Big things are happening in Grantville since the whole town was sent through time and space to war-torn seventeenth-century Germany, and up-timer nursing student Krystal Reed isn't handling it very well. She never wanted to live in Grantville and being sent back to the seventeenth century just makes it worse. Working with doctors who think bleeding is a legitimate medical practice and that women have no business in medicine is exasperating, to say the least-but their prejudices are no match for the new medical programs in Grantville and Jena. Now if only she can recover from losing her parents, her friends, her home, her college, and her future. Nils Jorgensen and his family are just a few of the thousands of down-timers looking for a new future in Grantville. They arrive with little more than their skills. Through hard work, the Jorgensens start a fashion empire. For people like elderly Irene Flannery, life is more about smaller, personal issues. With no family left up-time, her biggest worry now that's she's in the seventeenth century is having a married curate at the Catholic church. (The scandal!) But she has kept a secret since FDR was President and she'll defend her rose bushes to the death because of it.

The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships -- with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others -- and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Hester was famously known as "A" in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being, and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006. O'Connor's capacity to live fully -- despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia -- is illuminated in this engaging and authoritative biography. Praise for Flannery: "Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. There is much that is new in this book, but, more important, everything is presented in a strong, clear light."-Edmund White "This splendid biography gives us no saint or martyr but the story of a gifted and complicated woman, bent on making the best of the difficult hand fate has dealt her, whether it is with grit and humor or with an abiding desire to make palpable to readers the terrible mystery of God's grace."-Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy "A good biographer is hard to find. Brad Gooch is not merely good-he is extraordinary. Blessed with the eye and ear of a novelist, he has composed the life that admirers of the fierce and hilarious Georgia genius have long been hoping for."-Joel Conarroe, President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation

Antique shop owner Jade Mackenzie went from mourning her mother's death to a whirlwind of mysteries, breakneck chases, and a cult of madmen trying to kill her…all while a gorgeous fireman made himself her personal bodyguard. Life got a whole lot more interesting when Aidan MacFie turned out to be a Selkie, hybrid human and ancient shapeshifting seal. Forged in life and death circumstances, their newfound love has weathered the first storm, but an even greater danger lurks on the horizon… Through his great-grandmother's diaries, Aidan learned of the Hunters' intent to destroy their people, believing Selkie were unholy, their hybrid offspring unnatural and evil. Just before Aidan and Jade escaped the cult leader after them, he spoke of a reaping in which the Hunters would at last wipe out the Selkies during their Great Birth, a 16-year event of multiple seal shapeshifter births that would take place in Scotland soon. Putting their budding romance on hold is agony, yet Aidan and Jade head to MacFie Castle in Tobermory, where his uncle lives, to follow the Hunters' trail. Only by untangling the threads of Celtic folklore, aquatic shapeshifters, and the shocking overlap of their own families' histories can they hope to save the Selkie Folk. But will they be too late to avoid the mass extinction of Aidan's people by fanatics who will stop at nothing to purge the world of what they consider a threat to all humanity? With peril around every corner, what hope do they have of sharing a happily ever after?

Sydney, 1942, and in a nation threatened by a Japanese invasion, with husbands absent and sleek GIs present, a spirit of recklessness takes hold. Frank Darragh, an impressionable young priest, finds the line between saving others' souls and losing his own begins to blur as he becomes entangled with an attractive married woman, a ménage a trois, and a charismatic American sergeant.

"This girl is a real novelist," wrote Caroline Gordon about Flannery O’Connor upon being asked to review a manuscript of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. "She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety." This collection of letters and other documents offers the most complete portrait of the relationship between two of the American South’s most acclaimed twentieth-century writers: Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. Gordon (1895–1981) had herself been a protégée of an important novelist, Ford Madox Ford, before publishing nine novels and three short story collections of her own, most notably, The Forest of the South and Old Red and Other Stories, and she would offer insights and friendship to O’Connor during almost all of O’Connor’s career. As revealed in this collection of correspondence, Gordon’s thirteen-year friendship with O’Connor (1925–64) and the critiques of O’Connor’s fiction that she wrote during this time not only fostered each writer’s career but occasioned a remarkable series of letters full of insights about the craft of writing. Gordon, a more established writer at the start of their correspondence, acted as a mentor to the younger O’Connor and their letters reveal Gordon’s strong hand in shaping some of O’Connor’s most acclaimed work, including Wise Blood, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and "The Displaced Person."

An essential book for critical study of the works of Flannery O'Connor. "The best study of one of the best writers"--Robert Fitzgerald