Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place.

In a small, secluded town that thrives on gossip and superstition, Dottie offers plenty of both when the scandal breaks about a missing girl, a ghost, and the affair that started it all. Having suffered a history of miscarriages, reclusive Dottie develops a strange motherly interest in her fifteen-year-old neighbor, Magdalena. Somewhere between fantasy and reality, Dottie finds new life in her relationship with the mysterious girl.

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Biography of a Body is a lyrical meander through the development of a messy, flawed, imperfect human and what it means to live in a society that both pulls a person into itself and fiercely pushes back. In personal essays and snippets of verse that shift back and forth through time and place, Lizz Schumer fidgets with the puzzle pieces of a life that are at once starkly unique and glaringly obvious. This is less a narrative than a trail of breadcrumbs through an experience, where strange things whisper from the shadows and draw the listener into the dappled darkness.

Theatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending.

Generous Press is a new kind of romance imprint. Someplace Generous—a vibrantly diverse and inclusive anthology of romantic short stories—can be described in one word: yes. Featuring stories by award-winning poets like Richard Siken, Rachel McKibbens, and Brionne Janae; acclaimed fiction writers like Temim Fruchter, Corinne Manning, and Max Delsohn; and popular thinkers like Jessica P. Pryde, Someplace Generous presents voices largely new to the genre of romance, each bringing a fresh take on what it means to tell a love story.

Inspired by the explosive events of our polarized political climate, Burner is an all-too plausible contemporary thriller that examines the social and personal consequences of the lost sense of identity, trust, and truth itself that characterizes our technology-obsessed culture.

Becca's life is turned upside down when she finds Jenn dead in the bathtub. Soon she begins to unspool the secrets Jenn kept in life, including a troubled marriage to Rick and two dead wives in his past. The more Becca learns, the more determined she becomes to get justice for Jenn, even if the clues surrounding her death aren't quite adding up . . . Over a year before her death, Jenn begins to notice her husband acting strangely. Using her skills as a librarian, she digs into Rick's past—and falls down a rabbit hole far deeper and darker than she bargained for.

Don't You Dare is a compelling story that weaves together a current-day journey of discovery and a true-life love story between two women that took place over a hundred years ago. Newspaper headlines and stories back then didn't mention LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ community loved and lived in the background of society because it was too dangerous to do otherwise. All were hidden, just like the wedding photos belonging to author Gayla Turner's grandmother–Ruby.

Owen falls ill with food poisoning, leaving Julie to attend a neighborhood holiday party alone. When she wakes up, half-naked in her neighbor's bathtub, Julie doesn't know how to tell Owen, the police, her friends—anyone—that she has been sexually assaulted. So she keeps it secret until she realizes that she's pregnant with her assailant's baby.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

Longtime bachelor Ron Burley has a rule against messing around with married women in his rural upstate New York town, but sassy, lovely Lavender has convinced him to break it. Their steamy affair sets someone off, but it isn't Lavender's clueless husband—it's Marta, Burley's clingy childhood friend and ex-lover.