Showing results by narrator "Liisa Ivary" in All Categories

"Kalopsia", a word meaning "the delusion of things being more beautiful than they actually are", is what happens to us when we think we've fallen in love. Almost-love Stories is a collection of four short stories that almost ended well. Love isn't the way romance novels make it seem. Happily ever after doesn't exist and love is blind, but perhaps we should open our eyes.

A war erupts on the Western plains as tensions mount between the Southern Arapaho and settlers. Caught in the middle is Winter Fawn, torn between loyalty to her father and her mother's Arapaho people. Carson Dulaney has come West with his sister to start over after the War Between the States. But he is not prepared for the dangers of his new home. He is near death after an attack from a native tribe when Winter Fawn finds him and saves his life.

Love is all they have, and it's all 20-year-old Bess Dulaney thinks she needs from Hunter MacDougall. But Hunter knows he cannot provide Bess with the life she deserves, and his pride stands between them and the future they both desire. Then tragedy strikes, leaving Bess with no memories of her life or the man she wants to share it with. Suddenly, Hunter finds himself forced to put his faith in the passion that he can no longer deny.

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in Black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: The story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.” Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, and alters our perception of this historical moment.

Michael Ruane is an obscure American opera singer who arrives in Naples to play a small part in an important production of Tosca and star in his own staging of a little-known Benjamin Britten opera. The work comes at a particularly trying time, when he’s still raw with grief after his New York lover’s death from AIDS. As the productions get under way, Ruane is offered an unusual part: That of the “uncle from Rome” at a local wedding.

Like Jack Kerouac’s intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in fate and the shadowy recesses of a string of glittering, broken relationships. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching 16-year-old Gore makes her way from the sterile suffocation of the Silicon Valley through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders through bustling, electric Kathmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole.

A middle-grade retelling of Richard Nixon’s downfall, Bringing Down A President: The Watergate Scandal is an inventive and timely look at one of the biggest scandals to ever rock our nation by Andrea Balis and Elizabeth Levy.