Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine her surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital to find out that she's getting divorced, has three kids, and is actually thirty-nine. Now Alice must reconstruct a lost decade -- and try to reconstruct her life. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she's become one of those...

Kate Madison's stylish resale shop has been a big SoHo success, supporting her and her four kids since her husband's untimely death. Now they are grown and ready to forge lives of their own. And they all choose to play against the odds, to their mother's dismay. Isabelle, a dedicated attorney, is in line to make partner at her Wall Street firm when she falls for a client she represents in a criminal case. She tells herself she can make a life with...

"In this pair of novellas and two stories, Russo's characters bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from most of his novels. In "Horseman," a tenured professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches--"And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward, or...

"A brilliant, exuberant and entertaining story of a young American whose life is transformed when a Chinese-American businessman suddenly takes him under his wing on a global adventure"-- Provided by publisher.

"As a late spring blizzard brews, Brother Christopher, a cloistered monk at Blue Mountain Monastery in Vermont, rushes to tend to his Ida Red and Northern Spy apple trees in advance of the unseasonal snowstorm. When the storm lands a young Somali refugee,Sahro Abdi Muse, at the monastery, Christopher is pulled back into the world as his life intersects with Sahro's and that of an Afghan war veteran in surprising and revealing ways"-- Provided by publisher....

Single mom Shandi Pierce's life takes a turn when an enigmatic geneticist saves her and her three-year-old genius son from an armed robber.

“The stories in Acts of God are great postcards from the world of Ellen Gilchrist. It’s a world of war and strife and surprises, and it is, yes, marvelous to behold.” —The New York Times Book Review

Celebrated short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award for Victory Over Japan, returns with her first collection in more than eight years. In Acts of God, she

...

"One book. Nine readers. Ten changed lives. New York Times bestselling author Erica Bauermeister's No Two Persons is "a gloriously original celebration of fiction, and the ways it deepens our lives." That was the beauty of books, wasn't it? They took you places you didn't know you needed to go... Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open,...

It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean?...

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all...