Life Fiction

Martin Luther entered a monastery as a youth and as a man shattered the structure of the medieval church, speaking out against the corrupt religious practices of the time. His demand that the authority for doctrine and practice be scriptures, rather than popes or councils, echoed around the world and ignited the great Reformation. Accused of heresy and threatened with excommunication and death, Luther maintained his bold stand and refused to recant. In his crusade to eliminate religious abuses, he did more than any other man to establish the Protestant faith.

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.

In Friends Forever?, third in Tina Wells’s delightful middle-grade series, Zee and the rest of her class from the Brookdale Academy are off on a camping trip to compete in an environmental scavenger hunt. Zee is extra psyched because her best friend, Ally, is visiting from Paris. It should be fabulous having all her friends in one place, but for some reason everyone is fighting!

Returning from their wizardly holiday, Nita Callaghan and Kit Rodriguez look forward to getting back to their normal routine. But there’s trouble brewing. A strange darkness is befalling older wizards across the world, stealing away their power. Soon, young wizards from Earth and beyond must join forces to stop an unimaginable invasion—and defend the very essence of wizardry itself.

As Persephone's mom encourages her to do, she often "goes along to get along" instead of doing what she really wants. But when she meets Mount Olympus Academy bad-boy Hades, she finally feels she has found someone with whom she can be herself. He's the first person who actually listens to her, and she finds herself liking him, despite the fact the other goddessgirls think he's bad news. But if he makes her feel so special - and she's so comfortable hanging around him - can he really be all that bad?

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

After years of living in fear of her husband, Amanda Banning has left him and moved to Mystic Creek, Oregon, for a fresh start. But she's having a tough time providing for herself and her six-year-old daughter. Writing her secret yearnings on slips of paper and sending them into the wind helps her cling to the hope that things will get better - and that she can find happiness again.

Bo Mason, his wife, and his two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running throughout the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them, in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul, they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.

Ivan is an easygoing gorilla. Living at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade, he has grown accustomed to humans watching him through the glass walls of his domain. He rarely misses his life in the jungle. In fact, he hardly ever thinks about it at all. Instead, Ivan thinks about TV shows he's seen and about his friends Stella, an elderly elephant, and Bob, a stray dog. But mostly Ivan thinks about art and how to capture the taste of a mango or the sound of leaves with color and a well-placed line.

Fiona doesn't remember going to sleep. But when she opens her eyes, she discovers her entire world has been altered - her house is abandoned and broken, and the entire neighborhood is barren and dead. Even stranger is the tattoo on her right wrist - a black oval with five marks on either side - that she doesn't remember getting but somehow knows she must cover at any cost. And she's right.

Dan Gutman, the prolific author of over 60 popular books for children and young adults, vividly imagines what is surely every put-upon school kid's dream: a machine that does homework for them - error free!

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

Take a trip inside Riley's head with Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust; travel to infinity and beyond with Buzz Lightyear and Woody; swim the oceans with Marlin and Dory; and more. Featuring retellings of all 17 Disney-Pixar feature films, this collection is sure to be a hit with any Pixar fan!

While out searching for food, fruit bat Stellaluna and her mother are attacked by a vicious owl. Stellaluna is separated from Mother Bat and taken in by a family of birds where she must put aside her bat habits to fit in with her new family. But one fateful flight when she is separated from her adoptive siblings, Stellaluna is reunited with her bat family and learns that even though we're different, we're very much the same.

In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships.

Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir. Even so, people recognized the depth of his realization, and he was sought out by people of all walks of life for the teaching to be experienced in just being around him.

Molly knows that her purpose is to take care of her girl, C. J., but it won't be easy. Neglected by her mother, Gloria, who won't allow her to have a dog, C. J. is going through some tough times. Molly's job is to stay hidden in C. J.'s room, cuddle up to her at night, and protect her from bad people. And no matter what Gloria does to separate them, nothing will keep Molly away from the girl that she loves.

Kit Averin is anything but a gambler. A scientist with a quiet, steady job at a university, Kit's focus has always been maintaining the acceptable status quo. Being a sudden millionaire doesn't change that, with one exception: the fixer-upper she plans to buy, her first and only real home. It's more than enough to keep her busy, until an unsettlingly handsome, charming, and determined corporate recruiter shows up in her lab - and manages to work his way into her heart.