Delve in if you dare . . . This book is bursting with boggarts and sprinkled with spiteful marsh sprites; it groans with gruesome ghosts and is awash with wildmen. Full of fools, fiends, friendships and feuding families - there's something in here for every reader!

In his book Stories from the Old Yard: Book One, the Murders, J. M. Fitzmaurice chronicles two decades of brutal murder inside the MAX-custody federal penitentiaries at Lompoc, California, and other Bureau of Prisons facilities. From Lompoc to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Florence, Colorado, to Marion, Illinois, Fitzmaurice reveals the backstory behind the brutal killings carried out in medieval fashion by deadly prison gangs and ruthless predators on the federal penitentiary circuit. Interlaced with humanity, humor, and compassion, Stories from the Old Yard is much more than regurgitated investigative reports—it captures the courage and heroism of the young men and women who risk their lives daily to protect one another and Convict Nation alike! Some of these BOP staff gave their lives in this mission, and Fitzmaurice pays them the tribute they earned by making the ultimate sacrifice! The afterword includes a sneak peek from book two, More Stories from the Old Yard!

Whether imaginary or based on real events, stories are at the core of any culture. Regardless of their length, their rhetoric strategies, or their style, humans tell stories to each other to express their innermost fears and needs, to establish a point within an argument, or to engage their listeners in a fabricated composition. Stories can also serve other purposes, such as being used for entertainment, for education or for the preservation of certain cultural traits. Storytelling is at the heart of human interaction, and, as such, can foster a dialogic narrative between the person creating the story and their audience. In literature, this dialogue has been traditionally associated with narrative in general, and with the novel in particular. However, other genres also make use of storytelling, including drama. This volume explores the ways in which American theatre from all eras deals with this: how stories are told onstage, what kinds of stories are recorded in dramatic texts, and how previously neglected realities have gained attention through the American playwright’s telling, or retelling, of an event or action. The stories unfolded in American drama follow recent narratology theories, particularly in the sense that there is a greater preference for those so-called small stories over big stories. Despite the increase in the production of this type of texts and the growing interest in them in the field of narratology, small stories are literary episodes that have been granted less critical attention, particularly in the analysis of drama. As such, this volume fills a void in the study of the stories presented on the American stage.

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they’ve been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

The most complete collection of Glenn Blake’s luminous short fiction published to date. “I was born in a land of bayous, raised between rivers,” Glenn Blake writes. “There is a place in Southeast Texas where two rivers meet and become one. There is a long bridge over these waters, and as you drive across, you can look to the south and see where the Old River and the Lost River become the Old and the Lost. You can look out as far as you can see and watch this wide water become the bay.” These fourteen stories are set in the swamps, bayous, and sloughs of Southeast Texas, a region that is subsiding—sinking inches every year. The characters who inhabit Blake’s haunting landscape—awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives—struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.

As Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, Gashmu and the enemies of Israel mocked him: "It is reported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith it, that thou and the Jews think to rebel..." (Neh. 6:6). Too many Christians building communities today take the taunts of every modern-day Gashmu seriously. Community is a buzzword, and it turns out there's a lot of bad advice about how to build one. In Gashmu Saith It, Douglas Wilson includes forty years of experience for Christians wanting to build robust communities without retreat or compromise on the foundation of the Gospel. This book is full of wisdom: Get calluses. Be loyal. Fight sin. Build walls on the outside and a church in the middle.

Stories written in the late 19th century about six young children, orphaned by the Civil War, who come to live with their grandparents in rural Maine. 8-11 yrs.