Destitute and desperate, Jane Lucas knows there is one place where she can find refuge—her childhood home. Landing on the doorstep, Jane is confronted with a new lord of the manor! Devilish Colonel Francis Russell is known for his fierce reputation in battle. The civil war may be ended but, by stepping over the threshold, Jane fears she's crossing enemy lines. She will use every weapon in her arsenal to claim the home that's rightfully hers, starting with her bewitching charm…but then she goes and falls under the colonel's spell!

Hester Atkins was always a quiet, unassuming woman—until she's driven to commit a crime of desperation. Now on the run, she takes refuge in the home of her former suitor, Lucas Fryston. The Grange has stood abandoned since he sailed to America to begin a new life after the English Civil War…or so Hester thought. Lucas has returned to England, and their reunion reawakens a passion that neither can deny. But with Hester's past catching up to her, will one night of pleasure be all they can ever share?

Brothers of Earth: The leader of the Hana was a Priestess-Ruler in a world of humanoid aliens. Yet she was more closely related to her human prisoner, Kurt Morgan, though their star nations had been bitter enemies for two thousand years. She granted Kurt Moragn his lfie, but for a price: that he remain indebted to his captors, immersed in an alien environment which threatened to drive him mad. Beset with doubts, Kurt accepted the terms of his capture and despite his misgivings became intrigued with his life. For he shared something unique with his captorboth of them had survived the destruction of their worlds. And then they realized that the world on which they now lived was on the brink of a devastating war, and they were perhaps the only two sentient beings there who understood the ultimate sacrifice that might come from such a conflict. Could they save this world, or would they die with their adopted planet, humanitys orphans at the edge of space Hunter of Worlds: The Iduve were the most advanced spacefaring race in the galaxy. They traveled where they pleased in giant city-sized vessels, engrossed with their own affairs. The Iduve were humanoid, but they differed from Earths own humans in one significant way: they were pure predators incapable of human emotion. Aiela was a world-survey officer who found himself abducted to serve the Iduve clanship Ashanome. Forcibly mind-linked with two other captives, life for Aiela became wholly dedicated to the service of his captors. But then the Ashanome came to the world of Priamos, a war-torn planet caught in a struggle between humans and the alien race known as the amaut. When she discovered that her fugitive brother was hiding there, Chimele, leader of the Ashanome, was willing to sacrifice this entire world to destroy him. And Priamos only hope for survival lay with Aiela and his fellow captives

This book illuminates the connectedness of Dostoevsky's literary art with his philosophical and psychological brilliance. Two Fyodor Dostoevsky conferences originating at the University of North Texas set the stage for this volume. Scholars contributed original papers focusing on how Dostoevsky's literary art and philosophical insights enrich one another. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote and thought polyphonically. His polyphonic method is both his special literary technique and his distinctive way of probing theological, social, and philosophical depths. As Bakhtin and Terras suggest, all Dostoevsky's major literary inventions--from the underground man to the vitriolic Grushenka--are products of his ability to listen profoundly to his own characters. Like the genius author-redactor of 1 and 2 Samuel, he reports the heights and depths of human emotion and behavior, whether exploring the anatomy of dysfunctional families, making the heart soar with Zosima's vision of forgiveness, or giving Ivan Karamazov full rein to challenge theism. Dostoevsky's characters transform themselves into irregular verbs whose fierce independence emerges only because of their desperate and inescapable interdependence. His major characters are text, subtext, and context for each other. They play inside each other's head and answer in one way or another.

The realms of living beings are no longer the same as what we are used to seeing. Far into the future, our Earth has undergone one cataclysmic upheaval and what remains is the bare earth, the seas and vast lands. In this setting, a new breed of humans inhabit the world with other evolved life-forms and a struggle for supreme power ensues, which results in the famed but long-forgotten mystical Gragodonian emblems being recalled from their secret alcoves across the seven realms of living beings. In this volatile backdrop, three young kings from the northern kingdoms of Lamiras, Meldovia and Varnosia are secretly charged with the task of battling the perpetrators of unwholesome intentions. Unexpectedly, danger stalks the three princes at the very outset. Will any or all of them fall by the wayside, in their quest to overcome the evil of the times? The Mythical Emblems of Gragodon: Search for the Mythical Emblems is volume 1 of a series of stories that put you on the path of discovering courage, perseverance, friendship, love and loyalty.

From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.

It was supposed to be a simple human-interest story, the kind of fluff piece hard-nosed reporter Brett Davis begrudgingly accepts only because his job is at stake. But when his newspaper editor sends him to the northernmost point of Europe to interview the head of a secretive monastery, Brett encounters a man who cannot possibly be who he claims to be—St. Nicholas of Myra. All Brett wants are the facts, but the tale Nicholas tells is too incredible to be true. Or is it? As Nicholas reveals the intricacies of his amazing long life, Brett discovers not only the origins of every facet of the much beloved Santa Claus myth, but also that, when confronted with the miraculous, faith is the only rational choice left.