In 1880, college Professor John O’Connell arrives in Bozeman, Montana. He meets seemingly shy Grace Morgan but discovers this 'Penny Dreadful' writer is also a gambler and is anything but proper. For Grace, gambling is a way to make a living, if one were good at it, which she was. With most of her family gone, except for her aunt and fourteen-year-old brother, she wants a better life than they’d had. Publisher Note: This story appears, also, in the Western Ways Anthology.
Gentry presents two intertwined tales of Native American warriors on opposite sides of the Civil War who find their loyalties tested and their lives forever altered by rapturous love for two courageous women. Original.
Rye Tyler was twelve when his father was killed in an Indian raid. Taken in by a mysterious stranger with a taste for books and an instinct for survival, Rye is schooled in the hard lessons of life in the West. But after killing a man, he is forced to leave his new home. He rides lonely mountain passes and works on dusty cattle drives until he finds a job breaking horses. Then he meets Liza Hetrick, and in her eyes he sees his future. After establishing himself as marshal of Alta, he returns, only to discover that Liza has been kidnapped. Tracking her to Robbers’ Roost, Rye is forced to face the man who taught him all he knows about books, guns, and friendship. Two old friends—one woman: Who will walk away?
Enjoy this enemies to lovers Western historical from USA Today Bestselling Author Sylvia McDaniel Gambling on the Wild Woman Fannie Trippe is every mother’s nightmare. A wild child who refuses to obey the rules of conventional society—like women don’t gamble. Until the night her full house beats the mine owner’s three of a kind. Did she win or lose when she drew his attention? Walter Hersey watches the spirited young woman take everyone’s cash while rejecting the men who flirt outrageously. Struggling to raise his motherless twins, could this spunky woman gambler tame his ruffian children? With Fannie’s mother’s help, he plots to ensnare her and bend her to his will. Is he the one to tame Fannie’s wild ways? Or will the schemer soon find himself in a trap of his own making? Fans of Cynthia Wright, Jenna Kernan and Linda Lael Miller, check out these wild debutantes.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY “Feminism, history, literature, politics—this tale has all of that, and a heroine worthy of her own turn in the spotlight.” —Therese Anne Fowler, bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and became a pioneer in Russian literary history In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described “girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky—a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist—had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer “terribly unhappy, broken, tormented,” weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Alarmed by his condition, Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager—launching one of literature’s most turbulent and fascinating marriages. The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist’s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters—her husband’s and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna protected her family from creditors, demanding in-laws, and her greatest romantic rival, through years of penury and exile. We watch as she navigates the writer’s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe—even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself—until his addiction is conquered. And, finally, we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory contracts by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history. The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia—and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.
Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions. Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler. Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.
Her innocence destroyed, young widow Tally Bernard swore that she would never trust a man again. But when her brother disappears, she has little choice but to make a pact with the devil. Though he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life on a ranch of his own, Simeon Kavanaugh can’t escape the legacy of his werewolf father. The animal instincts that keep him from being fully human also make him a brilliant tracker, forced to survive on the desperation of people in need. The attraction between these two wounded souls is immediate, primal—and dangerous. And if Simeon has any hope of saving Tally, he must do what he has always resisted and merge both man and beast within him. But if she cannot accept what he becomes, his choice may cost Simeon the only thing worth having—Tally’s love....
Dark, dangerous Jordan Kyle lived life on his own terms, setting his own rules and playing for high stakes. He'd moved through this world alone, and was satisfied to have it that way—until he encountered Alyssa Chandler. By day Alyssa was a cool, controlled mathematical whiz, sorting through facts and figures. By night it was a different story. At night she became a creature of beauty and passion who was more than a match for Jordan. But were Jordan's seductive caresses enough for Alyssa to take a chance on a future together? Only time would tell…
