In these nine stories, the human condition presents itself in dramas of loss, betrayal and breakage, the shortcomings and strangeness of love in a fallen world. In scenes that shift from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the West Tennessee countryside, from the otherworldliness of the Great Salt Lake to the mercurial waters of the Alabama Gulf Coast, families fray and fragment and whistle in the dark. Mothers mourn their lost children. Children flounder in the backwash of their parents’ chaos and despair. Old lovers take stock of each other. While married couples offer each other thin comfort in grief, divorced couples circle each other warily, aware that despite their separation, their lives remain forever entangled. Psychologists take refuge in therapeutic language, even as that language fails to articulate the very truths the heart cries out to confront. Although houses figure as places of refuge and repositories of memory, they offer only fragile shelter. Stored-up memories lie in ambush. Characters bent by the weight of the past work out their tangled futures against the backdrop of a large, mysterious universe, shining with a presence which signals itself in storm, birdsong, mysterious footsteps, and the evocative smoke of distant wildfires, whose smell brings hidden things to light.

Shadows: Visible and Invisible is a collection of Hallowtide-themed short stories by seven Catholic Teen Books authors.

Grace and the Grave Robber: Grace doesn’t know what it means to go “souling,” but she certainly wasn’t expecting it to be like this!

Bogey in the Belfry: A storm drives William and his friends inside the dark church for shelter. Are animals making noises in the loft or is it something more sinister?

A Very Jurassic Hallowtide: Trapped in the mountains by a blizzard and a pack of T. rex, Darryl, Joshua and Harry’s All Hallows’ Eve is looking dangerous enough–even before things take an eerie turn.

Lucy and the Forbidden Secret: A medieval girl in a nunnery struggles with conflicts when another novice breaks her vows on the day of All Souls, revealing a shocking secret.

Helpless: Vanessa doesn’t need anyone’s help, and she sets out to prove it by going alone to investigate strange lights in the cemetery.

At the End of His Tether: When you live on a spaceship like Philip does, visiting the cemetery to pray for the dead always comes with the risk of joining them.

The Far End of the Cemetery: It’s another All Hallowtide, and on this All Souls’ Day, a young man finds himself at the cemetery yet again, but he’s not alone. Will tonight be the night, or will the torment continue?

Adelina is content to be a humble librarian with no magic, organizing ordinary books and leaving the magical section of the library to the management of the mysterious creature called a cervara…until she finds a misshelved spellbook that refuses to stay in its proper place. Despite warnings from the College of Magic and her superiors, she decides to return the book to the magical section, where she befriends the mysterious creature. Contrary to what she’s been told, the cervara is trying to protect humanity from dangerous magic by hoarding it in the library. But is it also hiding an even greater danger?

Leon is a mage in his final year at the college who needs to write something impressive for his final thesis. But when he meets the charming Adelina, and she confides her discovery to him, Leon’s world turns upside down. He’s forced to try to mediate between the mysterious creature and the power-hungry magi who surround him, all while trying to pursue his favorite librarian.

Can Adelina and Leon protect the cervara from the world—and the world from the dangers of the library? Or will both sides be destroyed by the secrets they hide and the greed that drives them to seek forbidden knowledge?

Space pilot Russ Atkins hungers for a fresh start. His gift of sensing telepathic interference has only yielded misery, landing him in military prison for two years. A dead-end job flying shuttles for a freighter is his only option as an ex-con.
His life is about to get worse. An unexpected encounter jolts him out of his dreary existence. But restoring a telepathic adolescent to her clan in defiance of the law is not the career change he had in mind.
The Union of Planets, governed from twenty-third century Earth, nurtures a deep-seated loathing toward its former thought-shifting overlords, the Ilanians. Aside from an enslaved group of Ilanians, many of whom are used as special agents to hunt their own kind, all telepaths and humans who help them face execution.
With a death penalty hanging over his head, Russ plunges into a criminal underworld to evade capture. But a telepathic Union agent from his past has plans that target both him and his young friend’s clan. Russ must search his heart to overcome his own prejudices, while his memories hold the key to defeating his thought-shifting foe.

Enjoy the fun, hectic, and holy moments of the everyday life of Fr. Otto and his parish in this very first Catholic Cartoon collection!

Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet was first published in 1840 in serial form in the children’s magazine, Giornale per i Bambini. The original story ended at Chapter XV with Pinocchio hanging from a tree, dead at the hands of assassins. The young readers of Italy would have none of it though, for Pinocchio had become their hero. They flooded the magazine with letters begging for more, and so the editor wrote to Collodi demanding that he “resurrect” the puppet. In its final form, the novel sheds its status as a simple morality tale and transfigures Pinocchio’s singular trajectory into the story of every human being—the tremendous and inescapable “adventure” we are all asked to take together. The destination is at once simple and profound: for our end is to become really real. 

This timeless tale is so familiar that it is easy to miss the rich significance of Pinocchio’s story—his creation at the hands of the father Geppetto, who, as yet ignorant of the latent spark of life, names this wooden puppet Pino (pine, in Italian) -occhio (eye, in Italian), “a piece of wood with eyes.” Geppetto’s sacrificial love is undying despite Pinocchio’s pride and the puppet’s delinquent disappearance and descent into an underworld of misbehavior and humiliation. In a great reversal, the prodigal Pinocchio undertakes his own sacrificial, and saving, acts of love for the man who made him, quickening his transformation into a real boy at last.

This edition, brought to you through the collaboration of Well-Read Mom and Wiseblood Books, pairs the original story with a commentary by the Italian writer, teacher, and Dante expert Franco Nembrini. By looking broadly and deeply at Collodi’s life, both his personal obsessions and disappointments, and by bringing his poetic vision into tension with the historical and cultural circumstances that existed when he was alive, Nembrini locates the uncompromising truth rooted at the core of this adventure: we were made by and for God, the Father who loves us and seeks us, who forgives us, and waits patiently for our return to him.