"Daisy Shoemaker can't sleep. With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. Still, Daisy knows she's got it good. So why is she up all night? While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she's also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. While Daisy's driving carpools, Diana is chairing meetings. While Daisy's making dinner, Diana's making plans to reorganize corporations. Diana's glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy's simpler existence. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental. Who IS this other woman, and what does she want with Daisy?"--Publisher.

In That Summer, Allen Drury turns from the world of international politics to the private politics of Greenmont, an exclusive vacation colony high in the California Sierras where an intense love story is played out against tribal country-club mores and tragic social pressures. Greenmont is a millionaire’s hideaway, a super-civilized encampment for the privileged few, but dangerous currents run beneath its affluent exterior. Major Bill Steele arrives there as an outsider, lonely and shaken after a painful and humiliating divorce. He is fleeing his own personal demons, but the people of Greenmont have their own plans for him. They see him as the perfect final solution to the increasingly serious problem of their favorite daughter, Elizavetta—at 35, kind and pretty, but unmarried. Major Steele tries to establish a gentle friendship with Eliza, recognizing that her emotions are as complicated and defenseless as his own. The people of Greenmont make it clear to the Major that friendship is not enough. From nasty small skirmishes, Allen Drury draws his vicious little society into a ruthless battle of frightening proportions and violent consequences. That Summer is the most personal and passionate book from one of America’s master novelists.

The origins of vampire beliefs, porphyria and vampire folklore were all tricks of involved magic. Thereâs no end to his evil. Jack took six men with him, but the sorcerer called up darkness, and the darkness came to his command. He kept the unnatural darkness around him like a cloak, and all the good men who came into his path came to grief because they couldnât see. The grim came. Even his love, Desirae herself, was struck down by one of the sorcerer's minions, but fortune preserved their lives. What held them tighter, true love for the real folklore or the love of magic?âLet the dance of the dark ones beginâ¦â

The New Generation Of Poems by Diana McGuire

A warm, inventive, and multilayered novel about two families - one made up largely of scientists, and the other of artists and mystics - whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter Mette, a twenty-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman, who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. But she has been recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop, no longer certain of her place in the world. As Brian Hall's new novel opens, Mette has gone missing. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her. Mette's path will take her across America and then to a fateful visit with her charismatic grandfather, Thomas, who formerly ran the commune north of Ithaca where Saskia was raised, and who now lives as a hermit in a windmill on a remote Danish island. Playing out over nine decades and three generations, and stitching together a dazzling array of subjects—from cosmology and classical music to number theory and medieval mystery plays—The Stone Loves the World is a story of love, longing, and scientific wonder. It offers a moving reflection on the human search for truth, meaning, and connection in an often incomprehensible universe, and on the genuine surprises that the real world, and human society, can offer.

This project began several years ago as a simple family history and legacy to leave to my sons and grandchildren. Every family and generation has their unique stories to share. It’s sad but true that many of these stories are lost as the participants die. We have all heard about the same old stories from the family’s older folks many times and got bored with the reruns of some. I hope to preserve these tales and histories. Perhaps a harsher example is the loss of the Holocaust survivors’ oral histories and the World War II veterans’ stories in history.

At the age of twenty-five, Benjamin James Brenkert--a young man from Long Island, a social work student, and an internet vocation to the priesthood--entered one of the historically boldest, influential, apostolic religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church. Aged thirty-four, and a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in good standing, Brenkert was missioned to the laity by his last religious superior. Brenkert could not come out publicly as a gay Jesuit and support his LGBTQ peers who were being fired from various church employment and volunteer activities because of whom they loved. Brenkert had never concealed his sexuality from his religious superiors, he knew all too well what was written in the Church's Catechism about homosexuals. Still, he felt uniquely called to respond to God's invitation to serve him in total love as a priest, something confirmed in him in prayer during his thirty-day silent retreat and affirmed to him by his religious superiors and peers throughout his life in the Jesuits. In his Open Letter to Pope Francis in 2014 Brenkert wrote, "Pope Francis . . . I ask you to instruct the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to tell Catholic institutions not to fire any more LGBTQ Catholics. I ask you to speak out against laws that criminalize and oppress LGBTQ people around the globe. These actions would bring true life to your statement, 'Who am I to judge?'" In 2015, the United States Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriage in Obergell v. Hodges and in 2020, the United States Supreme Court expanded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Despite these landmark achievements in the public sector, LGBTQ Catholics still cannot receive communion and must always seek reconciliation. Their flourishing as part of their religious community is always frustrated. Brenkert's account of his life before, in, and after the Jesuits is interwoven with trials and tribulations, but remains always full of hope, written candidly and with bracing honesty. Brenkert offers readers the opportunity to join him on a theological and spiritual pilgrimage, one that ends with readers making a discernment. The world today is full of distraction, misinformation, and timidity, Brenkert's pilgrimage is full of conviction, heartful, written with an eagerness to help people of faith and no faith at all find their true selves, all for the greater glory of God.

The public's perception of war changed drastically following the Vietnam War, as it was the first time the American public encountered an endless stream of graphic coverage of military conflict abroad. Still, the public often seems divided on the necessity of military engagement for defense or to promote regional stability and the tolls of war: loss, destruction, and veterans requiring lifelong care. These articles document changing attitudes toward war, compiling New York Times coverage as far back as the Civil War and continuing through twenty-first-century conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.