Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Literary Fiction

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait, possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives.

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them.

In a style reminiscent of John Cheever and Alice Munro, Michael Nye's second collection of stories, Until We Have Faces, contends with transfixing themes: marital and familial estrangement, ways of trespass, the intractable mysteries and frights of modern life, the uncertainty of knowledge and truth, the gulfs between people and the technology we use, the frailty of our economic lives - while underlining throughout the persistency of love. His consummate skill, penetrating wit, and unfailing emotional generosity are on full display in this fine new collection.

Between spending Valentine’s Day with her sweetheart Sam and shopping upcoming Presidents’ Day sales with the Good Buy Girls, everything is coming up roses and bargains for Maggie Gerber. But then the mother of Maggie’s nemesis comes to town, hoping to set her spoiled daughter up with Sam. When Maggie heads to her romantic rival’s house to put a stop to the scheming, she discovers Summer standing over a dead body - holding a weapon. As much as Maggie would love to see Summer get her just desserts, she can’t shake the feeling that the meddling menace is, in fact, innocent.

In the seaside town of San Benedetto, soccer (or calcio) is more than just a sport: it's an obsession. Twenty-two-year-old Etto, however, couldn't care less about soccer. His twin brother Luca, a rising soccer star, died tragically in a motorcycle accident, and their mother, unable to cope with her grief, drowned herself on the anniversary of Luca's death.

Experience the height of the Jazz Age through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most notable authors in American literature. This collection includes: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby.

In her first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys, which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet explores what it means to be home. Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting fractured communities and families. She moves through the houses of L.A.'s wealthy and elite and finds men and women both crass and tender, vicious, and desperate.

Considered to be one of Virginia Woolf's most popular novels, Mrs. Dalloway follows one high-society woman as she goes about her day planning a splendid party for her acquaintances. As she goes about her day, she ponders on the life she could be living had she not married the reliable Richard Dalloway and instead sought the enigmatic Peter Walsh. At one point, she muses on the fact that she had not the option to be with a close female friend of hers. The novel then takes a turn to follow Septimus Smith, First World War veteran plagued with deferred traumatic stress.

An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character - vibrant and post-apocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin, she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn't believe him, the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found, the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation, and more.

When Clara Winter left her rural Adirondack Mountain town for college, she never looked back. Her mother, Tamar, a fiercely independent but loving woman who raised Clara on her own, all but pushed her out the door, forcing Clara to build a new life for herself, far from her roots, far from her high-school boyfriend, and far from the life she had known. Now more than a decade has passed, and Clara, a successful writer, has been summoned home.

When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife's world in ways she never could have imagined. This double-edged and satisfying story features a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic. Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters.

When Maya Taylor, an English professor with a tendency to hide in her books, sends her daughter to Florida to look after a friend's child, she does so with the best of intentions; it's a chance for Ellie, 20 and spiraling, to rebuild her life. But Ellie fears she'll only disappoint again, and in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, she makes a mistake that she can't take back.

Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters - Natasha, Lucy, and Carly - as best they can. With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut author Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family.

The year is 1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries Mason McPhee. But nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws, Gin's life has become the stuff of fairy tales. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, Gin's world closes in around her.

Randy Chalmers has to admit he'd be dead or in prison were it not for Terry Elias. Thanks to Terry's coaching – and an endless stream of AA meetings – Randy's been off the booze for eight years, has a successful new career, and is thriving in a healthy relationship. All is well…until Terry is found dead of a heroin overdose. Convinced that something (or someone) must have pushed him, Randy is soon off on a dry-drunk quest for answers.

When Rachel sets off, alone, for her mother's isolated country house, she promises herself that the business of packing up and selling will only take a couple of weeks, and then she'll be home again, back to normal. But, from the moment she steps through the front door, Rachel feels that the house contains more than she had expected: along with the memories of her mother, there is something else, a presence - not quite tangible - trying to make itself felt.

One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll only to wake up the next morning stoned and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run - only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused.

On Bittersweet Place is the powerful coming-of-age story of Lena Czernitski, a young Russian Jew whose family flees their homeland in the Ukraine after the October Revolution. The story unfolds in Chicago during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, where Lena's impoverished family has settled and where she must traverse the early years of adolescence. Lena's new world is large and beautiful and full of promise, but it is also cold and unwelcoming and laden with danger.

Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband Wayne beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear - the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly.