Layla Hawthorne has spent most of her human existence hovering on the outskirts of the mortal and spiritual worlds. Things and entities only she could see were always explained away as a vivid imagination. Layla was ridiculed and isolated away in asylums to “cure” her and the instability gave way to blocking the connection to her family that never truly healed even after their untimely deaths. Layla always had a haunted feeling that gnawed at her for decades. A bundle of whispers, a fleeting shadow in the trees, little lights only she could see bouncing through flowers and a dream. One filled with ancient people in a village, a massive bonfire and him. A horned god with his hand held out to her, waiting for Layla to take it. The dream of him, his face obscured but Layla knew him down to her soul. A sudden death and a blessing of good fortune from a stranger has taken her out of the loud and busy city life into the quiet depths of an ancient forest and a house that she had always dreamed of having all her own. The moment her feet touched the forest floor, she knew it was no ordinary place. Creatures that were myths and what she saw as a child revealed themselves as Layla realized she was never crazy and she was finally home. One fateful evening brings her recurring dream crashing into her reality and the horned god himself. Cernunnos. A Celt God who brought with him the answers Layla sought for decades on where she came from and who she was meant to be. Their passion reignited has brought love back into Layla’s life and given her the chance to be everything she ever wanted. With those revelations comes the danger from an ancient enemy, Arawn the God of War who would do everything in his power to destroy them. He succeeded once before and will do anything to destroy them once and for all. As Layla struggles to control her once dormant powers and allow Cernunnos into her heart, the fates give them one final chance to save the world or risk it being destroyed by Arawn for all of eternity. Can they unite as one and bring down the most powerful war god in existence or are they doomed to be torn apart forever?

Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls (1853) is a book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. It is a re-writing of well-known Greek myths in a volume for children. The book includes the myths of: Theseus and the Minotaur (Chapter : "The Minotaur") Antaeus and the Pygmies (Chapter: "The Pygmies") Dragon's Teeth (Chapter: "The Dragon's Teeth") Circe's Palace (Chapter: "Circe's Palace") Proserpina, Ceres, Pluto, and the Pomegranate Seed (Chapter: "The Pomegranate Seed") Jason and the Golden Fleece (Chapter: "The Golden Fleece") Hawthorne wrote an introduction, titled "The Wayside", referring to The Wayside in Concord, where he lived from 1852 until his death. In the introduction, Hawthorne writes about a visit from his young friend Eustace Bright, who requested a sequel to A Wonder-Book, which impelled him to write the Tales. Although Hawthorne informs us in the introduction that these stories were also later retold by Cousin Eustace, the frame stories of A Wonder-Book have been abandoned. Hawthorne wrote the first book while renting a small cottage in the Berkshires, a vacation area for industrialists during the Gilded Age. The owner of the cottage, a railroad baron, renamed the cottage "Tanglewood" in honor of the book written there. Later, a nearby mansion was renamed Tanglewood, where outdoor classical concerts were held, which became a Berkshire summer tradition. Ironically, Hawthorne hated living in the Berkshires. The Tanglewood neighborhood of Houston was named after the book. The book was a favorite of Mary Catherine Farrington, the daughter of Tanglewood developer William Farrington. It reportedly inspired the name of the thickly wooded Tanglewood Island in the state of Washington.

This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find—an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single comprehensive volume. Everything is included from his three books of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837, revised 1851), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales (1851), and from his two books of stories for children based on classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853)—along with sixteen stories not found in any of these volumes. The stories are arranged, as they never have been in any other edition, in the order of their periodical publication. Readers of Hawthorne will thereby get a unique sense of how he became one of the most powerful and experimental writers of American fiction. Here are many familiar but always surprising works like “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield,” “The Birth-mark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Ethan Brand.” And here, too, are many others that deserve to be better known, like: • “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a suspenseful story of guilt and parricide; • “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” where the chances for human love are perilously suspended between the silken license of the revelers and the iron rectitude of the Puritans; • the masterly tale “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” full of the pains and terrors of national and familial separations, the severing of the ties of blood and culture that united the colonies to England; • and the exquisite little story “The Wives of the Dead,” about the ambiguities of love and loss, in which, as so often in Hawthorne, the reader at the end is left in a kind of awe at the multiple possibilities of meaning. To read these stories is to understand anew why Hawthorne is a great artist and an astonishingly contemporary one. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.