Calvin is the smallest guy in his high school, and a perfect target for Rozelle and her girl gang. His mother is dead, his father is long gone and his only remaining relative, his grandmother, is getting too sick to run her dry cleaning business. The only time Calvin feels in control is when he's working his yo-yo. When he takes up street performing, Rozelle demands a cut and insists on being his manager. To get media attention, she markets him as...

If there are two subjects that are universally fascinating and rife with controversy, they are sex and fat. Though our culture is obsessed with both, the two commingling are sometimes seen as offensive, obscene, or even grotesque. Fat people are not viewed as sexual beings. Of course, this perception is far from accurate. Fat people have normal and peculiar sex lives, just like everyone else. A compilation of true stories, cultural references, and...

BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS - My name is Cassidy Connor and my parents hate me. Well, they can go to hell. After yet another fight with my manipulative lawyer father and bible thumping mother, I disappear onto Hollywood Blvd among the other street kids. Or so I thought. The cops pick me up for a BS crime I didn't commit, and Dad announces the only way I can avoid charges is to voluntarily admit myself into Oak Dale, a psych ward for crazy teens. I don't...

Linda is a young, hardworking single mom struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. When she learns that her son Dre needs a kidney transplant, her family's already precarious financial situation takes a turn for the worst. Then she discovers that the only one who can help Dre is his half-brother LeVon, a drug-dealing gangbanger who thinks only of himself. Somehow Linda must get through to LeVon in order to save her son. Though she is deathly...

It's been likened to a plague, but A.I.D.S. was never just a health crisis. The second in a series on grieving the death of a friend, Friend Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends revisits a time when people with A.I.D.S. were also targets of bigotry and discrimination. In stories about Ryan White, ACT UP, the Names Project, red ribbons and more, you'll learn why friends made all the difference: not just caregiving or memorializing,...

"They were killing my friends." That was how Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy justified his heroic actions in World War II. As long as there have been wars, men and women in the military have watched their friends die. Experts warn that delaying our grief will complicate our lives. But what about those who have no choice but to delay it until the battle is over? In Friend Grief and the Military: Band of Friends you'll meet military and non-combatants...

In the hills of Tennessee, Shane Carson, a gifted, nationally-recognized horseman, is living the good life. When a mysterious mustang shows up on his farm, Shane doesn't know how--or why--the horse appeared, but the horse's distinctive brand identifies her. She is one of the Spirit Horses, a rare, wild herd that runs free on the Shoshone reservation in Wyoming. Watched over for centuries in the tribe's ancestral valleys, these exquisite horses, according...

In the same vein as Paul Theroux and Robert Olen Butler, some of these stories take place in foreign countries—Zaire (Congo) and Greece—and center on interactions between a host nation and an American visitor. Others are set in the US in the modes of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff, focusing on human relationships.Each story reveals a main character’s moral center in the face of unexpected events, some of which seem trivial, others vital.

Two violent deaths. Separated by time, but with a fatal connection… A man loses his father. A young woman loses her mother. Both in tragic circumstances that lead, when they meet, to surprising revelations from the past. Louisa needs to find the father she has never known, to warn him of possible danger - for them both. Her search takes her from England to Guernsey. Malcolm's journey is more tortuous: conceived in Guernsey, he travels to Canada...

Five years after an unspeakable tragedy, Gordie Allen is living with his half-brother Kevin, the only person who can protect Gordie at school and keep him focused on getting his life back on track. But just when it seems like things are becoming normal, Gordie’s biological father comes back into the picture, demanding a place in his life. Now there’s nothing to stop Gordie from falling into a tailspin that could cost him everything—including...