Recounts a famously outspoken agnostic's surprising relationship with Christianity H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author--and a famous American agnostic. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and reason in public life, Mencken is generally regarded as one of the fiercest critics of Christianity in his day. In this biography D. G. Hart presents a provocative, iconoclastic perspective on Mencken's life. Even as Mencken vividly debunked American religious ideals, says Hart, it was Christianity that largely framed his ideas, career, and fame. Mencken's relationship to the Christian faith was at once antagonistic and symbiotic. Using plenty of Mencken's own words, Damning Words superbly portrays an influential figure in twentieth-century America and, at the same time, casts telling new light on his era.

Bestselling author Holly Chamberlin’s heartfelt novel, set in a beautiful Maine beach town, tells of three sisters—and one summer filled with revelations… When Poppy Higgins left Yorktide, Maine, for Boston, she pictured future visits home as brief diversions from her real life in the big city. Fate had different ideas, and at twenty-five, Poppy has been called back to care for her two younger sisters following their father’s death. Sixteen-year-old Daisy resents Poppy’s long absence and chafes under her sometimes fumbling efforts to be a parent. Violet, now thirteen, is a virtual stranger to her oldest sister. Once a happy, united family, the Higginses seem adrift, and Poppy longs to escape her responsibilities. But when Daisy befriends Evie, an enigmatic newcomer to Yorktide, the young woman will be an unlikely catalyst in the sisters’ journey back to each other. For as Poppy discovers the deep loss in Evie’s life, she awakens to the truth about her own, and about the town, and the people, she’s tried to leave behind. Filled with the candid warmth of real sisterhood, Summer with My Sisters explores the many forms a family can take, and the unspoken ties that endure, season after season…

With the war drums echoing in her ears, and the sharp northern light glinting off the sharpened swords, Sela stood with trepidation on the shoreline. The dragon ships full of warriors had come, ready for battle and glory. But it wasn't the threat of conquest that shook Sela to the core. It was the way her heart responded to the proud face and chiseled body of Vikar Hrutson, jaarl, leader of the invading force—and Sela's ex-husband!

Ellie Homans, artist and wife of a prominent surgeon, lives in sumptuous luxury in a Boston suburb. Senator Alexander Lindsay, of Bostonian aristocracy, is vital, handsome, and politically powerful. But privilege has shielded neither from loveless marriages. Together they find a passionate commitment that submerges their mutual devotion to fidelity and personal integrity. The discovery of their affair leads Ellie¿s husband to devise a life-threatening method to imprison his wife in her unwanted marriage. He unwittingly passes his vendetta to his daughter, whose fury brings mother and daughter to the brink of disaster. Ellie¿s escape from innocence to costly awareness leads her to the realization that love, no matter how mature, can have a dreadful price. A woman finally discovers what she wants¿and what it costs. Ellie Homans keeps a running tally of "shoulds" in her mind, a list of her failures as the wife of an eminent surgeon from one of Boston's first families and mother to a son following in his father's footsteps and a daughter who hates her. The list is a catalog of battles she's lost over the years, from the decoration of the house to where her daughter Annie should go to college. Curtis (Song for a Lifetime, 1999) unfolds this romantic drama set among the New England aristocracy with an assured hand. Rich, engaging characters demonstrate that love often comes at a high price. -Kirkus Discoveries

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum. Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis with eye-opening results, Douthwaite focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. She uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frankénsteïn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Père Goriot. Bringing to light the missing links between the ancien régime and modernity, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France is an ambitious account of a remarkable politico-literary moment and its aftermath.

First published in 1987. This collection brings together important articles written by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters during the Suffragette Campaign, 1903-14. Includes a transcript of the 1908 trial of the suffragette leaders, their speeches, and major pamphlets of the Women's Social and Political Union.