Everybody wants a christening, wedding or funeral service to be unique to them and one of the main ways of personalising a ceremony is to choose one's own readings. Not everyone reads poetry or novels together and many do not know where to start in choosing a special piece. Here, an experienced editor of such books has collected together 100 readings from scripture and literature across the centuries in celebration of a birth, a marriage, a life that has ended. There is humour, tenderness, challenge, wisdom and realism in abundance, offering, quite literally, something for everyone.

Contributions by Anita DeRouen, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, W. Ralph Eubanks, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Bernard T. Joy, John Wharton Lowe, Anne MacMaster, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and Ryoichi Yamane Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections—or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences—across texts, authors, identities, and traditions. In the collection, contributors discuss Faulkner’s Light in August; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; “A Rose for Emily”; and “That Evening Sun”; Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings; One Time, One Place; The Optimist’s Daughter; Losing Battles; “Why I Live at the P.O.”; “Livvie”; “Moon Lake”; “The Burning”; “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”; and “The Demonstrators”; and Wright’s Native Son; The Long Dream; 12 Million Black Voices; Black Boy; Lawd Today!; “The Man Who Lived Underground”; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”; and “Long Black Song.” Acknowledging that Mississippi ground was never level for any of the three writers, the fourteen essays in this volume turn from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "A gripping page-turner...a riveting reminder of sacrifices made by history's most unlikely heroes." —Kristina McMorris, New York Times bestselling author of Sold on a Monday and The Ways We Hide An extraordinary book about a gifted architect who reluctantly begins a secret life of resistance, devising ingenious hiding places for Jews in World War II Paris. In 1942 Paris, architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money – and maybe get him killed. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won't find it while World War II rages on. He sorely needs the money, and outwitting the Nazis who have occupied his beloved city is a challenge he can't resist. Soon Lucien is hiding more souls and saving lives. But when one of his hideouts fails horribly, and the problem of where to conceal a Jew becomes much more personal, and he can no longer ignore what's at stake. Book clubs will pore over the questions Charles Belfoure raises about justice, resistance, and just how far we'll go to make things right. Also by Charles Belfoure: The Fallen Architect House of Thieves

"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century" Observer The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín use an old story of the old man married to the young wife to expose the social attitudes of a traditional Spain bound by rigid concepts of decency, reputation and honour. The Puppet Play deploys the puppets' uninhibited and passionate emotions as a direct attack on the 'tedious triviality' of commercial theatre. The Butterfly's Evil Spell explores the themes of love and frustration, while When Five Years Pass is a surrealist play with references to the film Un Chien Andalou [The Andalusian Dog] by Lorca's friend and collaborator, Luis Buñuel.

After her untimely death, eighteen-year-old Shari tries to prove that she did not commit suicide and attempts to keep the person responsible from killing again.