Showing results by author "Jamie Quatro" in All Categories

Marianne Power was stuck in a rut. Then one day she wondered: could self-help books help her find the elusive perfect life? What begins as a clever experiment becomes an achingly poignant story. Because self-help can change your life - but not necessarily for the better...Help Me! is an irresistibly funny and incredibly moving book about a wild and ultimately redemptive journey that will resonate with anyone who’s ever dreamed of finding happiness.

Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband, Thomas, their two beautiful children, and God. But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, their meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies. As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt, the listener is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul.

Jamie Quatro's stories are uncensored, sometimes eccentric explorations of life - its darkness and brilliance - written in a voice that David Means describes as "bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive". Quatro writes from Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, Scott, and their children. "Wave Function Collapse" is a stand-alone story narrated by the author, and is a great introduction to her writing. Download her new collection, I Want to Show You More, also available at Audible.

After 20 years of marriage and 20 years of imaginary romances, Maggie Ellmann meets a man who makes all the previous ones seem like an augury. However, the stronger Maggie's feelings are, the bigger her determination is to end the romance and again be a “good wife and mother”, and a good Christian. So Maggie starts to pray to God to pull her out of the affair. Fire Sermon is a debut novel of an acclaimed poet and short story writer. It's lyrical and intense. It talks about lust and its nature, the womanhood trammeled by the rules of faith, and the breaking of taboos.

Throughout the collection, a mother in her late 30s relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.