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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.