Bringing a unique perspective and a singular voice to contemporary fiction, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA features lush, poignant stories about the natural world. Here are mammals, historical figures, everyday people who discover the liberating properties of memory and knowledge in the face of captivity and loneliness. We meet a forlorn tortoise forced to live among humans. We witness orcas at Ocean World staging a revolt, using celibacy as their weapon. In a French cave, a young computer animator draws parallels between Cro-Magnon and modern women. One story even travels to heaven, where Charles Darwin seeks the source of human happiness. Whitty joins her authority about wildlife and her rich imagination to spectacular effect. Drawing on twenty years' experience with making nature documentaries, she takes readers inside the minds of animals and people struggling to overcome their limitations. In a voice as magical as it is informed, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA bridges the mythical and the mundane, the animal and the human. Julia Whitty is a brilliant new storyteller in American short fiction.

*** Winner of the 2012 eFestival of Words award for best literary fiction! ***

Village Books is a local institution…which is good, because most of the staff probably belong in one.

The manager’s addiction to WebMD has turned him into a closeted hypochondriac. The cashier’s husband may have just gone AWOL with a small arsenal of fragmentary explosive devices. The fiction lead is buying urine on the black market. Trying to hold it all together is the store’s long-suffering assistant manager, who is spinning his wheels in retail while he waits for something better to come along.

That something better may be Leah Dashwood, an aspiring actress and new assistant manager with an ambitious plan to transform the store and its staff in a way that will turn their carefully disordered world on its head. Will the store survive or will it be bought over by its evil corporate competition?

“Precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao’s yet to appear in English translation.”—Kirkus Reviews

A collection of six exquisite short stories from Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. These beautifully translated stories take as their themes the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory.

In “The Temple,” the narrator’s acute and mysterious anxiety overshadows the delirious happiness of an outing with his new wife on their honeymoon. In “The Cramp” a man narrowly escapes drowning in the sea, only to find that no one even noticed his absence. In the title story the narrator attempts to relieve his homesickness only to find that he is lost in a labyrinth of childhood memories.

Everywhere in this collection are powerful psychological portraits of characters whose unarticulated hopes and fears betray the never-ending presence of the past in their present lives.

It was almost 4 months later that we got the call that our missing hunter had been found. Deceased. The first words out of the Operations Officer's mouth, after saying Sam was found, were "You are going to kick yourself."A volunteer search and rescue dog handler, Rebekkah has always put duty and responsibility first. She lives by the rules, believing that success means having a plan and not deviating from it. Dreams are things that happen at night and don't ever seem to come true for her. Things in Rebekkah's life are about to change, and she’s not really sure she’s ready for it. With her K-9 partners Ariel and Gus, Rebekkah faces decisions that could jeopardize their lives every time they deploy. As she responds to missing person searches through treacherous terrain, emotional battles and bitter disappointment, she finds that there is a fine line between success and failure; but that the search for life is definitely worth the risk.Sharolyn Sievert, a seasoned K-9 handler herself, takes the reader with her on fictional missions in K-9 SEARCH—One Handler’s Journey, weaving the laughter, fears, faith and tears of a life that isn’t sensational or sexy, and definitely not glamorous, but a heartwarming and genuine reflection of a SAR dog handler and her dogs.

"A totally modern work. Martha Quest is, above all, ironically percieved by the author in whose hands irony is an instrument of compassion." — New Republic

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.

A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.