The Beautiful One


Everyone in the village knows Callen O'Grady. When someone disappears, when violence threatens to tear lives apart, when there is nowhere else to turn, people come to him. Some believe he is a criminal. Others call him a saviour. No one can explain why, after every disaster, life somehow continues.
Linguist Samantha Wagner arrives in rural Ireland to investigate how a people that loses its language can continue living inside the world that this language created without losing itself. She finds herself drawn into Callen's orbit, where an old crime still divides the village, stories carry more weight than facts, and every answer seems to change the meaning of the question that came before it.
As Samantha falls in love with Callen, the boundaries between language and reality start blurring. The deeper she searches for the truth, the more she starts to question not only the village, but every story through which she has understood herself. Callen knows her without her explaining. Sees her without her performing. Offers her the thing that she's been searching for her entire life: to be understood completely. Until she discovers that might not be a good thing.
Some people change your life. Others change the reality you live in.
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Is Your Teen Ready for Life After High School?
Whether it's college, work, a gap year, or simply becoming more independent, life after high school comes with new decisions, responsibilities, and challenges that young people aren't always prepared for.
The Life Skills for Teens After High School series was created to help teens and young adults build the confidence, independence, and practical skills they need for that transition.
The main book includes 101 practical tips covering real-world skills such as managing money and responsibilities, communication, decision-making, health and wellbeing, digital choices, relationships, and handling life more independently.
The companion Guided Journal helps teens take those lessons further by writing, reflecting, and considering how they can apply them in their own lives.
Want to see what the series is about? Start with a FREE guide.
The Essential Starter Pack gives teens and parents a preview of 5 practical tips from the full book, with simple, realistic guidance and actions they can start using right away.
Whether they're preparing for college, a job, a gap year, or whatever comes next, it's a practical introduction to greater confidence, independence, and real-world readiness.
History does not only live-in textbooks—it lives in the people who had to survive it.
A card table, an empty chair, and nearly twenty years of silence provide the deceptively intimate setting for Marva Washington’s Bid Whist at Midnight. What begins as a late-night reunion among former college friends Sardis, Grace, and Dorcus gradually becomes something far more revealing: an examination of friendship, memory, identity, and the history people carry long after the defining moment has passed.
The novel opens in February 1988, when the women reunite for the game that once helped bind them together in college. Their familiar rhythm cannot completely disguise what has changed. Four chairs surround the table, but Taletha will not be joining them, and the absence immediately gives the gathering emotional weight.
From there, Washington reaches back into their college years, placing personal stories alongside the social unrest of 1968. Student demonstrations against segregation, debates over Black identity, changing attitudes toward beauty and belonging, and the pressures surrounding the Civil Rights era become part of the characters’ everyday lives rather than distant historical footnotes. The friends themselves do not always agree on how change should happen. Taletha embraces activism, while Grace weighs the fight for equality against the possibility of losing the education her family sacrificed to provide.
That tension gives Bid Whist at Midnight particular relevance for contemporary readers and writers. Washington demonstrates how historical fiction can make large social movements personal. History is not presented only through famous names, protests, or political ideas; it is felt through friendships, family expectations, romantic relationships, ambitions, prejudice, grief, and the decisions ordinary people make when society itself is changing.
The card game becomes especially meaningful in that context. Bid whist is more than recreation. During college, the foursome grows from an uneasy grouping into friends who share personal trials, changing beliefs, and the complications of becoming adults. Their story suggests that meaningful relationships are not necessarily built on complete agreement, but on the willingness to listen, challenge assumptions, and recognize experiences beyond one’s own.
That idea carries considerable weight today. In a society still wrestling with questions of race, identity, inequality, belonging, gender, and generational trauma, fiction can create room for conversations that statistics and headlines alone cannot provide. Stories such as Washington’s remind contemporary writers of the value of preserving lived perspectives while giving readers the opportunity to encounter history through human consequences.
Bid Whist at Midnight offers readers something to carry beyond its final page: the understanding that the past rarely stays neatly in the past—and sometimes healing begins when people finally return to the table.
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Listen in as we discuss his book, Making Peace With Life, Dr. Rob Alex takes you on a deeply human, refreshingly honest, and surprisingly humorous journey through the chaos, beauty, heartbreak, energy, and wonder of being alive.
This isn’t a book about chasing perfection.
It’s about embracing the full spectrum — the ups, the downs, the middle ground, the transitions, the questions, the endings, and the beginnings.
Inside these pages you’ll explore:
Blending psychology, personal development, metaphysical insight, and everyday humor, Dr. Rob Alex writes like the friend who hands you cosmic wisdom and a high-five at the same time.
This book will not give you all the answers.
It will give you something far more powerful:
Permission to breathe.
Permission to question.
Permission to adjust.
Permission to live fully.
And most importantly —
Permission to make peace with life exactly as it is… while still growing into what it can become.
Click here to get your copy of Make Peace With Life
Bri and Jeffrey, having successfully located the long sought after missing He, accompany his return to the firm’s offices, to initiate their efforts in unraveling the sordid financial uncertainty, caused by the sudden death of one Senior Partner and the comatose hospitalization of another. Upon the three’s return, Jack Corso, once again, revitalizes his appearance; not as the Sin Eater, but as a beacon of survival.
Working together, the trio initiate their efforts sorting thru the past, known and unknown; attempting to coordinate the relevance of the newfound information, to the present; hoping that their sorting through the quagmire of secrets will prevent the financial collapse of the firm; offset scandal, along with possible criminal charges against the partners, and Bri, herself. In order for their efforts to succeed, they need to successfully wade through the veiled information and hidden agendas of their antagonists, Donald and Larry, the active controlling partners.
The trios search efforts require initiating travel into multiple States; once again, opening the doors for strange encounters with odd personalities, under the most unusual circumstances; encouraging the chasing of uncertainty, along the way.
Jack Corso is no longer the sort after mysterious He; the subject matter of a long and extended multi-State search. Assuming the role of an overseer, He sets the tone and the rules that need to come into play, as a praecipe for success. As a powerful, independent and sole sustaining individual, He spearheads a mission, accompanied by Bri and Jeffrey. Together, they follow the trails of uncertainty and develop their own independent story in the process: Defiance Rising. Fire I Walk With Thee. A Jack Corso Novel. Sequel to the Sin Eater and Dismissed Without Prejudice.
Defiance Rising: Fire I Walk with Thee

What if the life you've been searching for isn't waiting somewhere in the future? What if happiness isn't hidden behind a bigger paycheck, a perfect relationship, or some magical moment when everything finally falls into place? In Making Peace With Life, Dr. Rob Alex invites you to step off the endless treadmill of "someday" and discover something far more powerful—the ability to find meaning, purpose, and peace right where you are. Through humor, honesty, personal insight, and metaphysical wisdom, this book helps you see that life isn't something to conquer or perfect. It's something to experience, learn from, and ultimately embrace.
Inside these pages, you'll explore the lessons hidden within life's greatest challenges and its most beautiful moments. You'll discover why there is no finish line to chase, why comparison steals joy, how energy connects us all, and why asking better questions may be more important than finding perfect answers. Whether you're navigating change, searching for direction, recovering from setbacks, or simply trying to understand your place in the world, this book offers a refreshing perspective that reminds you your life already has incredible value. It's not about becoming someone else—it's about understanding the incredible person you already are.
Most self-help books promise to give you answers. Making Peace With Life offers something even more valuable: permission. Permission to breathe when life feels overwhelming. Permission to grow without demanding perfection from yourself. Permission to appreciate your journey without comparing it to everyone else's. And most importantly, permission to make peace with life exactly as it is while still creating the future you desire. If you're ready to stop racing, stop chasing, and start truly living, then this book may be exactly what you've been looking for.

The Beautiful One In 1912, Asim and Chione, a young Egyptian couple, are enthralled by the discovery of the Queen Nefertiti sculpt...