Three friends from college set out to change the world but in very different ways. Their efforts put them at odds and Pastor Pat Preston is soon in danger of losing his freedom, family, and hope. Aided by the Alliance, a legal organization defending religious freedom, Pat and his former college classmate Matt Branson, must face off against a former friend who challenges everything Pat believes.Three friends say good-bye after graduation from Princeton. Each is bound by high ideals and a resolute ambition to change the world . . . but unable to anticipate the dramatic events that will bring them back together.Each Sunday, Pastor Pat Preston stands behind the pulpit of his Nashville megachurch, hoping to change the world by proclaiming biblical truth.Newly appointed U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Knox Smith is out to change the world one arrest at a time. He is determined to mandate equality and wipe out intolerance by criminalizing hate speech. And he will prosecute anyone who discriminates against the new legal classes of people he has helped create . . . even Pat Preston.Standing between them is their friend Matt Branson, who now works in the Justice Department.Aided by the Alliance, a legal organization dedicated to defending religious freedom, Pastor Pat fights to hold onto his faith, his family--and his mind.Can Pastor Pat and religious freedom survive this frightening world John Knox Smith is working to create?

I wrote this short story during the summer of 1992. It helped me flesh out a couple of characters in my first novel, The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer, which I was writing at the time. I wrote it one Saturday evening, and the next afternoon, I read it to a rather large writing class. Our instructor loved it, and the class, mostly women, gave it a loud round of applause, something unheard of.Brenda is sitting up in bed leaning against the headboard with the white sheet and pink quilt pulled to her neck. She's naked and has her right hand down between her legs and her left hand on her right nipple squeezing hard. She's also thinking hard about Norman Todd, so hard in fact sweat is breaking out on her forehead and in her armpits. Spit is filling her mouth so fast she has to keep swallowing to keep it from running down her chin. She's thinking of the future, on a fantasy date with Norman, and he's got her where she wants to be most, pinned on her back in the seat of his brand new '57 T-Bird. She's also thinking of the past, about losing her virginity two months ago with Thomas Powers in the grassy foothills just outside of town (wondering why it happened with him, he's such a jerk), and the steamy date she had with Melvin Swensen last night. She can't believe how delicious he was. Her problem is, she can hear her mother's high heels clicking rapidly on the hardwood floor down the hall toward her bedroom. Brenda hopes she can come before her mother does. And, she's wondering why her mother is wearing high heals. The reason Brenda's mother has hurried down the hall and is now turning the doorknob to Brenda's bedroom (Brenda is at this very second in the throes of ecstasy) has a lot to do with the reason she's wearing high heels. Her name is Ramona, and today she is forty. Just yesterday she was thinking that when she was born, her grandmother was forty, and she had always thought her grandmother was very old. Now Ramona is the same age her grandmother was then. That's bugging the shit out of her, even though she's not a grandmother, maybe in part because she is not a grandmother; maybe she could accept her age if she was a grandmother; but the fact is, she's not. She exists in this woman's no-woman's-land; she still feels young and vital, and she has never crossed over into that state of mind, that state of mental existence, that state of being old and knowing it, as she expected she would. She specifically does not mean a state of acceptance; no that is not what she means at all. When you are old, she thinks, it should be like you were always old. You shouldn't have to accept it. You're just that — old. Enough said. It is on you just like skin. You don't even have to think about it. Someone asking about your age should be like asking about your skin. "Do you have skin?" "Yes, I have skin, of course I have skin," you would reply. Just like that. No question about it. "Are you old?" "Of course I'm old. I'm forty. I've always been old. What a silly question." But it just isn't that way. That isn't the way she feels at all.So Ramona at her advanced age, and yet still feeling very young, put on her high heels this morning just after breakfast, after she fixed a breakfast of ham, eggs and toast...

Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States.         It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives--West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator's mistress--so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington.                         Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics.         "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal's best," said The New York Times Book Review.         With a new Introduction by the author. From the Hardcover edition.

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What started as an ordinary day would soon turn into an extraordinary life. Halloween night and all was well till that first Knock came. What do you do when your world turns upside down? Well if you are the hero type you fight back! If you are Clark Wilson you assume you are crazy and try to make the best of it. After all its not everyday you find out there are alternate reality's next door.This is a Young Adult Fantasy, set in the magical world of Ytir. Owain Brecca Morwenna is a young Tiraeg noble who has power over the element of Air. He has been captured by Turkic corsairs, and made to use his Talent in their service. Now he has the chance to escape, and return to his family - and finds that his troubles are only just beginning....His Uncle Ianto would prefer Owain to remain dead as part of his plot to become Morwenna of Ravenscar's heir - and what did happen to Cousin Peredur? And when Owain finally gets back to Ravenscar, will his mother Brecca accept him? He was deliberately crippled by the corsairs to stop him from running away, and will never be able to walk normally again - which disqualifies him from inheriting her lands, under Tiraeg law.

When the US and World economy finally crashed, small groups of people on the West Coast of America chose to take to the sea in Ocean kayaks instead of waiting in welfare lines. One night a shape shifting/teller of tales comes to their fire and tells them about a time in the distant future when there will be only one Wooden House remaining in the ancient city site of San Francisco.This book is a story told to the Children of The Sea, about 18 dolphins who are able to shape/shift in order to take a two hour tour of the last wooden house. For the duration of the tour they will get to see and feel what it was like to be a "human" and they will get to choose their sex and age. The story takes place a couple of thousand years in the future and humanity has become extinct. In the course of the "house tour", one of the human "looking" entities gets a surprise. He discovers a small bowl of one of the rarest things in the Universe: a bowl of human dreams.He quickly drinks the exotic cocktail and immediately forgets who he is or what he was thinking. The remainder of the book details "Harry's" search for his true identity. This book is sort of a mythic, but modern, fairy tale for anyone between 13 and 90.

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Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftain who is thrown into marriage with the man who will one day become the Roman emperor Constantius. Leaving home for lands unknown, she spends her adulthood seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining ancient world, and becomes initiated into Christianity just as it is recognized as the religion of the Roman Empire. Helena-a novel that Evelyn Waugh considered to be his favorite, and most ambitious, work-deftly traverses the forces of corruption, treachery, enlightenment, and political intrigue of Imperial Rome as it brings to life an inspiring heroine.

This collection of poems epitomizes the time of innocence before the Great War and after. The setting is bucolic, but underneath, tension bubbles as interlopers of various kinds threaten to change the old ways forever. Will strength bend change to its pleasure?EMPTY INSIDE is a collection of flash fiction and short stories of the drama genre. Here you will find the human existence magnified. Details delve into the pain and misery of life.Some parenting mistakes are permanent. A father analyzes his in “Torment of Guilt”.“Vanilla Dr. Pepper” is the favorite beverage of a middle-aged couple trying to determine their future.Every high school has that one person that everyone makes fun of. We all know “That Poor Girl.”

'Such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors' Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelganger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the pieces in this volume form a start contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing. Laura Kranzler's introduction discusses how Gaskell's tales, with their ghostly doublings and transgressive passions, show the Gothic underside of female identity, domestic relations and male authority. This edition also contains a chronology, further reading and explanatory notes.