Modern Drama

Desperate to keep her teenage daughter from running with the wrong crowd again, Elsie Anderson makes the painful decision to leave Seattle for good. For her, solitude is a small price to pay for keeping Sophie out of trouble. Love is the last thing on Elsie’s mind, especially in a small town like Smithfield, Virginia. Alex Becker is the star of Smithfield's firefighting department. He may be a hero, but at night he sees a broken man in the mirror. There was a time when he believed in love, but that all disappeared after he unexpectedly lost his wife late last year. They both need a second...

“Bailey Ann Mayfair, when are you going to marry me?” With those words, Bailey Ann’s already messy world began to spin out of control. The dutiful oldest daughter, Bailey Ann is the one who came home to care for her parents, but she’s never felt more lost. Always the perfect child, she did everything the right way, including giving up the boy she loved. But Finn Malloy is back in town, too, and even he’s not sure where he stands with Bailey Ann. She once cut him so deep he never thought he’d recover. Now that she’s back, though… he can’t stop thinking about what might have...

King of Scotland is an award-winning, dark comedy and a free adaptation of Gogol's A Diary of a Madman. Long-term unemployed Tommy McMillan joins a government-funded retraining scheme, "Up the Ladder". This volume also contains the biting satire The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer. Set in 1780, Glasgow is booming, but the American war is looming, and the city's wealth is dependent on the import and export of American tobacco.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a mental patient tries to get help from a rabbi to smooth over family problems his manic episodes cause.