The Bride Said I Did

Dani Lockhart had always fantasized about her wedding day…walking down the aisle and giving her hand in marriage to the man of her dreams—just not to her enemy, Beau Chamberlain! But apparently that's exactly what she did…and couldn't remember. Sure Beau was movie-star handsome and lived by a value system that would stand the test of time. From work to lovemaking and everything in between, he followed the all-or-nothing rule. And he intended to find out exactly how his name and Dani's ended up on a marriage license—and just how Dani could be expecting his child!

Miranda should have taken the chance to say no when she'd been able to. Now she was trapped in a situation that made her seem like a bartered bride. Man Hunt. Jilly's wedding day had certainly been memorable - but for Chloe it was because her niece had confessed to lying about her involvement with Ben Haskell. Chloe had let him get away once - she wasn't about to let him go again.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Whiter Than Snow and Prayers for Sale comes a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who have all lived in the same Victorian home called the Bride's House. It's 1880, and for unassuming seventeen-year-old Nealie Bent, the Bride's House is a fairy tale come to life. It seems as if it is being built precisely for her and Will Spaulding, the man she is convinced she will marry. But life doesn't go according to plan, and Nealie finds herself in the Bride's House pregnant---and married to another. For Pearl, growing up in the Bride's House is akin to being raised in a mausoleum. Her father has fashioned the house into a shrine to the woman he loved, resisting all forms of change. When the enterprising young Frank Curry comes along and asks for Pearl's hand in marriage, her father sabotages the union. But he underestimates the lengths to which the women in the Bride's House will go for love. Susan is the latest in the line of strong and willful women in the Bride's House. She's proud of the women who came before her, but the Bride's House hides secrets that will force her to question what she wants and who she loves. Sandra Dallas has once again written a novel rich in storytelling and history, peopled by living, breathing characters that will grab hold of you and not let you go.

A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation “The Crane Wife” with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy, and self in the twenty-first century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this “elegant masterpiece” (Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger) asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer ​us all. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE GUARDIAN, GARDEN & GUN "Hauser builds their life's inventory out of deconstructed personal narratives, resulting in a reading experience that's rich like a complicated dessert—not for wolfing down but for savoring in small bites." —The New York Times “Clever, heartfelt, and wrenching.” —Time “Brilliant.” —Oprah Daily Ten days after calling off their wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, they realized they'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. What if you released yourself from traditional narratives of happiness? What if you looked for ways to leave room for the unexpected? In Hauser’s case, this meant dissecting pop culture touchstone, from The Philadelphia Story to The X Files, to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. They attended a robot convention, contemplated grief at John Belushi’s gravesite, and officiated a wedding. Most importantly, they mapped the difference between the stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose path doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing and to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home to live in.

»The Bridal Party« is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, originally published in 1930. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD [1896-1940] was an American author, born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His legendary marriage to Zelda Montgomery, along with their acquaintances with notable figures such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and their lifestyle in 1920s Paris, has become iconic. A master of the short story genre, it is logical that his most famous novel is also his shortest: The Great Gatsby [1925].

Emlyn Eisenach uses a wide range of sources, including the richly detailed and previously unexplored records of nearly two hundred marriage-related disputes from the bishop’s court of Verona, to illuminate family and social relations in early modern northern Italy. Arguing against the common emphasis on the growth of law and government in this period, her study emphasizes the fluidity of the principles that governed marriage and its dissolution, and deepens our understanding of the patriarchal family and its complex relationship with gender and status during the sixteenth century. Peopled by characters from across the social spectrum of the city of Verona and its contado, Eisenach’s study moves between stories about specific individuals—serving girls seeking honorable marriage through the unlikely route of concubinage, peasant men in search of independence from their fathers, and aristocratic wives seeking revenge against adulterous husbands—and broader analyses of social, economic, and geographical patterns of behavior. She shows how the Veronese at all social levels attempted to better their familial and personal fortunes by creatively molding wedding rituals to fit their particular circumstances, or engaging in the significant but until now little understood practices of concubinage, clandestine marriage, or informal marriage dissolution. Eisenach also evaluates the first half-century of religious reforms in Verona as the leading pre-Tridentine bishop Gian Matteo Giberti and his successors challenged common practices and understandings in sermons, treatises, confessionals, and court. Emphasizing the limitations of what the religious authorities could impose on the people, she explores how learned and popular notions of marriage, family, and gender shaped each other as they were put into action in the strategies of individual Veronese.