One woman's testimonial about the Peron years sheds light on gender hierarchies, the role of women in industry, women as union militants, and the material culture of working class family life in Argentina.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, two years before the start of the American Revolution, nine-year-old Maria worries that her mother will lose her contract to publish official reports and announcements of the British government because she prints anti-British articles in their family-run newspaper.

Maria's Story is a true account of a Polish teen's trials and tribulations as a slave girl of the Nazis in the Second World War. Driven out of Krakow during the invasion by the German Army, Maria and her sister Stefania flee for the safety of their country village only to be rounded up and sent to forced labor in Greater Germania. The loveliness of their new home in an alpine village in Austria belies the hardship and loneliness they endure among strangers in a strange land. It's Maria's faith that keeps her going and it's her faith that gives her the strength to provide for and protect her love child after a dangerous secret liaison with one of the sons of the landowner for whom she toiled. Liberated by the American Army, Maria miraculously finds herself in a Polish Army camp in Italy where she has a whirlwind romance with a handsome young war hero, who takes her on an incredible journey that brings them to yet another land and an uncertain post-war future.

Maria's Story...is an oral history as dictated by Maria Wolf Stella about people and events sought by academic scholars to authenticate studies of Germany's Nazi era. Her father's imprisonment and then enforced unemployment led to meager meals at home, discrimination in school, and, for Maria at age 14, an order to report for work in a war material factory. Throughout, she faced wartime terror and carnage as bombing raids around the factory increased in frequency and destructiveness. Maria survived shock, heartbreak, and grief from the bombing of her village. She survived being strafed by a fighter plane, a tank bombardment of a bunker which she alone occupied, and the sniping by a lone hidden rifleman while searching for her sister. Eventually, even her sunny disposition could not dispel feelings of despair and foreboding for the future. World War II introduced a new form of warfare with primary casualties shifting from battlefield soldiers to civilians in cities, followed by a cold war era filled by the murder and genocide of millions by communist governments. An introduction to the book written by Robert Stella, outlines a national intercontinental ballistic missile defense system to shield the nation's city dwellers against incineration by H-bomb warheads. Ten appendices, also by Robert Stella, provide new perspective to World War II events; an eleventh reviews essentials of a U.S. Ballistic Missile "Star Wars" Defense System.

Conjuring entrancing tales of Mexican American mystics and misfits, Marytza K. Rubio shatters the boundaries of reality with this fiercely imaginative debut. “The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria.” Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in “Brujería for Beginners” reminds us: “There’s always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won’t always know what it is until payment is due.” This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow in “Tijuca,” who promises to bury her husband’s head in the rich dirt of the jungle, and the sisters in “Moksha,” who are tempted by a sleek obsidian dagger once held by a vampiric idol. But magic isn’t limited to the women who wield it. As Rubio so brilliantly elucidates, animals are powerful magicians too. Subversive pigeons and hungry jaguars are called upon in “Tunnels,” and a lonely little girl runs free with a resurrected saber-toothed tiger in “Burial.” A colorful catalog of gallery exhibits from animals in therapy is featured in “Art Show,” including the Almost Philandering Fox, who longs after the red pelt of another, and the recently rehabilitated Paranoid Peacocks. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, “Maria, Maria”—a tropigoth family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as an ineffable new voice in contemporary short fiction.

A naïve English farmer’s wife travels alone to Poznan, Poland, to visit the Zachodni Institute; an archive that holds records of the wartime Polish Resistance. It is the start of an adventure into history, and all that had been hidden since the Nuremberg Trials where Stalin and dismissed all evidence submitted by the Poles and the ensuing 45-year Russian occupation of Poland ensured their silence. On a quest to distinguish fact from fiction, Cynthia Engelmann investigates the truth of an unpublished manuscript bequeathed to her upon the death of Maria Weychan. Maria’s memoire had revealed an extraordinary tale of intrigue, romance, imprisonment and survival, as told a by a young Polish dancer in Berlin after the end of World War II. She had survived life in a camp with her mother for longer than had previously been thought possible. Had they collaborated with the Germans to protect themselves? Finding herself part of a movement to collate events of history previously hidden and silenced, Cynthia uncovers the leads of the evidence to share the truth of Maria’s memoire.