Dreamfield Media Works presents Katherine's Cross by author Scott Simon. In his debut novel, Mr. Simon tells the story of eighteen-year-old Katherine O'Hara, a Catholic girl who wants nothing more than to escape a world of smokestacks, soot and drudgery. But in the racially charged and religiously divided steel town of Battle Hymn, she discovers that dreams come at a price.

The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character–a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hi...

From the founder of Scare Your Soul, this self-help guide will help you find the courage to embrace all of life's uncertainties so that you can live a more elaborate life of your dreams.Like a muscle, courage grows stronger the more you exercise it. Scare Your Soul will not only teach you how to exercise courage–it will guide you in taking small, boundary-pushing actions to expand your comfort zone.Combining research on positive psychology...

In this warm, funny, and wise new book, NPR’s award-winning and beloved Scott Simon tells the story of how he and his wife found true love with two tiny strangers from the other side of the world. It’s a book of unforgettable moments: when Scott and Caroline get their first thumb-size pictures of their daughters, when the small girls are placed in their arms, and all the laughs and tumbles along the road as they become a real family.Woven into the tale of Scott, Caroline, and the t...

From the beloved host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, moving tales of the marvelous animals who have crossed his path.Scott Simon’s household does not make much distinction between humans and other animals. Whether two-legged or four-, flesh-covered, fur-covered, feathered, or gilled—everyone is family. Today, Simon lives with the haiku-writing and absolument charmant French poodle Daisy and the daringly audacious foster cat Gato Blanco. But th...

"I'm getting a life's lesson about grace from my mother in the ICU.We never stop learning from our mothers, do we?"UNFORGETTABLE is a son's spirited, affecting, and inspiring tribute to his remarkable mother and the love between parent and child.When NPR's Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother's hospital room in July 2013, he didn't know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million Twitter followers. Squeezing the magnitude of his final days wit...

Wonder meets Three Times Lucky in a story of empowerment as a young woman decides to help solve the mystery of multiple suspicious deaths in her group home.Sally Miyake can't read, but she learns lots of things. Like bricks are made of clay and Vitamin D comes from the sun. Sally is happy working in the kitchen at Sunnyside Plaza, the community center she lives in with other adults with developmental disabilities. For Sally and her friends, Sunnys...

The acclaimed author of the intensely powerful novel Pretty Birds,Scott Simon now gives us a story that is both laugh-out-loud funny and heart-piercing–as sprawling and brawling as Chicago, where politics is a contact sport.The mayor of Chicago is found in his office late at night, sitting in his boxer shorts, facedown dead in a pizza. The mayor was a hero and a rascal: dynamic, charming, ingenious, corruptible, and a masterly manipulator. The city mourns. But it’s discove...

Tanners of Taiwan is an ethnography of identity construction set in the leather-tanning communities of Southern Taiwan. Through life history analysis and ethnographic observation, Simon examines what it means to be Chinese - or alternatively Taiwanese - in contemporary Taiwan. Under forty years of martial law from 1947 to 1987, the Chinese Nationalist Party tried to create a Chinese identity in Taiwan through ideological campaigns that reached deep into families, schools and workp...

Welcome to London, but not as you know it. A place where magics and horror run free, wonders and miracles are everyday things, and the dark streets are full of very shadowy people...Gideon Sable is a thief and a con man. He specializes in stealing the kind of things that can't normally be stolen. Like a ghost's clothes, or a photo from a country that never existed. He even stole his current identity. Who was he originally? Now, that would be telling. One thing's for sure though, he...

From the beloved host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday**, moving tales of the marvelous animals who have crossed his path.**Scott Simon’s household does not make much distinction between humans and other animals. Whether two-legged or four-, flesh-covered, fur-covered, feathered, or gilled—everyone is family. Today, Simon lives with the haiku-writing and absolument charmant French poodle Daisy and the daringly audacious foster ca...

Prozac has side effects, drinking gives you hangovers, therapy's expensive. For quick and effective relief -- or at least some literary comfort -- from everyday and exceptional problems, try a poem. Over the ages, people have turned to poets as ambassadors of the emotions, because they give voice and definition to our troubles, and by so doing, ease them. No matter how bad things get, poets have been there, too, and they can help you get over the rough spots.This is the first poetr...