The stories in this collection occupy a world at once as familiar as a suburban backyard or a southern college's hallowed football field and as strange as a man who buys Savannah, Georgia, and tries to turn it into the perfect Southern city as part of his attempt to win back his estranged wife. The fictional territory of Carrying the Torch , is in short, Brock Clarke's, one in which the surreal and the hilarious share a neighborhood with the painfully real and the sweetly ironic. Here readers will encounter characters dislocated by work and love, by huge losses and life's small dramas, men and women who have migrated South in search of redemption--or at least in the hope of leaving the worst behind.In these tales about what people try to leave and find they can't, about the lies we tell the people we love and the myths we create to make life livable, Marly Swick cites an "exceptional originality" as well as an "amazing emotional resonance, a haunting quality." "Notable for their balance of sentiment and restraint, the music of their language, and the haunting human longing that coexists with the irony and the humor," as Lee Martin remarks, these remarkable stories carry forward a tradition reaching from Flannery O'Connor to John Cheever and Donald Barthelme--and arrive at a brilliance all their own.Brock Clarke is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the novel The Ordinary White Boy and of What We Won't Do , a short story collection that won the 2002 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction.

Maud Howe Elliott (1854Ð1948), the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, was a Pulitzer PrizeÐwinning writer and a tireless supporter of the arts, particularly in her adopted city of Newport, Rhode Island. An art historian and the author of over twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including countless articles and short stories, Elliott is perhaps best known for co-writing a biography of her motherÑa major figure in the political and cultural world of New England, a womanÕs suffrage leader, and a leading progressive political voice. Elliott sought to enhance community and regional life by founding the Art Association of Newport in 1912 (now the Newport Art Museum), which she saw as the culmination of her life's work.

Two stories in one book, this is a powerful memoir of surviving the Holocaust, and should be read by everyone.

When I want to read a book, I write one. So wrote the 19th century politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli - Washington Irving said something very similar - and its a maxim which Ive adopted as my own. Almost all of the writing Ive done over many years has been based on wanting to read a book on a particular subject - a book which research told me didnt currently seem to exist. Carrying the Torch, like all my other books to date, was born out of the desire to read a good book on an interesting subject: finding nothing available that quite matched up to my expectations, I decided to write it myself. I wanted a good, general book about the phenomenon of unrequited love in the worlds art, how important a theme it has been in novels, poems, music and film for so long, why artists keep coming back to it again and again, what it actually is, what it feels like and how it might be explained and so forth. I like to think that thats the book Ive written. All the world loves a lover and most people, whether they openly admit it or not (and that includes a great many men!) love a good love story: as I make clear in the book, it doesnt seem to matter if the story has a tragic or at least unhappy ending, we dont enjoy it any less and may even enjoy it all the more, as the popularity of weepies in book or film form attests.

At the age of eight, Josiah took his place on the throne as King in Jerusalem. It began the fulfillment of the prophetic destiny that had been established for and about Josiah over three-hundred years earlier. He reigned as king for thirty-one years, and in that time he led the nation and the people through a time of revival and reconnection with God and God's ways. This book explores how Josiah carried the torch for revival, and draws on some principles from his reign that we can apply to see God bring a great revival in our day as well. When destiny overtakes reality there is a powerful thing that happens. It is time for you to step into your destiny today.

Finding your place in a family tree that has only one branch, the other shorn by the Holocaust, is a tricky business. Gail Weiss Gaspar grew up believing that her worth was tied to busyness and productivity, with achievement and education prized above all other accomplishments. Keenly aware that her beloved father survived Auschwitz and the brutal environment of the Mauthausen labor camp, she silenced her suffering because nothing could match what he endured. Gail's family had secrets, as all families do. It became her job to be the family's secret keeper. It wasn't until her 63-year-old father stood on stage at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and told his story that Gail understood that her voice mattered, too. This moving memoir honors the past while unshackling from it and highlights a generational journey through loss with tenderness and love. If you have ever said to yourself, "How could I possibly break free from my family's past?" this book is for you. When you read Carrying my Father's Torch, you will be inspired to consider how your family legacy has impacted your life, find the courage to overcome your legacy wound and become the hero of your own story