffalo Valley, North Dakota. A few years ago, this was a dying town. Now it's come back to life! People are feeling good about living here again - the way they used to. They're feeling confident about the future. Stalled lives are moving forward. People like Margaret Clemens are taking risks on new ventures and on lifelong dreams. On happiness. Margaret is a local rancher who's finally getting what she wants most: marriage to cowboy Matt Eilers.

In Regency England, marriage is everything. For young widow Sybella Lovatt, the time has come to find a suitable husband for her sister and ward Lucie. Male suitors are scarce near their Wiltshire estate, so the sisters resolve to head to London in time for the Season to begin. Once ensconced at the Mayfair home of Lady Godley, Lucie’s godmother, the whirl of balls, parties and promenades can begin. But the job of finding a husband is fraught with rules and tradition. Jostling for attention are two lords.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Circle of Friends and The Glass Lake comes This Year It Will Be Different, a stunning work that brings us the magic and spirit of Christmas in 15 stories filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit, charm, and sheer storytelling genius. Instead of nostalgia, Binchy evokes contemporary life; instead of Christmas homilies, she offers truth; and instead of sugarplums, she brings us the nourishment of holidays that precipitate change, growth, and new beginnings.

Significant events such as birth, marriage, and death are milestones in our lives in which we experience our greatest happiness and our deepest grief. And so it is profoundly important to understand how to approach and experience these occasions with grace, endurance, and joy. In On Marriage, Timothy and Kathy Keller bring 45 years of personal experience with marriage, as well as a deep understanding of God's resources in the Bible for those who want to find them. The Kellers teach us to understand how to begin and nourish your marriage well.

The "queen of beach reads” (New York Magazine) presents nine captivating stories of summer on Nantucket—and days that last forever—to carry us through when those warm sandy days feel far off. Inside the collection, you'll find: Three years after Mallory Blessing's death (in 28 Summers)...

Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and In Cold Blood. This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capote developing the unique voice and sensibility that would make him one of the twentieth century’s most original writers.

always wondered, How does she do it? Defying gravity is no easy trick. Neither is motherhood. Now that her mother is leaving New York for bigger skies in New Mexico, it’s a new stage in life for both of them in an ever-evolving relationship that reveals the true magic of being a mother.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in Kannada, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a...

Motherhood isn’t always what’s expected. One woman may delight in navigating the unknowable, while another may look to the past to chart the course ahead. Still another may have the urge to redefine the relationship between mother and child. For each, the journey can be heartwarming and heartbreaking, ever changing and challenging. In these provocative stories, acclaimed authors probe the growing pains that can change the lives of both mother and child in ways they never imagined.

The first ever collection of short stories from the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Over the course of thirty years, Sigrid Nunez has become one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices, producing nine penetrating, profound novels...

As identical twins, Bothan and Calum MacNachton share a bond stronger than most brothers, one forged by a terrible secret. Rumors and dark tales have been whispered about their clan for centuries. For they roam the Highlands at night, driven by a savage hunger that can never be sated. Their only hope lies in marriage to Outsiders, mortal women whose pure blood will weaken the hold of their eternal curse.

This is about the oldest story in the book. A partner betrays his significant other for their closest and most treasured friend by having an affair. The only way to tell this story is to go back to the beginning, to the start of the friendship, the boundaries that were slowly blurred and then crossed, which then resulted in the ultimate betrayal: an affair. The journey to that point starts with friendship, love, and loyalty and ends with a pain that can be described only as a cold, calculated, and direct stab to the heart from both betrayers.

Some Marriages are a little bit different from others. This is one of those. Do not call the police on me. This is fiction. It did NOT happen.

From the author of "The Killing of Train-Man Brown", "Send Me a Friend", and "Then Her Wig Fell Off..." comes "A Marriage Story".

In A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage, Sharon Gilchrest O'Neill challenges you to understand and live by the tenets of a committed relationship through an inviting, simple, and sensible approach to embracing marriage.

A profound portrait of contemporary Pakistan from the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali In seven searing, atmospheric stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices...

A debut collection of short fiction includes the author's award-winning story "My Life as a West African Gray Parrot", "He Was a Big Boy, Still Is" about a White public defender counseling the mother of a mentally impaired Black defendant, and "Technician" in which an ordinary, unemployed Trenton man is hired a state executioner.

When a sandcastle is built, it looks good but soon the waves of nature and outside forces become bent on destroying it. So it was for a marriage that looked good from the outside. In an attempt to strengthen what was already crumbling, Godfrey and his wife, Miriam, embarked on a holiday to Venice to bolster their marriage. He became obsessed with religion and its negative effect on life, as well as admiring topless women on the beach, while she became more and more bored. The whole holiday became a disaster for both of them.