A catastrophe outside the Vancouver Public Library has hurled Terri Jane McRae into the pages of a book she just read. To get out, she must decipher Dostoyevsky escapee Father Zossima's "miracle." If you have questions about creation, God, the universe, miracles, or what to wear at an 18th century French military ball, this is a great place to ask them.

A biography and collection of writings providing insight into the social conditions of the lives of ruling class women in the 16th century England, as well as a personal look at the life of one such woman.

In her exuberantly funny, bittersweet collection, Ellen Gilchrist offers 16 stories that delve into the vibrant lives of her signature strong-willed women. Ranging from hilarity to despair—innocent children bewildered by their elders’ behavior, a writer living on Xanax, and a socialite seeking a health cure only to find romance instead of rest—Gilchrist’s high-spirited characters always tend to find themselves in outrageous situations. The beloved and feisty Rhoda Manning returns, fighting the lure of the bottle while relentlessly going after her dream of becoming a famous writer. And while the restraint of family and society continues to haunt Gilchrist’s characters, they prove fearless and deliciously carve their own chaotic paths toward survival. Set in Fayetteville, Arkansas and New Orleans, Louisiana, the tales are artfully fashioned, providing tastes of marvelously trouble-prone people at every stage of life. Packed with humor, sexuality, and ever true to human weakness, this collection is romantic and full of passion—a treat in which readers will happily indulge. PRAISE: “The Age of Miracles is Ellen Gilchrist’s best book yet. Its comedy, irony, sexuality, inwardness, and sadness, all of it undergirded by a brave and funny sensibility, convince me anew that her work is in the first rank of American fiction today.” —Willie Morris, Author of My Dog Skip and North Towards Home “The Age of Miracles itself seems a miracle, powerfully illustrating the serenity that people sometimes develop as they age, the reward for enduring all the difficulties and disappointments of life.” —San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle “The stories in this collection are among her best.” —Miami Herald

The Miracle Lady is a story of Francine Koldoff¿s life retold revealing how God intervened in key points to provide miracles.

The Reformation's war against the saints and their miracles is well known. The story of the Protestant Reformers' embrace of natural wonders as miracles that could similarly spur piety and moral discipline is much less familiar. In Miracles and the Protestant Imagination, Philip M. Soergel examines the sixteenth-century Lutheran wonder books, works filled with accounts of monstrous births, celestial apparitions, natural disasters, plagues, and other seemingly aberrant events occurring in the natural world. Soergel traces the inspiration behind these books to a widespread appropriation of wonders that was taking place throughout late-medieval and early-modern Europe. As sixteenth-century rulers stocked their curiosity cabinets with all manner of strange and confounding bits of nature collected from the far corners of the globe, evangelical theologians, too, compiled enormous compendia filled with accounts of fantastic events long recorded in the natural world. Many embraced such tales to satisfy an innate curiosity about nature and its often incomprehensible processes, but Germany's devout evangelicals relied upon them to warn of imminent Apocalypse, to drive home the full scope of human depravity, and to encourage the repentant to keep the Law of an angry, Deuteronomic God. Luther had dismissed natural signs as inferior when compared against the testimony of the scriptures. Nevertheless, inspired by Melanchthon and other contemporaries who embraced history, natural philosophy, and rhetoric as proofs for Christian doctrine, the authors of late-Reformation wonder books fashioned natural signs into powerful defenses of treasured evangelical principles. In so doing, their works revealed the tensions as well as fears at play within a maturing Reformation movement as it faced mounting internal dissension and external pressures from Calvinism and resurgent Catholicism.