Owen Thomas

This is the Dream, ten stories less about dreaming than not dreaming. Ten stories about pulling free the gossamer mask of illusion and seeing the face of what has been true - about ourselves, about the people we choose to love, and about our path through the woods - from the very beginning. JOHN. The bus driver whose lunchtime encounter with Andromeda reunites him with the one person he has spent a lifetime choosing to avoid. ("Everything Stops"). WYATT. The Appalachian who wakes from a dream that his wife has been abducted by aliens to find that she has gone missing and wishing the explanation could be so benign. ("Little Green Men"). RUTH. The chocolate-quality inspector whose compartmentalized solitude threatens complete suffocation until a renowned romance novelist reveals the paper-thin wall that separates despair and hope. ("Paper Walls"). KATHY. The identical twin, so desperate to be original that she sacrifices her authenticity to a stranger on a plane, lying herself a new identity without any thought to the consequences. ("Failure to Thrive - Act One: Flying and Lying"). KATJA and JUNE. The novelist and the reporter, bound by history, separated by an ocean, and united in a struggle to reconcile their own hearts one letter at a time. ("Failure to Thrive - Act Two: Katja and June"). K. P. SORENSON. The convention speaker with a renewed hope of becoming a literary demiurge, looking for validation from an audience of would-be fans, but finding instead the very last man she expects and the only woman who can separate fact from fiction. ("Failure to Thrive - Act Three: The Birds"). DANNY. The laid-off, newly separated factory worker whose life is in such dramatic contrast to that of his next-door neighbor, and George Clooney, that robbing a convenience store seems like his best option. ("Hating George Clooney"). PETER. The teenager who, forced to spend Christmas in Hawaii with his younger sister, his parents, and the friends of his father not seen since college, discovers that reality is only a state of mind. ("Island Santa"). ZOE. The Hollywood intern, working on a movie about a superhero with random powers, managing a telephone relationship with an anonymous criminal, and excavating the secret structure of creation. ("Random Man"). CALI. The high school loner whose dreams of a dead classmate lead her to the razor's edge between living and not living. ("This is the Dream").

What if your childhood harbored a dire warning about your future? What if your life and the lives of dozens of others, including your future child, depended on you deciphering that warning before it is too late? Mother Blues is about the maternal relationships we never knew existed, the evil we never expect, and the redemption we never think possible. Subversively feminist and environmental, this is a novel about mothers: those we have loved and lost, those we have never known, and those who have always been there for us whether we have realized it or not. And while this is not a novel about blues music, the blues is everywhere in this story, both grounding it in history and pushing it forward in a slow, rhythmic ache. As Hurricane Harvey submerges Houston, Davis Payne escapes to the small desert town of Corbin, Texas. He is escaping much more than a 100-year flood. He is escaping a life of guilt and a childhood haunted by death. When Davis was ten, his mother drowned saving him from a boating accident. Years later, his first love burned to death before he could reach her. Davis has no idea of any supernatural connection between these tragedies. He knows only that if he does not leave Houston and stop drinking, he will not live to see his late thirties. But, of course, there is no starting over; there is only another step deeper into reckoning. Davis soon finds his life inextricably tangled with the lives of others fighting to keep their own heads above water. For Corbin, Texas is not the quiet refuge Davis expects. Beneath its dry, dusty surface Davis finds a town rife with terrible secrets, restless legacies of love and heartbreak, and life-and-death dramas that rival his own. Olivia DeLuna, for instance, is a beautifully bi-racial loner with a tragic past that she keeps rigorously to herself. Working a collection of low-paying jobs, Olivia lives in a brothel masquerading as a pecan farm called Libby's Nuts. Its proprietor, Libby Holder, is a colorful, hysterically irreverent madam known after dark as Liberty Cherish, a woman rumored throughout Corbin to have long ago murdered her husband and fed his privates to the coyotes. Parentless from childhood, Olivia's only goal in life is to own a blues club known in its heyday as Mother Blues. There are others in Corbin whose stories Davis must make his own: a haunted, childless schoolteacher risking incarceration for murder in order to save a troubled student she is determined to adopt; a former Louisiana prostitute who, having heroically raised and died for her adopted Asian daughter, is ultimately avenged when the girl marries her mother's killer and exploits the opportunity; and a world-renowned blues diva who unwittingly trades her only daughter for commercial success and who, until her final days, spends the rest of her life desperate for a chance to atone. Filling the background of these various dramas, is the rapidly unfolding drama of Corbin: a tiny town teetering on the precipice of momentous change. A plan is afoot to transform Corbin with a commercial river walk fed from an engineered diversion of the Pecos River. Except for environmentalists fighting to preserve the habitat of a tiny minnow species, most of Texas is rabidly in favor of the project. Unfortunately, no one realizes that the Corbin River Walk is but a well-conceived, brilliantly executed and violently defended fraud perpetrated by the Russian mob. If there is one maternal presence that binds together the characters of this novel, living and dead, it is the blues itself. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, Mahalia Jackson, and all the timeless mothers to that quintessentially American genre are here, a soulful Greek chorus singing from the shadows, warning and imploring, offering hope, and bearing witness to lives adrift and in danger of capsizing.

What convinces us that we have been wrong about the world? When do we know that the usual ways are no longer working; that it is time to set down one life and pick up another? Winner of the Pacific Book Award for short fiction, Signs of Passing presents ten stories told from the nearside of epiphany, less a time or place than a state of mind in which one can hear the voice calling from beyond the veil of conscious understanding and singing of how life can be better: -A young boy, abandoned by divorce, discovers something inexplicable happening in the two-dimensional world of Winchester County, his favorite TV western;-A waitress at a bar called The Office, so alienated from the tedium of her own existence she no longer feels any fear walking home at night in the dark when perhaps she should;-A crime detective novelist so beset by writer's block that he attends the funerals of strangers in hopes of gleaning some advice from the dead, unaware that he is being followed;-A young and secretly talented widow struck by the revelation that her late husband was not the man she thought she had married;-A homeless, rural bus driver forced to confront the possibility that the dreams keeping him alive have been too small for him and that it is better to embrace peril in risking everything for a better life than to live safely in a prison of the familiar;-A squared-away child psychiatrist forced to confront the reality that one of his immature patients and an erotic dancer know more than he does about the fraud of his own existence and the excruciating secret to happiness;-An assistant veterinarian for a small-town zoo who, unbeknownst to her undeniably perfect husband, has taken to following random strangers around the city as a way of escaping both her guilt and her contentment;-A young photojournalist surrendering herself to the control of a brutish and degenerate winemaker, all to exorcise a past that will not let her go and that holds all love at bay;-A shopping mall employee whose enmity for a local television meteorologist is rewarded with an unlikely opportunity for revenge; and-An entertainment media mogul, stricken with sudden news of cancer as he battles in court to retain the rights to remake an old television western about a better life in Winchester County. A collection of separate stories about interconnected characters, Signs of Passing is devoted to the experience of waking up-of recognizing the better life in all of its unlikely disguises-and then summoning the courage to leave everything else behind, and to give chase before it's too late.

Offers a collection of articles from young academics who delivered papers to a seminar, entitled Llenyddiaeth Mewn Theori held at the University of Wales Lampeter in April 2005. This volume presents an assessment of Welsh literature from many historical periods and highlights the political questions of modern Wales.

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For generations, conventional wisdom stated that you could never sell a book with 'penis' in the title - until Quirk's "Penis Pokey" shattered all of the rules, racking up 100,000 in net sales in just 18 months. In this same tradition comes "How to Live with a Huge Penis" - a gift every man will cherish, regardless of whether or not he actually needs it. Frankly, it's enough for someone to think he needs it. This hilarious self-help parody is full of compassionate advice for men afflicted with Oversized Male Genitalia (OMG). Far too often, these men are banished to the fringes of society, victims of their own freakish length and girth. But Dr. Richard Jacob and Rev. Owen Thomas are here with a message of tolerance and hope, along with hilarious advice on 'coming out' to your family, sharing your assets with a partner, and avoiding injury in the workplace. Complete with a daily affirmations journal and inspiring quotes from leading self-help experts, "How to Live with a Huge Penis" will send an uplifting message to men around the world.

In Welsh Theological Literature and Debate, 1707-1841