A girl from Appalachia makes it in New York, becoming the host of her own TV talk show. At 24, Ruby Bottom has everything a woman could dream, money, fame and a wealthy boyfriend. But in her past there was another man, an idealist who saw more in her than she saw herself, and she cannot forget him.

Ruby Maxwell has what every young woman dreams of: a glamorous job hosting a successful talk show, a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and a boyfriend who only wants to put a Tiffany diamond on her finger. But she also has unsettling dreams about the Appalachian home she ran away from at age seventeen, dreams that make it impossible for her to find peace -- or love. When a reporter inadvertently uncovers her secret past, he sets in motion a chain of events that place Ruby in the harsh spotlight of public opinion and threaten to destroy the life she has built for herself. As her two worlds collide in Annie Garrett's Because I Wanted You, Ruby is haunted by the memory of the man she once loved and cannot forget, the idealist who saw more in her than she saw in herself. And even as she faces her mistakes, she tries to believe the fortune cookie adage that she carries with her at all times: "Love does no wrong that can't be made right."

The characters in this collection of 21 short fictions hum with restlessness. They pine for lost loves and pop music romances, Hollywood heartthrobs, and sunnier towns. They flee from failed relationships and looming violence, adulthood and other deaths. Written with dark humor and incisive, voice-driven prose, Kara Vernor's stories will stick in your head like a song.

A collection of startling and breathtaking stories about people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. A New York Times Notable Book A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.

The loving voices of a child's parents tell the story of an adoption, from waiting to meet the baby for the first time through the growth of a family. Peter Catalanotto's vibrant illustrations form a clever and dramatic counterpoint to the text: presented as a series of family snapshots, the images run backward in time.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

"Novelist Juniper Blossom has romance down to a science in her bestselling books. But she's not about to settle for just any man-a happy ending looks different for everyone, and she needs to find the guy whose idea of forever matches her own ... Divorce attorney Tomas Rivera is as proud of Juniper's authorial success as she is, but that doesn't mean he buys into her books' premise. His career is proof enough that true love is the real fairy tale-and everyone knows fairy tales aren't real"--