• Fiction

'In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house.' Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons- his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind- in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead.

The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love.'

Braelyn I'm nobody. Homeless, afraid of my own shadow and haunted by memories. I went through the motions, but I wasn't living. He made me live again. He became my everything. Until he came back. The man that caused me to live in my own personal hell for years.

Ethan Brae is broken. She's haunted by memories. I saw the fire in her eyes flicker and it was enough. It consumed me.

I was determined to see her thrive. I didn't expect to fall in love with her and that it would become everything. Nothing will stop me from protecting her. He will pay for her pain. A story of love that won't let go - no matter what!

California’s gold country, 1850. A time when men sold their souls for a bag of gold and women sold their bodies for a place to sleep. Angel expects nothing from men but betrayal. Sold into prostitution as a child, she survives by keeping her hatred alive. And what she hates most are the men who use her, leaving her empty and dead inside. Then she meets Michael Hosea, a man who seeks his Father’s heart in everything.

Michael obeys God’s call to marry Angel and to love her unconditionally. Slowly, day by day, he defies Angel’s every bitter expectation, until despite her resistance, her frozen heart begins to thaw. But with her unexpected softening comes overwhelming feelings of unworthiness and fear. And so Angel runs.

Back to the darkness, away from her husband’s pursuing love, terrified of the truth she no longer can deny: Her final healing must come from the One who loves her even more than Michael doesthe One who will never let her go. A powerful retelling of the story of Gomer and Hosea, Redeeming Love is a life-changing story of God’s unconditional, redemptive, all-consuming love. Includes a six-part reading group guide! You can call it Hocus Pocus, you can call it Magic, but when the sorcery of ages past calls forth a spell woven through the sisterhood, it is difficult for the forces of nature to ignore. That spell will be granted.

A spell of black magic had been cast. The call came unexpectedly, but at the necessary time. Our sorceress, her great psychic ability challenged, called up a spell for the sake of love.a Love Spell, perchance. That particular night, the words were woven, the die was cast. The witch chanted.carefully, the words she had conjured up.

This was important.someone was in need. The spell of love rose up over the skyscrapers. The sultry glowing red mist was seen for hundreds of miles away. Weaving in and around the tall buildings it lent to the fun and mystery of the city.

Some people looked at it as something odd, but in a city like this nothing was beyond the norm. Magic was everywhere. One might have thought someone was filming. The networks were always captivating their audiences. It was just another ordinary day in the 'Big Apple.' If one thought it to be unusual, it was never reported.

Fiction

Pilots did comment on the strange red glow. Captains in the harbor guided their ships through the mist. Only Miss Liberty noticed the workings of a sister, a witch, but then, of course, she had nothing to say. Susanna and Jayden swam there in the water off the coast of Brittany, France. They made love there in the crested waves.

He held her.he kissed her.but most of all he loved her. His touch as always set her on fire. Her blood began to boil.bubble bubble.oh, what trouble?

He guided her hands down. And then she touched his source.his magnificent power. They held each other.clung to each other. This was their great love. And then she found herself back in the castle.Croix's castle. She was trying to escape.somehow her magic did not work anymore.

She was in love! That love was her downfall. She could not conjure up any more magic.

She was captivated.under his spell. His eyes were dark and diabolic.

They flashed with the very fire from the depths of Hell. He looked at her and just his glance burned a hole through her flesh and into her soul.

He was her master. His hand tightened and they surged forward. There was no escape. He had fought, even killed for her. He had sought out the dark side. She was his.she had always been his.

She would never belong to anyone else, be they man or devil. All the hatred, locked away for two hundred years, had been loosed by his sword. His brother, his mirror image, had been sent to Purgatory. He would burn there forever but never be consumed. Her hand trembled, and she seemed to falter. He grabbed her.this was no time for innocence.

Their destiny lay up those stairs.in the Bridal Chamber. And she would, most certainly, without any doubt, be his bride! But then, again, exactly whose bride would she be? Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning masterpiece became an international bestseller on publication, was adapted into an award-winning film, and has since come to be regarded as a modern classic. The Remains of the Day is a spellbinding portrayal of a vanished way of life and a haunting meditation on the high cost of duty. It is also one of the most subtle, sad and humorous love stories ever written.

It is the summer of 1956, when Stevens, a man who has dedicated himself to his career as a perfect butler in the one-time great house of Darlington Hall, sets off on a holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and, unexpectedly, into his own past, especially his friendship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. As memories surface of his lifetime 'in service' to Lord Darlington, and of his life between the wars, when the fate of the continent seemed to lie in the hands of a few men, he finds himself confronting the dark undercurrent beneath the carefully run world of his employer.

'CancerDance- a love story', is a journal written while navigating the nightmare existence a perfectly normal family becomes embroiled in once the Big C enters their lives, changing everyone forever. Spanning almost a decade, 'CancerDance- a love story' is a testament to the sheer power of love, a reminder that we're all much stronger than we think we are, and a warm embrace to those dancing along with us. Thursday, April 15, 2010 I wonder whatever happened to 'normal.'

I asked my son yesterday if he could even, in his ten year existence, remember a time when our family life didn't consist of hospitals, operations, recovery, repeat. And though he made light of thinking it over, he was serious when he said, 'No. I'm trying to come to terms with our new reality. Not our beloved old knock-around house at the edge of Brownsboro TX (pop.

756)-chickens in the yard, turkeys on the porch, drifting off to sleep to the chorus of hundreds of spring peepers down by the pond-but this hotel room in the middle of Houston (4th largest city in the US of A), the non-stop cacophony of helicopters and ambulances rushing to the hospital district glowing just a few blocks away. And, as crushing as living here with no set ending, no date we can circle on the calendar, is, we refuse to leave without Ward. They tell us it's going to be a 'very, very long haul' but that's fine as long as we're all here and all together. I've known Ward for 16 years and we've been a couple almost 15. This is not my first go-around on the relationship/marriage train, but this is the only time I can honestly say there's never been one minute, one second, that I've ever thought, 'Hmmmm, this just isn't working out.' Ward's the best friend I've ever had, the best father I could ever imagine for Alec, and truly the Love of My Life. And even though I'm surly, argumentative, and difficult, for some reason he feels the same way about me.

But while other couples-even those who still love each other deeply-stagnate and flounder a bit under the day- to-day child raising and working and bill paying, wishing for some excitement to knock the dust off of their routines, we crave the opposite: Quiet. Stay-at-home Life. I know, from tuning into every morsel of his being, which is wrapped up, trussed up, invaded, and hooked to machines that surround him carnivorously, that he can hear me.

I hold his hand, and talk to him, and at sensible times there are signs-the twitch of his hand in mine, the raising of an eyebrow, the flicker of an eyelid, the rising or lowering of his blood pressure-that tell me he's fighting as hard as he can. That no one wants to go home more than he does. And I keep him company, holding his hand and reading aloud to him in an almost insane caricature of normalcy. I pretend not to notice the nurses and others coming in and going about their medical business-the business of keeping my husband alive till his body is strong enough to once again keep itself alive. And outside the hospital walls, I meet other people who complain petulantly about the irritating habits of spouses, or the boredom of their jobs, or the tiring, mind-numbing chores inherent in the raising and training of children, and they look at me like we're all in the same secret club and ask, 'Yanno what I mean?' I think of what I wouldn't give right now to find beard hairs in the bathroom sink, or a collection of half-empty soda cans abandoned around the house, or even to simply be at home in our own bed-together. And I can't even feign thinking about it before answering, 'No.

In Shades of Gray Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective struggles with multiracial identity. McKibbin weaves a rich sociohistorical tapestry around the critically acclaimed works of Danzy Senna, Caucasia (1998); Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001); Emily Raboteau, The Professor’s Daughter (2005); Rachel M. Harper, Brass Ankle Blues (2006); and Heidi Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). Taking into account the social history of racial classification and the literary history of depicting mixed race, she argues that these writers are producing new representations of multiracial identity. Shades of Gray examines the current opportunity to define racial identity after the civil rights, black power, and multiracial movements of the late twentieth century changed the sociopolitical climate of the United States and helped revolutionize the racial consciousness of the nation.

McKibbin makes the case that twenty-first-century literature is able to represent multiracial identities for the first time in ways that do not adhere to the dichotomous conceptions of race that have, until now, determined how racial identities could be expressed in the United States. From Lisa Tucker, the critically acclaimed author of The Song Reader, comes a wise, humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about the risks and rewards of loving when a single day can change our lives. Nineteen years ago, a famous man disappeared from Los Angeles, taking his two children, Dorothea and Jimmy, to a rocky, desolate corner of New Mexico where he raised them in complete isolation in a utopian 'Sanctuary.'

The children grew up with books and encyclopedias, records and a grand piano, but no television, computer, radio, or even a newspaper. Now Dorothea, at twenty-three, is leaving this place in search of her missing brother - and venturing into the wide world for the first time. Dorothea's search will turn into an odyssey of discovery, leading to the truth of her family's past and the terrifying day that changed her father forever.

But Dorothea's journey will also introduce her to an unusual cast of characters, including a homeless girl from Missouri who becomes a jazz singer and a social worker whose mistake in judgment changes her best friend's life. And she will meet Stephen, a doctor turned cabdriver who, after suffering his own losses, has lost his ability to believe in a meaningful world. Together, they have a chance to make a discovery of a different kind: that though a heart can be broken by the tragic events of a day, a day can also bring a new chance at love and a deeper understanding of life's infinite possibilities.

Beautifully written, with a spellbinding story, Once Upon a Day is 'a lyrically poignant reminder of the necessity of hope' (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

'Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white.

Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love'-Publisher. Read more.Rating:(not yet rated)Subjects.More like this. 'Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia.

On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love'-Publisher.