Destiny Can Be Dangerous A brief, fated moment at a wedding, and Cassie Cameron was hooked. She'd been unable to forget Dar Cordell, though months had passed. Who could explain it? She was surrounded by handsome, glamorous men every day, and yet somehow Dar had touched her soul…in a once-in-a-lifetime way. Meanwhile, someone was watching. Someone else had his eye on Cassie, and time was running out when fate cruelly chose to reunite her with Dar. Suddenly the obstacles they faced were greater than ever—their very lives were on the line. Would one moment of passion have to last them a lifetime?

"DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE AND THE SHENANDOAH MADE ME WANT TO STRAP ON MY HIKING BOOTS." -Charles Covington In 1965, life on the morning side of the Blue Ridge Mountains feels far away from world events. Jerry Fletcher and David Williams are seniors at Rappahannock High School, ready to graduate and get on with their lives. They are more concerned with the baggage they have inherited from their parents than Civil Rights or the Gulf of Tonkin.Jerry is the only son of a family evicted from the mountains to make way for Shenandoah National Park. His path seemed set by family history and the comfort he finds in the mountains, but fate and war will take him away from home.David is the eldest son of a local fundamentalist preacher. His future seemed set in the ministry, but experiences guide him down a path that differs from his father's expectations and he must reconcile his changing world view with the values he holds dear.Debut novelist James G. Brown has published articles on life in rural Virginia and books in the fields of agroindustry and rural development and lives in the shadow of the Blue Ridge."SO MUCH TO ENJOY IN THIS POWERFUL GENERATIONAL STORY" -Charles Burnell

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.

"Previously published as The decameron project."

In THE MORNING SIDE OF THE HILL, Ezra E. Fitz' debut novella, he asks readers: What if you anted up and kicked in everything you had on a belief, a hope, a dream, on faith, and you lost? This is one of the questions facing Willie and Mo, the two insecure, incomplete protagonists that was inspired by--and is an homage to--William Faulkner's classic novel, THE WILD PALMS. Like Faulkner's novel, it unfolds in two parallel stories told in alternating chapters that subtly illuminate one another. Set in Harlem and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, the twin tales gather like a storm to an exhilarating ferocity, culminating in a violent flood of passions that none of the characters can control, and which threatens to drown them all. Faulkner fans may think they know what the end holds for these characters, but rest assured, the finale of THE MORNING SIDE OF THE HILL exposes an unexpected coincidence that Faulkner may have hinted at but never fully explored.

The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian culture, marking a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the importance of this cultural moment, previous studies often reductively distort our reading of the formation of early twentieth-century lesbian identity, either by neglecting to examine in detail the developments leading up to the ban or by framing events in too broad a context against other cultural phenomena. Fashioning Sapphism locates the novelist Radclyffe Hall and other prominent lesbians--including the pioneer in women's policing, Mary Allen, the artist Gluck, and the writer Bryher--within English modernity through the multiple sites of law, sexology, fashion, and literary and visual representation, thus tracing the emergence of a modern English lesbian subculture in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on extensive new archival research, the book interrogates anew a range of myths long accepted without question (and still in circulation) concerning, to cite only a few, the extent of homophobia in the 1920s, the strategic deployment of sexology against sexual minorities, and the rigidity of certain cultural codes to denote lesbianism in public culture.

Following the tremendous success of her first book, a nonfiction work on housekeeping that became a surprise bestseller, Cheryl Mendelson brings to her debut novel the same intensely readable style that made Home Comforts so popular. In the spirit of Anthony Trollope, she roots her story very much in a specific time and place—1999, in an old-fashioned New York City neighborhood that’s becoming rapidly gentrified—and the enormously engaging result resembles a twentieth-century version of The Way We Live Now. Anne and Charles Braithwaite have spent their entire married life in a sedate old apartment building in Morningside Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood filled with intellectual, artistic souls like themselves, who thrive on the area’s abundant parks, cultural offferings, and reasonably priced real estate. The Braithwaites, musicians with several young children, are at the core of a circle of friends who make their living as writers, psychiatrists, and professors. But as the novel opens, their comfortable life is being threatened as a buoyant economy sends newly rich Wall Street types scurrying northward in search of good investments and more space. At the same time, the Braithwaites weather the difficult love lives of their friends, and all of the characters confront their fears that the institutions and social values that have until now provided them with meaning and stability—science, religion, the arts—are in increasing decline. Though the group clings to the rituals and promises of such institutions, the Braithwaites’ imminent departure sends shock waves through their community. As the family contemplates the impossible—a move to the suburbs—their predicament represents the end of a cultured kind of city life that middle-class families can no longer afford. This intelligent and captivating social chronicle is the first of a trilogy of novels about Morningside Heights; readers sure to be drawn in by Mendelson’s habit-forming prose have much more to look forward to.