Showing results by narrator "Diane Piron-Gelman" in All Categories

Someone is trying to kill Lila Hilliard. During the Christmas holidays she returns from running errands to find her family home in flames, her father and brother trapped inside. Later, she is attacked by a mysterious man on a motorcycle... and the threats don't end there. As Lila desperately tries to piece together who is after her and why, she uncovers information about her father's past in Chicago during the volatile days of the late 1960s... information he never shared with her, but now threatens to destroy her.

In 1941, a young Harvard-educated classicist named Varian Fry arrived in occupied France on a daring mission to rescue more than 2,000 of Europe's leading writers, artists, and intellectuals from the Nazis. Hounded by the Gestapo, he smuggled Marchel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt and dozens of other 20th century cultural luminaries out of France and brought them to America. So why did even the people Fry saved want to forget him?

It all began with a line of Persian poetry . . . Anna and Nouri, both studying in Chicago, fall in love despite their very different backgrounds. Anna, who has never been close to her parents, is more than happy to return with Nouri to his native Iran, to be embraced by his wealthy family. Beginning their married life together in 1978, their world is abruptly turned upside down by the overthrow of the Shah, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

Can a desperate young lady return a rakish earl to respectability? When Miss Margaret Caldecourt returns to her ancestral English country manor from Vienna to care for her late brother’s six-year-old son and heir, Timothy, she learns that unscrupulous relatives threaten his birthright. Immediately she seeks help from her childhood friend and Timothy’s newly named guardian, the handsome Adam Fortescue, sixth Earl of Abberley.

As World War II rages across Europe and the Pacific, its impact ripples through communities in the heartland of America. A farm girl is locked in a dangerous love triangle with two Germans soldiers held in an Illinois POW camp. Another German, a war refugee, is forced to risk her life spying on the developing Manhattan Project in Chicago. And espionage surrounds the disappearance of an actress from the thriving Jewish community of Chicago's Lawndale.

In 1978, Janet Tavakoli, a Christian of European heritage, born and raised in the United States, moved to Iran with her husband. Iran had a large class divide. The insecure Shah had grand ambitions. He headed a brutal dictatorship. Islamic religious leaders fomented discontent. Some Iranians were still outraged about the role of the United States in the overthrow of democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950's. Smoldering embers were about to inflame an Islamic revolution.

It is summer in the south of France, and Pea and her little sister Margot spend their days running free, inventing games in the meadow behind their house. But Pea has worries beyond her five and a half years. Her father has died in an accident, and her mother has just lost a baby. Maman is English, already isolated in this small, foreign village, and in her compounded grief, she has retreated even further. Pea and Margot stay out of her way and try to make things better, but they can't make Maman happy again.

On the eve of the Cuban Revolution, headstrong 18-year-old Francesca Pacelli flees from her ruthless Mafia-boss father in Havana to the arms of her lover, a rebel fighting with Fidel Castro. Her father, desperate to send her to safety in the US, resorts to torture and blackmail as he searches the island for her. So begins the first part of a spellbinding saga that spans three generations of the same family. Decades later, the family is lured back to Cuba by the promise of untold riches.

In The Fence My Father Built, when legally separated Muri Pond, a librarian, hauls her kids, teenage Nova and 11-year-old Truman, out to the tiny town of Murkee, Oregon, where her father, Joe Pond, lived and died, she’s confronted by a neighbor’s harassment over water rights and Joe’s legacy: a fence made from old oven doors.The fence and accompanying house trailer horrify rebellious Nova, who runs away to the drug-infested streets of Seattle.

Joan Didion and Nora Ephron have both written, by turns grimly and hilariously, about the indignities of getting older. Now comes Jane Juska, laying bare (literally) everything no one has yet said about life in the later years. With her characteristic wit, unsparing eye for detail, and famously frank opinions on gender issues, Juska, author of the best-selling memoir A Round-Heeled Woman, talks sex, the ups and downs of body parts well below the neck, and the indomitable human need for connection, whatever a woman's age.

When Clare Thaddeus' sister was abducted, she was five and her family fell apart. Now, twenty-seven years later, there's a chance Lynnie could still be alive! Divorced parents, a rebellious daughter, and a devoted sister find their lives in turmoil once again. This time, will crisis tear them apart or will forgotten love knit them together once more?

Ona Gritz has had cerebral palsy all her life, but until she gave birth to her son,she didn't really understand what it meant to be disabled. Her cerebral palsy affects her coordination and balance but not enough to have ever truly hindered her. "For the most part, I considered my disability a cosmetic issue", she tells us in On the Whole. "Just how obvious is it? Do people see me as pretty despite the limp?" But now she's got a new baby to care for, and no one has warned her what a physical job she has taken on.

Ten years ago, "Eva Maria Staal" kept a gun in her purse. It was a present from her boss, Jimmy Liu, the international arms dealer extraordinaire with a taste for high-class male escorts. Together, Jimmy and his devoted assistant traveled the world’s most dangerous hotspots, closing deals with ruthless warlords and corrupt generals, and trading Stinger missiles in Karachi, AK-47s in Chechnya, and hollow-point bullets in Islamabad. But burdened by her conscience, Eva Maria finally got out, married an optometrist, and had a baby. Now, assailed with memories of her secret life, she must reconcile her suburban present with a repressed but ineradicable past.

Newly-widowed Francesca Canelli is not your typical soccer mom but she would do anything to help her 15-year-old son, Matt, a passionate soccer player determined to honor his dad's memory. Financially strapped and emotionally devastated, Francesca accepts a sexual proposition from the coach of Pegasi United who promised to secure Matt a starting position on his premier St. Louis team. Their bargain quickly sours when the coach abuses Francesca, demeans Matt, and threatens to renege on the deal.

From the dark depths of the past to the bright hopes of the future, Pati Nagle's stories range across the palette of human emotion. Named for her Theodore Sturgeon Award Finalist story, Coyote Ugly includes fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, romance, mystery, and a few surprises. The rhythms, colors, and flavors of New Mexico enrich many of the stories. Curl up with this collection and your favorite hot cuppa, and prepare to escape the ordinary.

Nancy Jane Moore wrote her first flash fiction many years ago when everyone in her writing group decided to enter a contest for one-page stories. None of them won, but she got hooked and has been writing short-shorts ever since. Her first project for Book View Café was posting a free flash fiction every week for a year. Some were reprints, others older stories that needed one more revision, but quite a few were written in the week they went up. This 52-story collection includes most of those stories and a few new ones as well.

Beth Crandall has known trauma. Kidnapped from her birth family when she was three, abandoned at a mall by her kidnapper a few months later, traumatic amnesia has prevented memories from plaguing her as she was adopted and ushered into a "normal" life. But a twist of fate reunited her with her birth family recently and now she's attempting to move forward in a way she couldn't before. As a teenager, Beth's face was scarred in an attack at a group home where her best friend lived.

Young Lena Bentheim is forced to flee Nazi Germany for Chicago in 1935, leaving her family and boyfriend behind. After learning English, she eventually finds a new life as a secretary in the Physics Department of the University of Chicago. She meets and marries another German refugee scientist and has a child. Then tragedy strikes, and Lena is forced to spy on the nuclear fission experiments at the University of Chicago.

In his first short story collection, Tim Chapman explores behaviors that are at once familiar and bizarre, while introducing us to an odd assemblage of characters. A reformed hit man has to kill to save the love of his life. An advertising executive deserts her family to find happiness as a forest nymph. A downsized factory worker decides to fake a disability. A young girl has to decide whether her divine power is a blessing or a curse. Engaging stories about family, class, crime, and love from the author of Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold.

A Kazakh woman visits a shaman to contact her dead son. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.