The stories of our lives are a lot like songsbeautiful, eternal melodies composed by our loving God. In Heart Songs, author Kathryn Slattery shares some of these songs through her own life stories, seeking to provide hope, encouragement, and inspiration. In this collection, she explores the joys and challenges of lifes changing seasonsbeing a young mother; being a member of the Sandwich Generation pressed on both sides to meet the needs of her aging mother while also caring for her husband and children; being an empty nester and losing her mother; and being a joyful mother of the bride. Throughout her lifes journey, Slattery discovers fresh, helpful, spiritual insightsheart songsthat she shares as a mother, daughter, sister, wife, and friend. With refreshing candor and gentle, self-effacing humor, Heart Songs captures those divine and fleeting moments when heavens music breaks through and our hearts sing in perfect harmony with our loving God. Praise for Heart Songs Kitty Slattery writes not just for the heart but for the soul. She reaches deep into her own life as well as the lives of others to find the stories that lift us up and give us the greatest gift any writer can givehope. Edward Grinnan, editor-in-chief of Guideposts magazine and author of The Promise of Hope Heart Songs is full of heart-tugging warmth and wisdom, a chance to savor the wonder of a life well-lived. Rick Hamlin, executive editor of Guideposts magazine

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

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

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.

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.