Phillipa Maakestad - long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter - grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding

The stories in this prize-winning collection evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world of these stories is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Packed with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. ø From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl?s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother?s yearlong struggle with the death of her synesthetic daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Each book in this Land of Our Lady series contains a concise yet interesting record of a specific period in American history--always explaining the Catholic influence of religion, culture and morality. Every private Catholic school, home-schooling family, and library will benefit from these Catholic textbooks. Book 1: Founders of Freedom, most often used in Grade 4, begins with the Creation, ending with events leading up to the discovery of the New World.

Mary In Our Life: An Atlas of the Names and Titles of Mary, The Mother of Jesus, and Their Place in Marian Devotion presents the 1,969 names, titles, and appellations used to identify the Blessed Virgin Mary over the centuries in terms of their history and related events. Within these titles and their history can be seen the official and private attitudes and prejudices of the times; government pressures, conflicts, and interdictions; internal problems within the Catholic Church; and startling examples of dedication, devotion, and piety. Taken together, Marian titles are a real-life story of the Catholic faith.

Storied Landscapes is a beautifully written, sweeping examination of the evolving identity of major ethno-religious immigrant groups in the Canadian West. Viewed through the lens of attachment to the soil and specific place, and through the eyes of both the immigrant generation and its descendants, the book compares the settlement experiences of Ukrainians, Mennonites, Icelanders, Doukhobors, Germans, Poles, Romanians, Jews, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes. It reveals how each group’s sense of identity was shaped by a complex interplay of physical and emotional ties to land and place, and how that sense of belonging influenced, and was influenced by, relationships not only within the prairies and the Canadian nation state but also with the homeland and its extended diaspora. Through a close study of myths, symbols, commemorative traditions, and landmarks, Storied Landscapes boldly asserts the inseparability of ethnicity and religion both to defining the prairie region and to understanding the Canadian nation-building project.

Most Catholics can recite the Hail Mary but haven’t actually reflected on the meaning of the prayer. Blogger and author Sarah Reinhard invited forty of the most popular Catholic voices, including Lisa M. Hendey, Lisa Mladinich, and Brandon Vogt, to write a brief reflection on one word of the Hail Mary. In Word by Word: Slowing Down with the Hail Mary, popular Catholic author Sarah Reinhard compiled an accessible, profound, and unique meditation on each word of the Hail Mary, one of the most important prayer traditions in Catholic life. Each of the reflections encourages readers to “slow down” with the Hail Mary and experience previously unseen dimension in the popular devotion, making it come to life in a new way. This unique, formative, and informative exploration of the beloved prayer is a gift to anyone who wants to be continually changed through it—learning to slow down and examine things more closely. The book is based on a blog series Reinhard facilitated with popular Catholic writers and social media experts, including Lisa M. Hendey, Brandon Vogt, Paula Huston, Kate Wicker, Pat Gohn, Kevin Lowry, Lisa Mladinich, Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle, Fr. Patrick Toner, and Jeff Young.

For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession. Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West. The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones-and find that our old love has only deepened.

Love stories wherein people ask themselves: what is love? In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people—young, old, gay, straight, midwestern, coastal—are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together—to function, work, and survive—while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Lovecontains nine stories. "Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancée insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires—all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

Over 2,200 Jokes from America’s favorite live radio show A treasury of hilarity from Garrison Keillor and the cast of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion. A guy walks into a bar. Eight Canada Geese walk into a bar. A termite jumps up on the bar and asks, “Where is the bar tender?” Drum roll. The Sixth Edition of the perennially popular Pretty Good Joke Book is everything the first five were and more. More puns, one-liners, light bulb jokes, knock-knock jokes, and third-grader jokes (have you heard the one about Elvis Parsley?). More religion jokes, political jokes, lawyer jokes, blonde jokes, and jokes in questionable taste (Why did the urologist lose his license? He got in trouble with his peers). More jokes about chickens, relationships, and senior moments (the nice thing about Alzheimer’s is you can enjoy the same jokes again and again). It all started back in 1996, when A Prairie Home Companion fans laughed themselves silly during the first Joke Show. The broadcast was such a hit that it became an almost-annual gagfest. Then fans wanted to read the jokes, share them, and pass them around, and the first Pretty Good Joke Book was born. With over 200 new and updated jokes, the latest edition promises countless giggles, chortles, and guffaws anyone—fans of the radio show or not—will enjoy.