Children with no birth records and a soldier with PTSD together must define the value of human life. Jenna Mosier is on a mission to save her murdered sister’s child. Estranged for ten years after a bitter fight, the trail is as cold as her dead sibling. The only glimmer of hope is the place her sister’s body and a ten-year old boy were abandoned…the backyard of Reed Adler, retired Marine Special Ops. Working together, Jenna and Reed piece together a mystery involving missing children and biogenetics research..and find they have more than justice and revenge in common. But the closer they get to answers, and each other, the more deadly the game becomes. With their hearts and lives on the line, they must decide what they are willing to risk to save one young boy. This is the first book in a new suspense series where a group of former Marines become Shadow Finders. They help find those who have disappeared, have no identity, or are presumed dead.

Fifteen short stories involving pets. But don’t think for a moment that you’ll “See Spot Run”, or that Lassie will save her master who’s fallen in the well. Those are common pet tales, and these are Uncommon Pet Tales. Within this collection, you’ll find a little bit of romance, a little bit of revenge, a few ghosts, and some fantasy and magic. You’ll find some uncommon pets such as Katelynn, and Mr. MacCawber, and you’ll find some uncommon stories, such as Patience, and Schrodinger’s Other Cat. You’ll find stories of man’s (or woman’s) best friend, and stories where the animals are far from friendly. And you'll find some stories that simply refuse to fit into a category. As always, each story in the Read on the Run series of anthologies is short, to suit your busy lifestyle.?

An anthology of 18 short romance stories.? Not love stories, although some of them do include aspects of that.??But whereas love stories are often sad, each of the selections in A Wink and a Smile has either a 'happily-ever-after' ending, or at least a strong suggestion that this is where the characters are heading.? That doesn't mean these tales all sound the same; to the contrary, we've found quite a diverse collection of romances.??Yes, there are a couple of traditional romances, and there's a healthy handful of budding romances, but we've included a story set in the future, and a couple of fantasy tales.??Within this mix, you will meet several matchmakers and you'll see couples reconcile, and? even?a few stories that will make you laugh. As always, each story in the Read on the Run series of anthologies is short, to suit your busy lifestyle.

Interested in learning more about flower essences, what they are and how to use them? This handy pocket guide lists 115 healing flowers, including the most commonly used remedies, and what you can do with them.Looking for a more in-depth guide to vibrational healing remedies? Check out "The Comprehensive Vibrational Healing Guide" . The comprehensive guide includes information on how to make your own crystal, flower and environmental essences; explains Rife machines, bioenergetic remedies, and homeopathy; covers energy healing methods, sound healing, color therapy and so much more.

Movies, mobsters, and mayhem! Charlie Barnett loves movies. He’s such a fanatic that he’s become best friends with the manager at the local theater, Mr. Mankiewicz. But when the mob comes looking for a mysterious object and Mr. Mankiewicz is kidnapped, Charlie is thrust into a real-life adventure more dangerous than any he’s seen onscreen. With the help of a master of disguise, Charlie races against time to find Mr. Mankiewicz and save a priceless artifact from falling into the wrong hands.

LITTLE ELISA:?“A Time Traveler Story”??“..There will always be a missing piece in life. It could be either something that is left undone or someone who you could not be able to come together with. Maybe the last piece has all the meaning of our lives and therefore it is always hidden” said Elisa, before she started her talk.??It might be a specific moment that we have to spend the rest of our lives searching that missing diamond piece. Because, without that last piece, nothing will be complete..”??“..Similar to this, what was the missing piece and the true meaning of Alice’s life before she became Elisa? She had to discover it. But she would have to take a really long trip to discover this..”??TRAVELER PILGRIM:?Before I met Elisa, I had read such thing like below, in the book of the Muslim: “This life of the world is nothing But a Pastime and a Game.” ?(Quran, The Book of Islam)??“How could this be possible? Or is this the true meaning of the life?” were the questions that I asked myself since I read this. ?Is there an imaginary world and a real one? ??But after meeting Elisa and seeing these alternative (imaginary) worlds, I slowly realized that I am in a world of amusement indeed. ??Finally I could see that everything is a fictitious game in this book. I am sure that you will agree with me and rethink about the “truth” as you keep reading this book in which Elisa lived and my interesting trips with Elisa..??And you’ll be remember that In the universe, ?Everything has both an imaginary view and a real one, after this long trip!.??“..Could the life we live and we consider as real be a fancy and funny fiction? What is reality? ?This has been discussed again and again, throughout history. It has inspired artists and philosophers.”??He was just a little boy according to his parents. ?Time has passed quickly. But he decided not to lose his childish spirit in spite of everything. He would find a way to implement his belief about finding the elixir of youth and the eternity of life. ??- “Soon we will take a step into a new period by discovering the truth in this alternative world!” he was saying while searching for the elixir of immortality all the time.??"A black rabbit sneaked into a white hole.."?What was that? ?There was not the world we knew, everything was meaningless but a brand new world and a vision were awaiting for the rabbit.."??The Miraculous “WONDERLAND”: ?Where EVERYTHING is POSSIBLE..

Charles Dickens was born on 1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class, but they suffered financially as a result of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family's dire straits forced him to quit school and work in a blacking factory, a place where shoe polish is made. Within weeks, his father was put in debtor's prison, where Dickens's mother and siblings eventually joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on his own and continued to work at the factory for several months. The horrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood. Apparently, Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more efficiently. For Dickens, that instruction may have represented the first step toward his full integration into the misery and tedium of working-class life. The more senior boy's name was Bob Fagin. Dickens's residual resentment of him reached a fevered pitch in the characterization of the villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.??After inheriting some money, Dickens's father got out of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts of lawmakers to alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens became famous and began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which was serialized in 1836 and published in book form the following year.??In 1837, the first installment of Oliver Twist appeared in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was then editing. It was accompanied by illustrations by George Cruikshank, which still accompany many editions of the novel today. Even at this early date, some critics accused Dickens of writing too quickly and too prolifically, since he was paid by the word for his serialized novels. Yet the passion behind Oliver Twist, animated in part by Dickens’s own childhood experiences and in part by his outrage at the living conditions of the poor that he had witnessed as a journalist, touched his contemporary readers. Greatly successful, the novel was a thinly veiled protest against the Poor Law of 1834.??In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated, ending a long series of marital difficulties. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels—among them Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Bleak House—continued to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.??The Poor Laws: Oliver Twist’s Social Commentary?Oliver Twist opens with a bitter invective directed at the nineteenth-century English Poor Laws. These laws were a distorted manifestation of the Victorian middle class’s emphasis on the virtues of hard work. England in the 1830s was rapidly undergoing a transformation from an agricultural, rural economy to an urban, industrial nation. The growing middle class had achieved an economic influence equal to, if not greater than, that of the British aristocracy.??In the 1830s, the middle class clamored for a share of political power with the landed gentry, bringing about a restructuring of the voting system. Parliament passed the Reform Act, which granted the right to vote to previously disenfranchised middle-class citizens. This desire gave rise to the Evangelical religious movement and inspired sweeping economic and political change.

This fourth novel of Boothby's Dr. Nikola series reveals that Nikola has discovered all of the facts necessary to extend a human being's life. He has studied science and magic secrets of Tibetan monks. He explains: ?"It has been a long and tedious search, but such labour only makes success the sweeter. The machinery is now prepared; all that remains is to fit the various parts together. In six months' time, if all goes well, I will have a man walking upon this earth who, under certain conditions, shall live a thousand years."??To assist him, he hires a destitute young physician, who explains his predicament: ?"As ill luck would have it, however, I had got into the wrong set, and before I had been two years in the hospital was over head and ears in such a quagmire of debt and difficulties that it looked as if nothing but an absolute miracle co-uld serve to extricate me." ?That miracle seems to have come to him in the person of Dr. Nikola.??The nefarious and wealthy Nikola has purchased a remote castle in the north of England, where the seclusion will allow him and his new assistant and Nikola's deaf-mute malformed Chinese servant to conduct his grand experiment on a human subject. ? AUTHOR: Guy Newell Boothby was an Australian novelist and writer, born in Adelaide, son of Thomas Wilde Boothby, who for a time was a member of the South Australian Legislative Assembly. Guy Boothby's grandfather was Benjamin Boothby (1803-1868), judge of the supreme court of South Australia from 1853 to 1867. When Boothby was six, he traveled to England with his mother. Around 1890, he took the position of private secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, Australia, but was not content with the work due to little opportunity for advancement. He turned to his writing talents, writing librettos for 2 comic operas and stories about Australian life. Boothby moved back to the United Kingdom in 1894. He wrote over 50 books in the course of a decade, before dying of pneumonia in Bournemouth. Some of Boothby's earlier works were non-fiction, but later he turned to writing novels. He was once well known for his series of five novels about Doctor Nikola, an occultist anti-hero seeking immortality and world domination.

D.J. and her dad moved far from the small town and only home she ever knew. Now she’s starting middle school in the city with kids she’s never met. She tries to make friends, but they all appear to be slaves to screen time. D.J. just likes to garden, nurturing plants, watching them grow and thrive. It seems she’ll never find a way to fit in, but then she awakens in a gorgeous garden where she meets Persephone, Goddess of Spring. She must be dreaming; her new friend can’t possibly be real—and what could she know about getting along with gamers? D.J. really needs some ideas, or she might never find her own place in a complicated world. ? Daisy, Bold & Beautiful is the debut novel of middle-schooler Ellie Collins, daughter of award-winning author Stephanie Collins. Boys and girls alike will appreciate Ellie’s keen eye for the challenges of growing up that she and her friends must face. Discover the wonderful writing of Ellie now, then follow her to learn about her writing and more books to come.

A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and “puts aside the things of childhood,” it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then — as she falls asleep in the car — takes the long way home, to prolong a moment such as he has not experienced in years. An elderly doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, makes use of the few precious moments of consciousness granted him each morning to pass on to his grandson what he has learned about life and living responsibly. Loss, and permanence, the ephemeral and the eternal, are common themes of Jan?Balabán’s collection of short stories?Maybe We’re Leaving, presented here in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski. With psychological insight that rivals the great novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the twenty-one linked narratives that make up the collection present us with everyday people, with everyday problems — and teach us to love and respect the former, and bear the latter. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Edited, translated, and introduced by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, this bilingual anthology presents Russian short poems of the last half-century. It showcases thirty poets from Russia, and displays a variety of works by authors who all come from different backgrounds. Some of them are well-known not only locally but also internationally due to festival appearances and translations into European languages; among them are Gennady Aigi, Gennady Alexeyev, Vladimir Aristov, Sergey Biryukov, Konstantin Kedrov, Igor Kholin, Viktor Krivulin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Genrikh Sapgir, and Sergey Stratanovsky. The next Russian poetic generation also features prominently in the collection. Such poets as Tatyana Grauz, Dmitri Grigoriev, Alexander Makarov-Krotkov, Yuri Milorava, Asya Shneiderman and Alina Vitukhnovskaya are the ones Russians like to read today. This anthology shows Russia looking back at itself, and reveals the post-World-War Russian reality from the perspective of some of the best Russian creative minds. Here we find a poetry of dissent and of quiet observation, of fierce emotions, and of deep inner thoughts.

Thérèse Raquin is a novel by ?mile Zola, first published in 1867. It was originally published in serial format in the journal L'Artiste. It was published in book format in December of the same year. In 1873, Zola turned Thérèse Raquin into a play. Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to her first cousin by a well-intentioned and overbearing aunt. Her cousin, Camille, is sickly and selfish, and when the opportunity arises, Thérèse enters into a tragic affair with one of Camille's friends, Laurent. In his preface, Zola explains that his goal in this novel was to "study temperaments and not characters" and he compares the novel to a scientific study. Because of this detached and scientific approach, Thérèse Raquin is considered an example of Naturalism.

The story follows the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters in the fictional town of Cranford closely modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire, which Mrs Gaskell knew well.

Joam Garral, a ranch owner who lives near the Peruvian-Brazilian border on the Amazon River, is forced to travel down-stream when his past catches up with him.

I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six inside, and making a two days’ journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month;—but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well-bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! They may all be improvements,—I dare say they are; but you will never meet with a Lady Ludlow in these days.

Lone Earthman on the vivid and intricate world of twin-sunned Antares in Scorpio, Dray Prescot has been the pawn of the unseen Star Lords who seeded that planet with the offspring of a hundred alien races. But at last Prescot has come in sight of the goal to overthrow the slavers and their evil empires that he shares with these space masters. On the island kingdom of Hyrklana his course now seems clear: overthrow its decadent queen, lead rebellion against the cruel Arena, and free the princess who was its rightful ruler. It is a hard task, but for Dray Prescot against whom sorcerers and swordsmen have contended, it is the only course he could follow. Though it might this time lead to his death, there can be no turning back. The adventures of Dray Prescot stand equal to the works of John Norman, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs for sheer fast-paced high adventure. Rebel of Antares is the twenty-fourth book in the epic fifty-two book saga of Dray Prescot of Earth and of Kregen by Kenneth Bulmer, writing as Alan Burt Akers. The series continues with Legions of Antares.

On the magnificent and mysterious, beautiful and terrible world of Kregen, a planet orbiting Antares four-hundred light-years from Earth, much may be achieved and much lost. Far more than merely a strong sword arm is required for victory. Far more than a cunning and devious brain is needed to secure success. Having won his princess, Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains, and having become the Emperor of Vallia with Delia at his side as Empress, Dray Prescot has renounced the crown and throne. Any thoughts of a quiet life are foolish, as he well knows. Among the many problems besetting him, the most important are uniting the lands of Paz and beating off the viciously hostile raiders from over the curve of the sea, the feared and hated Shanks. Containing three novels: Scorpio Ablaze Scorpio Drums Scorpio Triumph This edition includes a glossary to the Lohvian cycle.

Turgenev is retelling an incident from his own life, his infatuation with a young neighbor in the country, Catherine Shakovskoy (the Zinaida of the novella), an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father's mistress.

Part anthology and part travelogue,?Translating Libya?presents the country through the eyes of sixteen Libyan short story writers and one American diplomat. Translating Libya, published in 2008, was one of the first books to introduce Libyan literature to an English-speaking audience. The updated 2014 revision includes a foreword by Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih, one of Libya's most recognised authors, and a new introduction by the author, in light of the Libyan Revolution and its aftermath, which he witnessed firsthand.? Intrigued by the apparent absence of 'place' in modern Libyan short fiction, Ethan Chorin, one of the first U.S. diplomats posted to Libya, resolved in 2004 to track down and translate stories that specifically mentioned cities and landmarks in Libya - and then to visit those places, and describe what he encountered there. The result is a mixture of travelogue and memoir that sheds light on the social factors that fed the 2011 Revolution and its aftermath. The collection includes pieces from the 'sixties generation' of writers, as well as a newer generation of Libyan writers, including several women, writing in a variety of styles, "twisted" 1001 nights, to allegory, fictionalized memoir and overt satire.? Chorin explains how the stories, under cover of anonymity, distorted place-names and double-meanings reveal the depth of anger and despair that precipitated and fed the Arab Spring - and serve as a reminder to those who fought heroically for their freedom, that true courage springs from isolating, not repeating the mistakes of the past.

The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen and Abiram slowly making their way across the virgin prairies of the Midwest looking for a homestead, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, and during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They meet Natty Bumppo, the trapper, who has left his home in New York state to find a place where he cannot hear the sound of people cutting down the forests.

The play examines the precarious relationship between three women and sheds some light on the complexities of psychiatric care in the 21st century... poetic and often distressing... --The Stage Sean Burn's plays (www.gobscure.info) have been staged by a number of companies across Europe and in the UK. His thirty short films have received screenings worldwide, as well as at Tate Modern and National Film Theatre Studios, London. The latest - Widescream - was joint winner of 2010's Old Vic short monologue competition. His latest solo show - Bastilles England - taking poet John Clare's asylum break out and five day walk to freedom in 1841 has toured internationally.? He was shortlisted for a Dadafest Disability Arts Award 2009 for next swan down the river might be black and this play was also shortlisted for the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award 2011. It toured the UK nationally in 2012.