There are times when some things must be done by the pastor. Why? Because there is no one else to do them. Dr. Lawrence Hudson, an eager, young pastor, gladly bears this responsibility as he embarks on his first duties at the Church of the Redeemer in the small town of Roy, Tennessee. The year is 1947, and this is the first church appointment for this bright, dedicated man of God. With grand ambitions and a deep desire to please the Lord, Dr. Hudson is attentive to the needs of his parishioners, no matter the place or the hour, and seems to have sermons ready at the drop of a hat. He soon becomes famous for his front porch sermons and fireside sermons, which he gives to those who stop by his home for counsel and spiritual advice. Although he quickly proves himself to be wise beyond his years, Dr. Hudson still has many lessons to learn as he sets about tending his new flock. Perhaps even more difficult, he, like all humans, must face his own failures and mistakes. For he has a ghost in his past which is not easily forgotten-a lost love which he may never recover. Wrestling with his own heartache, loneliness, and regret, he focuses on the needs of others in order to fill the void in his own life. Only his closest friend and housekeeper, Mrs. Ward, knows of his inner struggle-one, it seems, only God can heal. My Patch of Heaven is a story of hope, faithfulness, and triumph as a pastor and his flock ever reach for that higher calling.

Erik was 12 when Gypsy decided she was through with striptease—'I’m forty-two years old. Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers.' Her endless schemes for staying famous and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle—a best-selling writing career, a musical based on her life, a disastrous attempt to turn her home movies into a blockbuster—make for comedic yet poignant reading. My G-String Mother is a stylish, incisive portrait of two lives: an awkward adolescent who was as much confidante, co-conspirator, and companion as son, and the legendary woman who told police at a raid at the famous Minsky’s burlesque house, 'I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.'

Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus: a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill. Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.

Ayn Rand Novel CollectionAyn RandTwo landmark epics from the famed philosopher and “a writer of great power” (The New York Times Book Review), The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged explore themes of individuality, freedom, and fascism and feature two of Ayn Rand’s most famous characters, Howard Roark and John Galt.The FountainheadAtlas Shrugged

From #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Barbara Freethy comes an award winning tale of romance and suspense. Fans of Carla Neggars, Karen Robards, and Nora Roberts will enjoy this intricately suspenseful story that begins with the question -- what if you looked exactly like someone in a famous photograph? From the back cover: Everything she's been told about her past is a lie ... Julie De Marco is planning a perfect San Francisco wedding when she comes face-to-face with a famous photograph, the startling inage of a little girl behind the iron gate of a foreign orphanage -- a girl who looks exactly like her. But Julia isn't an orphan. She isn't adopted. And she's never been out of the country. She knows who she is -- or does she? Haunted by uncertainty, Julia sets off on a dangerous search for her true identity -- her only clues a swan necklace and an old Russian doll, her only ally daring, sexy photographer Alex Manning. Suddenly nothing is as it seems. The people Julia loved and trusted become suspicious strangers. The relationships she believed in -- with her mother, her sister, and her fiance -- are shaken by new revelations. The only person she can trust is Alex, but he has secrets of his own. Each step brings her closer to a mysterious past that began a world away -- a past that still has the power to threaten her life ... and change her future forever.

Jefferson Square was a multi-million dollar culture center…but there was nothing at all cultural about some of the things that happened there during its grand opening in the Sixties. At the Repertory Theater, a play called Confessional was in rehearsal. Some called it dramatic literature. Others considered it a tasteless exploitation of the playwright’s former marriage to America’s queen of sex. In the expensive interior of Symphony Hall, the brilliant and erratic conductor of the Jefferson Square Symphony Orchestra was working feverishly on a new concerto while his private life was rushing toward its own scandalous crescendo. In the board room, the dream of the state’s governor for a presidential nomination was interrupted by the discovery that Jefferson Square was making this rich man richer. And in the executive offices, where architects’ drawings were still being argued over, Jefferson Square’s recently hired cultural director was being tempted to destroy what he had been employed to hold together. Jefferson Square provides a fascinating glimpse of life behind the scenes in the midst of the creation of a new urban cultural epicenter, a symbol of the gentrification forcing out longtime neighborhood inhabitants. From the glitz and the glamor of Jefferson Square proper, to the hardships faced by residents of the condemned projects in the area, Gerson brings microcosms of the Sixties to Technicolor life.

Responding to the enduring lure of the West that captured his imagination as a child, Jerry Ellis decides to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a short-lived, hell-for-leather mail delivery service that lasted just one and a half years starting in 1860 but has marked itself in national memory ever since. Starting his journey in St. Joseph, Missouri, Ellis follows the Pony Express trail across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to the end of the line in San Francisco. Ellis succeeds in completing his twenty-one-hundred-mile journey by foot, horseback, covered wagon, hitchhiking, and canoe. Open to what he finds, including his own frailties, Ellis reports with sympathy and humor on the strange variety of the modern West.

A scholar examines 14 everyday objects featured in horror films and how they manifest their power and speak to society’s fears. Take a tour of the house where a microwave killed a gremlin, a typewriter made Jack a dull boy, a sewing machine fashioned Carrie’s prom dress, and houseplants might kill you while you sleep. In Household Horror, Marc Olivier highlights the wonder, fear, and terrifying dimension of objects in horror cinema. Inspired by object-oriented ontology and the nonhuman turn in philosophy, Olivier places objects in film on par with humans, arguing, for example, that a sleeper sofa is as much the star of Sisters as Margot Kidder, that The Exorcist is about a possessed bed, and that Rosemary’s Baby is a conflict between herbal shakes and prenatal vitamins. Household Horror reinvigorates horror film criticism by investigating the unfathomable being of objects as seemingly benign as remotes, radiators, refrigerators, and dining tables. Olivier questions what Hitchcock’s Psycho tells us about shower curtains. What can we learn from Freddie Krueger’s greatest accomplice, the mattress? Room by room, Olivier considers the dark side of fourteen household objects to demonstrate how the objects in these films manifest their own power and connect with specific cultural fears and concerns. “Provides a lively and highly original contribution to horror studies. As a work on cinema, it introduces the reader to films that may be less well-known to casual fans and scholars; more conspicuously, it returns to horror staples, gleefully reanimating works that one might otherwise assume had been critically “done to death” (Psycho, The Exorcist, The Shining).” —Allan Cameron, University of Auckland