Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Sarna examines a representative selection of psalms with their forms of expression, literary style, and range of religious ideas.

Best-selling author takes you behind the scenes of your favorite songs.

In this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book. An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge.

I highly recommend Sacred Heart Songs for all who seek deeper healing and an embrace of the divine. Caryl Conroy Johnson, MA, MS, spiritual director and a co-pastor of St. Mary Magdalene Community, Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania Savor every page of this inspiring book. Each chapters reflections invite you to explore the dreams in your heart and to let them sing! Nicole Sotelo, author of Women Healing from Abuse: Meditations for Finding Peace Is your body craving energy? Are you challenged by insomnia? Fibromyalgia? Trauma? Chronic pain? Is unfinished business in your life holding you back from reaching your potential? Share in the stories of those who have traveled similar paths and learn about the benefits of Reiki upon their well-being. Through a unique weaving of spirit and science, Sacred Heart Songs provides clear markers along the path to safety and wellness, freeing the songs of our hearts. Each of us has an inner wisdom, intimately woven in Gods spirit of truth. This wisdom is waiting to guide us through disease to wellness. Contemplative reflections at the end of each chapter engage the process of dialoging with our hearts and souls as they call out to us with the truths and dreams of our lives.