When best friends Aggie and Fiona drift apart in fifth grade, Aggie grows to understand that fading friendships are normal, and she makes a new friend who shares more of her interests.

When Aggie's friend Fiona starts to pull away, canceling plans and acting, well, different, Aggie is confused. It's not like anything happened; or did it? There aren't any good answers, but it turns out that new friendship can turn up just when you need it most. A graphic novel from American Girl.

Born in Dundee in 1938, Maureen Reynolds grew up in wartime Scotland, a young girl surrounded by adult concerns. There was the endless queuing for rations that never seemed to stretch quite far enough, the blackouts and the air raids. But, if times were hard, they were also simpler, and in Voices in the StreetMaureen remembers with great fondness her early years with her wise old grandad, the enjoyment of riding on tram cars, the weekly wash house gossip and the people and places of her childhood. When she left school at fifteen, Maureen immediately started her working life with a job at the local sweetie factory, coming of age in the era of Teddy Boys and rock 'n' roll and enjoying the dancing with her best friend Betty. Then, as Maureen grew up, she found her love, only to see him borrowed in the name of National Service. But, through good times and bad, she would never forget growing up in Dundee.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced the practice of plural marriage in 1890. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, however--the heyday of Mormon polygamy--as many as three out of every ten Mormon women became polygamous wives. Paula Kelly Harline delves deep into the diaries and autobiographies of twenty-nine such women, providing a rare window into the lives they led and revealing their views and experiences of polygamy, including their well-founded belief that their domestic contributions would help to build a foundation for generations of future Mormons. Polygamous wives were participants in a controversial and very public religious practice that violated most nineteenth-century social and religious rules of a monogamous America. Harline considers the questions: Were these women content with their sacrifice? Did the benefits of polygamous marriage for the Mormons outweigh the human toll it required and the embarrassment it continues to bring? Polygamous wives faced daunting challenges not only imposed by the wider society but within the home, yet those whose writings Harline explores give voice to far more than unhappiness and discontent. The personal writings of these women, all married to different husbands, are the heart of this remarkable book--they paint a vivid and sometimes disturbing picture of an all but vanished and still controversial way of life.

Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

History has until now hidden how close the ambitions of these two men came to carving out a Mormon Kingdom of God in the Republic of Texas.".

Roger Winter has always been preoccupied with “recording reality in all its strangeness,” in the words of biographer and art historian Susie Kalil. His works partake of wide-ranging influences: childhood memories of gospel hymns blaring from a loudspeaker atop the “Holy Roller” church near his home; strange totems composed of crows, foxes, angels, and old family photographs; rusted cars resting among chest-high weeds; faces reflected in the windows of a New York City bus. According to his siblings, he has been an artist since he was “pre-verbal,” and in a career spanning eight decades, he has continually reinvented himself, breaching the boundaries of one stylistic convention after another—never content to allow the expression of his vision to be constrained to a single vocabulary. In this definitive retrospective of Winter’s life and art, Kalil explores not only the myriad influences of the artist and his dizzying stylistic journey but also allows Winter’s work to pose important questions: Why do some people become artists and others don’t? What gives artists their unique modes of perception and expression? Where is the line of separation between what is seen and what is represented? Between the maker and what is made? The Art of Roger Winter: Fire and Ice offers an in-depth portrait of one of today’s most important American painters. Critics, collectors, scholars, students, and art lovers will glean deep insights from this study in contrasts.