We Smoked Our Sister: Stories from a childhood carries the reader back to the wonderful days of the 1960’s; a time of excitement in the growth of America. The life of a rural family in Chunchula, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile County is portrayed between these pages. Though it was a time of financial hardships, the family was held together by a loving mother and father, who worked hard and raised their children to be disciplined/focused, productive, motivated, and successful as werll as creating a love for learning and the importance of family and heritage taught through stories passed down from family ancestry, as well as stories created by the Seymour children who lived these stories. Family life was like a work of art. Also, this book looks at a part of family life and the methods used to discipline children in the south. A picture of a rich life comes through to the reader, which could describe the simple everyday lives of any family in the south. The south has such rich undiscovered family history. The reader will not be able to put it down; it totally involves you in the life of the Seymour family and the siblings with their wonderfully hilarious antics. The reader will be able to picture a time in America when life was totally different. We long for those days again, where there was peace, harmony and caring among the citizens. So take a journey though the sixties and relive the days that are so precious to many southern families. This book contains stories that are timeless in beauty and wonderfully intriguing.

After the death of her abusive father and loss of her beloved Ethan and their unborn child, Pattyn runs away, desperately seeking peace, as her younger sister, a sophomore in high school, also tries to put the pieces of her life back together.

The #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Crank" returns with a gripping, masterful novel, told in verse, that weaves a riveting story about a teenage girl who is raised in a fundamentally religious yet abusive family.

Ibrahim al-Mazini was one of the great humorists and stylists of twentieth-century Arabic prose literature. Like an Egyptian James Thurber, he captured the foibles and triumphs of Cairo's middle classes of the 1930s and 1940s in exceptionally stylish prose. This collection gathers in one volume some of al-Mazini's best short fiction, including two novellas: Midu and His Accomplices and Ten Again. Midu is an engaging, well-liked army officer who--assisted by almost every other character in the story--arranges a faux heist from his uncle's library in order to allow young love to run its course. In Ten Again, a man awakes to find that he has returned to childhood, on the day of his tenth birthday: his wife, who is being wooed by a most obnoxious suitor, is now his mother, and his two sons torment him mercilessly at his birthday party. In al-Mazini's skillful hands, the short stories included here illuminate a lively fictional world: from a drunken encounter with a parrot to an undertaker's attempt to provide a cadaver with a believer's contented smile. An unmarried woman dreams of her unborn daughter, who is impatient to be born; and a reclusive author who has chosen to disappear from Cairo's literary scene is tracked down--to his obvious disgust--by an intrepid researcher. Rich in insight, imagination, and humor, these stories are a splendid introduction to a major figure in the early generation of Egyptian writers.

Short stories from the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing, Africa's leading literary prize - awarded to an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. The collection includes the five shortlisted stories along with 12 stories written by the Caine Prize Writers' workshop. The Caine Prize is patronised by the four African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Wole Soynika, Nadine Gordimer, Naguib Mahfouz and J.M. Coetzee.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife. The story caused a sensation when it first appeared and Tolstoy's wife was appalled that he had drawn on their own experiences together to create a scathing indictment of marriage. 'The Devil', centring on a young man torn between his passion for a peasant girl and his respectable life with his loving wife, also illustrates the impossibility of pure love. 'The Forged Coupon' shows how an act of corruption can spiral out of control, and 'After the Ball' examines the abuse of power. Written during a time of spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, these late stories reflect a world of moral uncertainties.

'The Ferryman of Brill, and Other Stories' is a novel written by William Henry Giles Kingston. The story takes place in the town of Brill in the province of Flanders, which is ruled by the harsh Duke of Alva who resides in Brussels. The Duke is trying to convert the population to the Church of Rome, with little success. The protagonist, Diedrich Meghem, is a young merchant and a Protestant who falls in love with Gretchen Hopper, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Duke Alva becomes aware of Hopper's wealth and plans to take it for himself. Hopper is a known follower of the reformed principles and can easily be accused of heresy.