Marie Sandvik loved to preach, even as a child in Norway where she preached to sheep and imaginary people. In 1919, at the age of seventeen, she came to America to get an education, and worked her way through high school, college, and seminary. Her struggle against extreme poverty created in her a compassionate heart, and she vowed that someday she would help those who were penniless as she had been. In 1940, she converted a vacant skid row bar into a mission, moved in behind it, and ran it to help the poor, the homeless, and the hungry, and to bring God's word and love to them all. Four years later Marie was joined by Doris Nye, a young college graduate who was skilled in music and business administration. As a child, Doris daydreamed about growing up to help the poor. She learned compassion for those who were less fortunate as she accompanied her two aunts, who were medical doctors, on their rounds. Doris planned to become a missionary after she graduated from college, but circumstances put her in touch with Marie at the skid row mission. Doris quickly discovered that her calling was to work with Marie. The two women stayed together for the rest of Marie's life, and their work eventually received national acclaim.

From Elizabeth Stevens, writing as E.J. Knox, comes... A ruthless god. A sinful angel. A princess to come between them. My life is perfect. My life is planned. My life isn’t mine. Promised to a man I love. A man I hate. Not even a man. A god. Apollo Callahan is that and much more. My life is broken. My life is fractured. My life isn’t free. Craving a man I hate. A man I need. Not even a man. An angel. Valen Kincaid is nothing I could ever want. Though the Saints rule the hallowed halls of Saint Benedict’s College, they’re anything but saintly. Behind closed doors, they call themselves the Sinners. Sex. Fast Cars. Drugs. Money. The odd assassination or two. Nothing is beneath them, except the next in a long line of women. Can one little princess, searching to break free from her prison tower, bring these mighty lords crashing to their knees? The stunning first book in the Sinners of Saint Benedicts duet. This is a dark, angsty, contemporary high school enemies-to-lovers romance with enough steam to melt your screen. Do not engage in public consumption unless your poker face is impenetrable. Do not read if you don’t like broken alpha males claiming what’s theirs, a feisty heroine determined to break the bonds of an unwanted future, complicated love triangles full of passion and dirty words, or books with a choose your own ending (I know, I don’t like them either). This story features the heroine in sexual situations with both love interests. While not considered cheating by the characters, you may have different feelings. Proceed with caution. Contains possible triggers.

Tamora Pierce’s New York Times bestselling Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen are now available in one ebook bind-up. Aly is the teenage daughter of the famed Alanna, the first lady knight in Tortall. Unlike her mother, Aly’s passions lie not on the battlefield, but in the art of spying. Gifted with the skills of a master spy and granted the dubious blessing of a trickster god, she embarks on a most dangerous mission. Little does Aly know that her path is destined to tangle with an age-old prophecy and a deadly underground rebellion.

Pearl was the Artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre from 1983-1987. He toured internationally with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, danced independently, and with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Pearl also was Artistic Director of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1991-1992, and taught in the School for the next decade. He has also taught at the Martha Graham School, the Juilliard School, the Ailey School, and at the New York High School of Performing Arts.

This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the “splendid festive performance” of spectacular plays and operas given at absolutist courts in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Versailles, and Vienna between 1631 and 1668. Gods of Play fills voids in the scholarly literature on the seventeenth-century, on absolutism, on courtly theatricality, and on the philosophy of play. Aercke demonstrates that such splendid performances were not just frivolous entertainment for the courtly class but were serious activities with far-ranging political consequences.

Startling stories center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women in “a voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice)—from the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary “Wise, energetic, funny, and wild, Gods of Want displays a boundless imagination anchored by the weight of ancestors and history.”—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina and Woman of Light WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Them, Book Riot In “Auntland,” a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughters “Dog.” In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm chaser. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In “Mariela,” two girls explore one another’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark, while in “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in “Resident Aliens,” a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets. With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.