Issue #106 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Nancy Fulda and Nicole M. Taylor.

The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s EnglandIn a home overlooking London's Regent's Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora stayed in academia and became a successful classicist, able to observe both the breadth of history and the lives of others with brilliant, cool detachment. Together, they face the sacrifices they have made as women and intellectuals.First performed in London in 1962 and later in Scandinavia, where it was produced by Ingmar Bergman, Doctors of Philosophy is a fascinating artifact of early second-wave feminism.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from...

Manna is the life-blood of the world. It flows through everything, touches all, infusing life with its azure glow. Demons, and evil in the hearts of men, can cause this energy to become twisted, corrupted, and drain the life of the world itself. The power of the raw manna, whether pure or corrupted, is toxic to the touch. It causes normal men to go insane, or die screaming. Only the Arbiters may interact with the manna without fear, for they are protected from its deadly light by ancient, near-forgotten sorceries, and intense training which begins at birth. When Arbiter D’Arden Tal is assigned to investigate the city of Calessa, he finds that it has been nearly overrun by the horrors of the corrupted manna. Wielding his crystalline sword, D’Arden must find the root of the city’s deadly spiritual disease before it consumes more innocent life. D’Arden must cleanse the dying city before the evil overwhelms him, and consumes the meager remains of innocent life within Calessa’s walls...

Solip:System begins shortly before the ending of Hardwired and continues beyond that point. In Solip:System, the main character is the computer personality Reno (a minor character in Hardwired). The author intended that this book would provide a link between Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind.

From the author of the best-selling Burke novels, the sequel to Aftershock: the second installment of his thrilling new series in which Dell, an ex-mercenary, and Dolly, a former battlefield nurse, lead us deep into the ugly underbelly of a seemingly idyllic Pacific Northwest coastal town.Just before daybreak, a body washes up on a pristine beach. The dead man's skull has been bashed open, and his upper body is covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. An anonymous photographer e-mails an image of the scene to the local news, spurring the police to instantaneous response. Searching for suspects at one of the town's "homeless-by-choice" encampments, the cops pick up Homer, a "walking wounded" schizophrenic, who has been showing off a wristwatch he says God gave him. The watch is engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man's tattoos. Even though Homer could never have inflicted such damage on a man twice his weight and half his age, he is immediately...

“I’m as peaceful a man as you’re likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can’t say it’s haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try...." A summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, the deceptively tranquil 1950s, a classic semicomic cast and setting (teachers, swarms of rowdy boys, crafts, Indian lore, campfires), the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher and one superbly gifted boy, haunted by a tragic past yet calmly heroic. All advance through splendid weather, natural grandeur and riotous fun toward a startling fate that none will forget. In his eighth novel, Reynolds Price provides again the kind of voice that won his readers in Kate Vaiden, winner of the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. A sane adult looks back at his life, finds and gives us the interesting facts, the meanings he thought he learned for good on the threshold of manhood and how they look now, in full maturity. The Tongues of Angels is intimate, enveloping, relentless and rich. Any veteran of summer camp, boys’ or girls’, will hear deep echoes, recalling the buried forecasts of youth. Any reader stands to gain throughout.

For readers of The Paris Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue comes a love story inspired by "one of the most intriguing relationships in history"*—between Eleanor Roosevelt and "first friend" Lorena Hickok. Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR's own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she...

In 1812 the quiet Missouri plains were split by an earthquake so powerful, it rang church bells in Boston. Two centuries later, almost no one in the Midwest knows the history of the New Madrid fault line. And no one knows that another quake is coming, a quake so massive it will kill tens of thousands, destroy cities, change the course of the Mississippi River itself. The first quake is the worst. reducing the central United States to the Stone Age. Then the fault line shakes again. And again. Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that’s sure to grab fans of such recent screen shockers as Deep Impact and Armageddon .

Forget Netflix and chill…campfire and thrill. The second book set in the Camp Firefly Falls world with stories so hot, you can roast marshmallows on your ereader.Meet Miguel Castillo and Seraphina Worth. Two advertising office enemies sent to a corporate retreat at a sleep-away summer camp to work our their differences. With strict orders to come back with whatever trophies and ribbons are awarded for best team or come back unemployed, they are stunned to find out their boss sent them the to wrong camp session. Instead of corporate team building, they are signed up for Rediscover Your Marital Intimacy week. She thinks he’s unpredictable, unreliable, and unstable. He thinks she’s stuffy, stilted, and square. They can barely work together and now they have to pretend to be married for a week at summer camp—sharing a cabin with one bed, doing tantric yoga, and thwarting the advances of a couple interested in a wife swap. Trouble is, the one thing they both excel at is marketing. And the more they sell themselves as the perfect married couple, the harder it to remember it’s an ad campaign and not a love match. 

A collection of darkly compelling tales from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates.A young professor is convinced she's being followed, but when she confronts her shadow events take an unexpected turn...A promising student attempts to save her brother from his descent into madness, but she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers...A renowned author embarks on a grand tour of Europe, but soon his bad manners threaten to cost him more than he has to give...These biting and beautiful stories force us to confront, one by one, the demons within.