NNELS Upgrade

The stories in this collection are unifed by a sense of dislocation. In each of the pieces, there is an underlying element of disturbance and disharmony. Resolution threads its way through the narratives while the characters struggle to navigate conscious choices and come to terms with new realities. A perspective that views the complexity of life journeys as a manifestation of intentional decisions, circumstances beyond one’s control, and the need to reflect upon the combination of both in order to become fully realized, drives the narrative voices.

The interrelated stories of this pseudo-memoir introduce readers to Barbara Klein Muskrat, a successful author of fiction and freelance book reviewer. Spanning some thirty years in her personal and professional life, Barbara irreverently acquaints readers with her challenges related to her schizophrenic literary career, divided between writing fiction and reviewing it.

This collection presents an arc of historical experience of Jewish child and teen life during the Shoah. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the young and hunted in these stories hide in forests; survive in ghettoes and camps; and assume new identities. The stories in this collection depict children as creative, resilient, aged-before their time, as they adapt to their unconscionable reality.

When Elizabeth Thiessen embarks on an expedition to study the cave murals of Baja California, Mexico, she is catapulted onto a mythical, existential journey into the unknown. Within days of landing in the Baja, Elizabeth discovers that her daughter, Patricia—posted in Afghanistan with the Canadian armed forces—is taken hostage by the Taliban. Elizabeth struggles with her decision to remain on assignment, her extreme anxiety over her daughter’s kidnapping, and the recollections it prompts of her conflicted relationship with her father, a Holocaust survivor.

Three women, three countries, three stories—the destinies of a Thai in prison for murdering her husband, a Cambodian longing for a child, and a Laotian Hmong refugee are threaded together by the tears leftover from the Vietnam War.

Mehri Yalfani’s stories in The Street of Butterflies feature Iranian women dealing with displacement, cultural change, and struggles for survival and adaptation as immigrants in North America. At the same time, the challenges they face also reveal the racial, gendered and cultural anxieties of these same individuals who carry with them the biases of their country of origin to the norms of the new land. “Soleiman’s Silence,” “Felicia,” “If You Were I,” “Geranium Family,” and “Line,” all portray many dimensions of the migrant’s strive (or the refusal) to build a home, away from home.

One Day It Happens is an eclectic collection of short stories by Mary Lou Dickinson, which deal in myriad forms with communication or lack thereof in the lives of the characters. One of the universal factors in human existence is the need to connect with one another. When these characters fail to do so, it is the result of fear, of loneliness, of violence, of impending death. Sometimes they succeed in spite of everything to reach a place of insight and understanding, usually in unexpected ways and to their own surprise.

Why do we keep secrets and why do we confess them? The nine tales in this collection, all told in the first person, are each spun around a well-kept secret, willingly or inadvertently confessed. Sometimes the secrets are at the core of the narrator’s life, other times they appear tangential. Regardless of the magnitude of its burden, the confession finds its way to the reader, through a story told perhaps over a cup of tea, in the pages of a journal or within the intimacy of the narrator’s mind.

In Communion, a recovering alcoholic and her estranged daughter try to negotiate a new relationship in spite of vastly different lifestyles; Was Spring tells the story of three women who suffered a tragic accident years ago; and Small Things explores how the little differences keep us from understanding each other.

In real and personal stories, these women share their personal stories of triumphs, tragedies, and life's funny moments, while challenging the reader to look beneath the surface of how society views women, especially as they age.Body & Soul was commissioned by Dove as a way to demonstrate that beauty has no age limit.