The family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job. Ramona Quimby is a character intimately known by Beverly Cleary readers. In this story of Ramona's year in second grade they will come to know Mr. Quimby equally well. As it opens he loses his job without warning, and Ramona's seven-year-old view of this all-too-frequently family crisis rings every change of mood from tears to laughter. Not...

Jack Riggs has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Contest, and has been published in many literary journals. Lyrical yet disturbing, When the Finch Rises is a journey into the shadowlands of childhood. Twelve-year-old Raybert Williams and Palmer Conroy are best friends. But when Palmer shows Raybert an old photograph, it will color forever how Raybert sees his world.

Living in the family car in their small North Carolina town after their father leaves them virtually penniless, Georgina, desperate to improve their situation and unwilling to accept her overworked mother's calls for patience, persuades her younger brother to help her in an elaborate scheme to get money by stealing a dog and then claiming the reward that the owners are bound to offer.

"Just before Danny Cadogan's fourteenth birthday, his father leaves. Having drunkenly run up a gambling debt he cannot pay, Big Dan Cadogan takes the easy way out and abandons his wife and children to face the wrath of the men sent to settle the score. Determined to protect his mother, brother, and sister, Danny turns into a young man set on makiing his way in a violent and dangerous world. He becomes a Face. And not just a Face, but the most feared...

It is a moment in the near future when the threat of terror has cultivated rage, apathy, and panic across the country. For Phil, a dermatologist at the UCLA hospital, it is a time of unease, in contrast to the days when he coasted through life on his good looks and middling charm. In addition to having to deal with his mother, Edith, who's emerging after years of grieving over her late husband, Phil has been recruited for a secret terror-response...

The author reveals how, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a spiritual awakening led her to sobriety.

Gilbert lives in Endora, a place where nothing happens. Aside from a secret affair with a housewife, Gilbert spends his days stocking shelves at a grocery store, caring for his mentally handicapped brother, and holding together a large family headed by Mama, a former beauty queen whose weight tops 500 pounds. But just when Gilbert thinks nothing will ever change, a pretty stranger arrives on the scene, capturing Gilbert's heart and inspiring him to...