Wednesdays Child is about a four-year-old deaf-mute child, Caroline, who gets kidnapped. Fast paced and gripping, the story takes us on the journey of the parents and detectives quest to find the little girl, while also giving us chilling glimpses of Carolines struggle with a ruthless kidnapper. Will they ever find Caroline alive? An ordinary man concerned with share markets and multiplying his wealth transforms himself into the Saint. Why? What made him who he is today? A Random Act of Kindness gives us the answers to these fundamental questions, weaving a beautiful and poignant story on what matters most in this world. Two people who are made for each other take a long time in realizing what was apparent to everyone else. Peter and Samanthas story, Eternal Love is something we can all relate to and understand. Will they finally end up together? Having children can take a toll on parents. But what about having a child diagnosed with a terminal illness? The Day After Tomorrow, however, takes a different perspective and looks at everything from the childs point of view. A short story that is sweet with a funny twist at the very end.

The Girl Who Said No and other stories is full of good, moral, fun stories of romance and adventure that teenagers and adults will enjoy.

In three amazing stories childcare worker Shane Dunphy reveals a world of hidden heartbreak and survival against the odds. When Shane meets her, Gillian is starving herself to death and in thrall to a mother more interested in abusing and manipulating her daughter than cherishing and protecting her. Though he tries to help, it seems Shane is just another adult destined to fail Gillian ... For the daughter of disturbed violent parents, Connie is an amazingly well-adjusted A-grade student. But when Shane finally gets behind the facade, he unearths a shattering truth behind her apparent normality ... Cordelia, Victor and Ibar are three loving siblings left with a hopelessly alcoholic neglectful father. It’s a race against time to see if their father can ever become the kind of Dad he wants to be, or if they are destined to be split up and sucked into the childcare merry-go-round ...

As Miriam Martin stood at her father's graveside, she recalled the complex story of her parents' marriage. Her mother's family migrated from the Mid-West in 1887 on the expanded line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad from Kansas City to San Diego. Miriam's grandfather was looking to find the "golden fruits, the gardens of this sunset land." It was there in San Diego County, on a windy summer day on the beach, that her mother, Suzanna, met her father, Victor. She was 13. He was 20. By the time Suzanna was 14, they had been secretly married. Suzanna still lived at home, meeting Victor on weekends. Miriam couldn't help but smile as she recalled the story she had been told about how the secret was revealed. But she also knew that the happiness her parents had at the beginning was short-lived. Victor, a pharmacist, and his family had the only pharmacy in San Diego, and he was a prominent citizen of the city. Yet all his education and charm could not overcome his alcoholism, and Miriam (called Merry by her beloved father) was caught in the middle of her parents' stormy relationship. Miriam's story unfolds against the backdrop of California's earliest days, when most residents lived a rural life. And when "the town of San Diego reeked of newness, with its crude dirt streets and sparsely placed wooden buildings. Strange trees called palms flanked the roadway." Yet it was growing day by day as Easterners and Mid-Westerners made their way to Southern California's sunny shores.

A dozen of the very best mystery stories from crime-fiction’s maestro, including one brand new Inspector Banks story. Best known — and much admired — for his long-running and bestselling Inspector Banks series, Peter Robinson is also widely and highly praised by mystery mavens for his riveting short stories. Robinson’s versatile talent is on full display in the twelve stories that comprise his latest short story collection, The Price of Love and Other Stories. Spellbinding plots, suspense that grips and won’t let go, utterly unpredictable twists, psychological truths both sweet and scary, characters you’d like to meet (and some you’d hope never to encounter), all set in places that are characters themselves — these are the fundamentals of story and mystery that Robinson plays like the virtuoso he is.

Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction Long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Named a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose. A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday’s Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

As we approach the year 2000, infant mortality rates, child placement dilemmas, and appropriate socialization of children continue to challenge the field of child welfare. It is thus especially significant to reflect on the history of child welfare. The carefully selected topics explored in this volume underscore the importance of recovering past events and themes still relevant. It is the aim of this volume to illumine current issues by a review of past struggles and problems. A History of Child Welfare offers many examples of practices that have direct import for those who struggle to support children. Who is not bothered by what seem to be increasing acts of violence by children against children? The role of hidden cruelty to children in perpetuating violence is illuminated by studying the past. Historians and social researchers have gone far in examining the family, and by implication, their revelations greatly increase society's complex responses to children over time from early assumptions that children were little more than miniature adults to the discovery of childhood as a special developmental period. At the start of this century women still did not have universal suffrage and brutal child labor was not unusual. Harsh legal codes separating the races were widespread, and those bent on improving the lot of children knew that reform meant commitment to an uphill struggle. By the end of the century, much has changed: child labor, while still present, has been outlawed in most industries, women vote and hold many high offices; and de jure racial segregation is largely a memory. Yet the state of children remains precarious, with poverty a persistent theme throughout the century. The fifteen articles in this volume cover a wide range of social conditions, public policies, and approaches to problem solving. Though history does not repeat itself precisely, problems, controversies about solutions, and certain themes do. A History of Child Welfare takes up social and economic conditions that correlate with increasing rates of child abuse and neglect, and an increasing number of children in out-of-home care. This volume distinguishes approaches that have been useful from those that have failed. In this way, these serious reflections help build on past successes and avoid previous errors.

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.