The Fiancée and Other Stories

The Fiancée and Other Stories

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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Twelve stories deal with a young woman who decides to break with her smug fiance, a suicide inquest, a woman who murders her husband, a greedy merchant, a declining family of landowners, and a tactless host.


To the Stars and Other Stories

To the Stars and Other Stories

Author: Fyodor Sologub

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780231200059

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A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in "becoming" a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane. Renowned as one of late imperial Russia's finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub's stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub's "little fairy tales," ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and "incidents" of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso's elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.


Never Fall for Your Fiancee

Never Fall for Your Fiancee

Author: Virginia Heath

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1250787777

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"Filled with fabulously British banter, wit, and heart, this delightful book is one of my must-read rom coms of the year." - Evie Dunmore, USA Today bestselling author of Portrait of a Scotsman “Virginia Heath’s fun characters and situations will have you laughing out loud! Don’t miss this wonderful read!” - Sabrina Jeffries, New York Times bestselling author The first in a new historical rom-com series, a handsome earl hires a fake fiancée to keep his matchmaking mother at bay, but hilarity ensues when love threatens to complicate everything. The last thing Hugh Standish, Earl of Fareham, ever wants is a wife. Unfortunately for him, his mother is determined to find him one, even from across the other side of the ocean. So Hugh invents a fake fiancée to keep his mother’s matchmaking ways at bay. But when Hugh learns his interfering mother is on a ship bound for England, he realizes his complicated, convoluted but convenient ruse is about to implode. Until he collides with a beautiful woman, who might just be the miracle he needs. Minerva Merriwell has had to struggle to support herself and her two younger sisters ever since their feckless father abandoned them. Work as a woodcut engraver is few and far between, and the Merriwell sisters are nearly penniless. So when Hugh asks Minerva to pose as his fiancée while his mother is visiting, she knows that while the scheme sounds ludicrous, the offer is too good to pass up. Once Minerva and her sisters arrive at Hugh's estate, of course nothing goes according to his meticulous plan. As hilarity and miscommunication ensue while everyone tries to keep their tangled stories straight, Hugh and Minerva’s fake engagement starts to turn into a real romance. But can they trust each other when their relationship started with a lie? The first book in the Merriwell Sisters series, Never Fall for Your Fiancée is a hilarious, sparkling historical romantic comedy from Virginia Heath.


My Fake Fiancé

My Fake Fiancé

Author: Piper Rayne

Publisher: Piper Rayne, Inc.

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13:

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I never felt truly desired by a man—until him. The second he stepped foot into my small town Alaskan inn, his gaze swept over my curvy figure with desire, igniting a flame I thought was dead. He flirted with me, and I might’ve left two chocolates on his pillow at turndown, but that’s where it stayed. Over the years, he’s floated in and out of town while a friendship developed between us. It’s probably for the best because I’m not a one-night stand kind of woman. Which is funny because when he propositions me to be his fake fiancé in order to end a family feud, it turns out I am the kind of woman willing to pretend to be the one he’s in love with.


Vanishing and Other Stories

Vanishing and Other Stories

Author: Deborah Willis

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2010-08-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0062020277

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A French teacher who collects fiancés; a fortune-teller who fails to predict the heartbreak of her own daughter; an aging cowboy seduced by a city girl . . . these are some of the unforgettable people who live in these pages. In Vanishing and Other Stories, secrets are both kept and unearthed, and lives are shaped by missing lovers, parents, and children. With wisdom and dexterity, moments of dark humor, and a remark- able economy of words, Deborah Willis captures an incredible array of characters that linger in the imagination and prove that nothing is ever truly forgotten.


The American Fiancée

The American Fiancée

Author: Eric Dupont

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-02-11

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 006294746X

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In this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book. An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge.


The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories

The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories

Author: Kurahashi Yumiko

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-20

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1317478312

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This is an English-language anthology dedicated to the short stories of Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-), a Japanese novelist of profound intellectual powers. The eleven stories included in this volume suggest the breadth of the author's literary production, ranging from parodies of classical Japanese literature to cosmopolitan avant-garde works, from quasi-autobiography to science fiction. Her subversive fiction defies established definitions of "literature", "Japan", "modernity" and "femininity", and represents an important intellectual aspect of modern Japanese women's literature.


Make Believe Fiancé

Make Believe Fiancé

Author: Vivi Holt

Publisher: 8th Note Press

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1961795140

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The engagement is fake, but the feelings are real. Gwen Alder is starting over. Divorced and broke, she's come to Billings, Montana for a new beginning. But waitressing at a roadside diner for the summer isn't paying the bills. Heath Montgomery almost has it all—fame, fortune and a mega-watt smile. The one thing he's missing is a date for his cousin's wedding. When Gwen and Heath cross paths, Heath has an idea: what if he paid Gwen to be his date? No strings, no complications, just a simple transaction to get his parents off his back about settling down. When the wedding date ruse goes well, Heath asks Gwen to play his fiancé...for an entire weekend. They're nothing alike. To them, it's just a business arrangement. They definitely don't plan to fall for each other. But sometimes love has plans of its own. Explore all the books in Vivi Holt's Make Believe collection: Make Believe Proposal Make Believe Fiancé Make Believe Wedding Make Believe Honeymoon Make Believe Husband Make Believe Marriage


Marriage for One

Marriage for One

Author: Ella Maise

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-10-27

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1398521639

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The only way to secure her dream is to marry a handsome stranger . . . When Rose and Jack meet, she has just lost her uncle, and with him her dream of owning a coffee shop. Rose wanted nothing more than to open a café in her uncle’s building. But her uncle’s will is clear – the building goes to Rose’s husband. Not to her. Then, his lawyer, Jack, offers an unusual solution… she can marry him. She’ll get the café and he’ll get the building. For some reason, Rose agrees. It might be a marriage of convenience but it’s anything but simple. Despite it being his idea, Jack is unbearably surly... But then he does something that shows Rose he might just have a softer side. Maybe love can start with a contract… but will Rose still feel that way when she learns the full terms of their deal?