Throughout history, aviation has been a field filled with adventure and romance, daredevils and heroes, great challenges and big dreams. "If We Had Wings" captures the essence of man's ongoing fascination with flight, from early Renaissance scientists who imagined fanciful flying machines through the technological breakthroughs that launched humans into space. The passion to fly and the corresponding advances in aviation have always changed our world irrevocably, and "If We Had Wings" offers both the tragedies and the triumphs of the continued attempts to reach even higher. These compelling stories are enhanced by removable documents -- ranging from diary pages of a World War I airman to letters that Amelia Earhart wrote to her parents in the event of her death. These will all make the material come to life like never before.

In a world divided into fliers and non - fliers, how far would you go to be able to fly? How much would you sacrifice - your own child?

Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

"July 24, 2008, my wife and I sat in Dr. Doug Flora's office. The doctor entered the room, turned, and looked at us and said, 'I know folks, this really sucks! You have esophageal cancer. It is what is called a clinical T3N1 tumor. It's extremely serious.' He then went into a detailed explanation of Dr. Saeed's findings. He sketched a picture of my esophagus and stomach on a white sheet of paper that covered the examining table and pointed at the base of my stomach and esophagus and drew a circle where the tumor had been detected. He said that the tumor's size was 2.0 mm. I told him that I had been taking long walks to get a suntan and to lose weight and had been proud to lose seventeen pounds. He said, 'The cancer took your seventeen pounds-it wasn't the walking.' Join author Paul D. Jackson, Jr. in If A Frog Had Wings as he reflects on how his life experiences from childhood to adulthood had prepared him for the fight of his life. Share in the humor, heartbreak and steadfast stubbornness in Paul's love of life that have helped him to overcome great adversity and come out standing.

The notion that we spring into existence ex nihilo at birth strikes many people as counter-intuitive. By contrast, the idea that we have an eternal identity appeals to some deep intuition about the self. And indeed, belief in the soul's pre-mortal existence has a long history in Western thought. Terryl Givens offers the first systematic exploration of this fascinating if generally unfamiliar feature of Western cultural history.

A nine-year-old girl's harrowing account of abuse at the hands of her parents. Her name is Avocet Jackson, but her mother called her Bird, naming both her children after birds, "her logic being that if we were named for something with wings then maybe we'd be able to fly above the shit in our lives."

After having a near-death experience in the accident that killed his younger sister, Wenny, eleven-year-old Will copes by writing her letters.

A dog imagines what the world would be like for dogs if they had wings.

This young adult fantasy debut about love, found family, and healing is “a fantastical ode to the Golden City’s postpunk era,” told through the eyes of a Mexican-American girl (Entertainment Weekly). “Complex and beautiful, blending folklore, San Franciscan history, the music scene, vampires, magic . . . hard to put down.” —School Library Journal Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rockstar family in one of the city’s storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas’s live-in governess and quickly finds her place in the girl’s tight-knit household, which operates on a free-love philosophy and easy warmth despite the band’s growing fame. But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas perform a riot-grrrl ritual in good fun, accidentally summoning a pair of ancient beings bound to avenge the wrongs of Xochi’s past. She would do anything to preserve her new life, but with the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those who’ve hurt her, no one is safe—not the family Xochi’s chosen, nor the one she left behind.

If I Just Had Two Wings is published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside.