In a quiet corner of southwestern Connecticut, a secret sleeps. Now that those who would have been most affected by its disclosure are beyond hurt and embarrassment, a choice must be made-but it's not the only choice Joe Ingersoll must make.

Joe, the keeper of that secret, lives in a modest home in a quiet neighborhood, thanks to his clever selection of a small parcel of land bordered by a cemetery. Now sixty-four and retired from a career in public relations, he's turned his attention to new projects, including the compilation of a dictionary of idiomatic expressions and the creation of a series of children's books. He likes his neighbors-but secretly loves one of them. Joe longs to express his love, but he fears rejection.

At forty-six, Sally Stobbs is doing her best to rebuild her sanity, self-respect, and optimism following a painful divorce. Her friendship with Joe is on the verge of evolving into something more, and she must now choose to follow her instincts or allow the pain of a failed marriage to ruin her future. Joe awakens a new love in her, and she readily agrees to wait for him to commit-but something seems to be holding him back.

When he does reveal his secret to her, it only draws them closer. Sally insists on being by his side when he reveals his decision, his choice, to the young mother he has loved from afar.

"Pilar Orsini Oquendo has just lost the love of her life. Her fiance, Gonzalo, has been wrenched from her grasp by his untimely passing. Left alone to grieve, she finds herself at their favorite place, on a secluded beach in Spain. It is here where Gonzalo s childhood friend finds Pilar and, in a fit of lust, rapes her. Distraught and betrayed, Pilar soon finds the rape has produced a pregnancy. Despite the difficulty, Pilar decides to keep the baby. She struggles to wade through her emotional turmoil and continue her ambitious career as a translator of American literature. While speaking at Columbia University, Pilar meets Gus Brubaker. Gus is a Spanish literature translator, and he is immediately taken in by Pilar s intellect and stunning beauty. Pilar is conflicted and still dealing with the aftermath of her rape as her attacker continues his harassment. She is also pregnant. How will she explain this to Gus, who, she believes, will surely leave her when she reveals her pregnancy? The Translators tells a story of troubled romance set in the world of linguistics and literature. As Pilar and Gus travel the world together, they also must travel beyond pains of the past. In the conquering of violence, there is a possibility of healing and perhaps, a possibility of endless love."

In a quiet corner of southwestern Connecticut, a secret sleeps. Now that those who would have been most affected by its disclosure are beyond hurt and embarrassment, a choice must be made-but it's not the only choice Joe Ingersoll must make.

Joe, the keeper of that secret, lives in a modest home in a quiet neighborhood, thanks to his clever selection of a small parcel of land bordered by a cemetery. Now sixty-four and retired from a career in public relations, he's turned his attention to new projects, including the compilation of a dictionary of idiomatic expressions and the creation of a series of children's books. He likes his neighbors-but secretly loves one of them. Joe longs to express his love, but he fears rejection.

At forty-six, Sally Stobbs is doing her best to rebuild her sanity, self-respect, and optimism following a painful divorce. Her friendship with Joe is on the verge of evolving into something more, and she must now choose to follow her instincts or allow the pain of a failed marriage to ruin her future. Joe awakens a new love in her, and she readily agrees to wait for him to commit-but something seems to be holding him back.

When he does reveal his secret to her, it only draws them closer. Sally insists on being by his side when he reveals his decision, his choice, to the young mother he has loved from afar.

March 3, 1945, turns into a fateful night of horror for a young American Marine caught in the onslaught of Japanese fire on Iwo Jima. But worse than the machine-gun wounds that he sustains is a reality that he will bury, a mental and psychological scar so terrible that he won't allow it to surface with doctors at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. It is only with a nurse who has an actual scar of her own from an abusive stepfather that he finds some respite.

Given a medical discharge after V-E Day, the wounded Marine returns to his home in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, which lies on the fringes of the dying coke and coal country. There he begins the agonizing journey of recognition to confront a naked, shattering truth. How he deals with his strong-willed father, friends, one antagonist, and the nurse who makes her way to Mount Pleasant, will determine the outcome of his nightmare on Iwo Jima.

"The Oldest Son" is a story of the triumph of hope that springs from the love between a woman and a man.

"Pilar Orsini Oquendo has just lost the love of her life. Her fiance, Gonzalo, has been wrenched from her grasp by his untimely passing. Left alone to grieve, she finds herself at their favorite place, on a secluded beach in Spain. It is here where Gonzalo s childhood friend finds Pilar and, in a fit of lust, rapes her. Distraught and betrayed, Pilar soon finds the rape has produced a pregnancy. Despite the difficulty, Pilar decides to keep the baby. She struggles to wade through her emotional turmoil and continue her ambitious career as a translator of American literature. While speaking at Columbia University, Pilar meets Gus Brubaker. Gus is a Spanish literature translator, and he is immediately taken in by Pilar s intellect and stunning beauty. Pilar is conflicted and still dealing with the aftermath of her rape as her attacker continues his harassment. She is also pregnant. How will she explain this to Gus, who, she believes, will surely leave her when she reveals her pregnancy? The Translators tells a story of troubled romance set in the world of linguistics and literature. As Pilar and Gus travel the world together, they also must travel beyond pains of the past. In the conquering of violence, there is a possibility of healing and perhaps, a possibility of endless love."

Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century Spain's most respected authors, lived an international life-a career in the diplomatic service, with postings to more than a half dozen countries in Europe and the Americas. Cosmopolitan, cultured, and urbane, Valera was fluent in a number of languages and read widely in all of them. A serious student of his own and foreign literatures, he wrote novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and literary criticism, in addition to carrying on a voluminous correspondence with several of his fellow Spanish writers and friends. The unifying thread of his work is "art for art's sake," that is, beauty as the end and purpose of inspiration and creativity, a stance he commented on at some length in his introduction to the 1886 Appleton English translation of his first novel, Pepita Jimenez (1874), the tale of a young seminarian who falls in love with a young widow. Commander Mendoza (1877) tells the story of Don Fadrique Lopez de Mendoza, a man of seafaring adventures and a deist in the mold of the eighteenth-century philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded pride and a Catholic driven by religious fanaticism, neither of which traits prevented her from having had an adulterous affair as a young woman in Lima, Peru, with Don Fadrique. The conflict that plays out in Commander Mendoza, with both principals now back in Spain, centers on the Commander's discovery of the marriageable daughter that he did not know he had, and it turns into a contest of wills that effects changes in both of them as the fate of their daughter hangs in the balance. Rich in characterization and exploration of human foibles, it is a work that continued to stand high on the list of Valera's favorites, for in 1885 he wrote in a letter to a friend: "What would please me would be to continue writing novels like Pepita Jimenez and Commander Mendoza." Robert Fedorchek is a professor emeritus of modern languages and literatures at Fairfield University (Connecticut). He has published fifteen books of translations of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, including three other novels by Juan Valera. He has also translated numerous fairy tales by Valera, Antonio de Trueba, Cecilia Bohl de Faber, and Concha Castroviejo for Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. Susan McKenna is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Delawa where she specializes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature. She is the author of Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazan.