Josh and Andres unexpectedly inherit an old rooming house in Chicago. Each discovers they have a long and deep history with the place. Thrilled to have a home of their own, plus a place for Andres to make and sell his art, the two are challenged to turn the place into a community art center. The challenge becomes more personal as each deals with their own backgrounds, family issues and differing personal interests. Tough decisions are made about their new/old home, relationship with their ...

Connecting the dots. Looking backward to look forward. Personal discovery. Acceptance. Rejection. Change. Love. Family. These are the themes of essays, poems and short stories by Bill Mathis who writes of the people he meets along the path while walking his dog, the lessons in life those interactions bring to mind. A poem about a young soldier who died in Viet Nam, another about God being a baseball or a sixteen-inch softball. Fiction about missed opportunities between a father and his gay...

Eula's stardust—spirit—has been waiting for her father to return to their old farmhouse so she can learn why he didn't rescue her, her brother, and their mother. Dying of cancer, her father Duane, finally returns. He wants to pass away with his guilt and remorse of not being able to rescue his family and, more importantly, his secret shame over the way he dealt with his mixed race relationship. Retha, a nurse specializing in end of life care, works to help him overcome his regrets. In the ...

Six fascinating and touching diaries are discovered in an old rooming house that detail the lives of the owners and tenants spanning over a century of change in Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood. An unwed pregnant teen shows up; a teen from Paris, France appears, the result of a relationship during World War I; the first Mexican in the neighborhood is given a room and eventually inherits the place, his diary describes his young life running the streets in Tijuana, Mexico and how the...

Shaw Skogman, a taciturn, successful farmer, erupts and attempts to kill his wife and son by firing a shotgun at them. Shaw ends up with a severe leg wound but chooses to die rather than accept a lifesaving amputation. His wife and family learn more shocking things about him as they discover the separate life he led in plain sight. Elderly farmers and their spouses died. Was it of natural causes? How did he acquire so much land? What was the relationship between him and Melvin, his nervous...

Face Your Fears is filled with vitality as it challenges the traditional concepts of normalcy, family, disability and love. Nate is a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy raised in a family of achievers. He must be fed, dressed and toileted, yet has unique skills and abilities he gradually becomes aware of. Jude is able-bodied, one of 10 children raised on a hardscrabble Iowa farm. He can change diapers, cook, fix equipment, milk cows, and discovers his vocation as a physical therapist. Both e...

A huge collection of the world's best jokes that take a minute each to tell. Be instantly popular by using these jokes on colleagues and friends, just choose wise jokes that don't offend of course!Here are a few jokes, out of hundreds jam-packed in this book.A farmer named Muldoon lived alone in the countryside with his pet dog that he loved and smothered love on. After many long years of companionship, the dog eventually died so Muldoon went to his parish priest:"Fa...

Discover a more lighthearted side of the funeral industry in this collection of real-life stories from the authors of Mortuary Confidential.Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . . I Had Lost The Hearse!Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker...

A masterful twist on the serial killer novel from the award-winning author Lauren Beukes: the girl who wouldn't die hunts the killer who shouldn't exist.Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens...

"Dr. Deborah Serach Gold died on the cross sometime during a night of freezing rain in late October of my last year at Three. It probably wasn't the worst thing that happened to her that day, but it had been over two decades in the making . . ."The day after a terrible storm, electricity still crackling in the air, a woman is found dead on the outskirts of a Texan town. She has been brutally attacked and nailed to a cross.The victim is Dr Deborah Gold, a psychologi...

Recommended by O Magazine * GMA * Elle * Marie Claire * Good Housekeeping * NBC News * Shondaland * Chicago Tribune * Woman's Day * Refinery 29 * Bustle * The Millions * New York Post * Parade * Hello! Magazine * PopSugar * and more!“The Kindest Lie is a deep dive into how we define family, what it means to be a mother, and what it means to grow up Black...bea...

When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic.On the surface, Annie Powers’s life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when she senses that the demons of her past have resurfaced and, to her horror, are now creeping up on her. These are demons she can’t fully r...