THE HUNTER'S WIFE was originally published in The Atlantic which is where I first read it and which is also how I discovered Anthony Doerr. I am not recommending that you read it; but the psychological profile of Nugent came to mind while flipping through Anthony Doerr's extraordinary debut collection of stories. She begins to sleep for most of the day, but out of the depths of her ordeal arises an unusual gift.

The blind hero of the title story spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya, his fingers ploughing through sandy granules of grace and intrigue, his German shepherd at his side. The Shell Collector is a beautiful, emotional story about the glorious sunrise that can come after a dark night, about surviving loss and finding hope and joy again. One of my favorite quotes from The Shell Collector is, “Unfortunately no life is free of sadness, be it from pain, loss, ill, or…, well, you get the idea.The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr’s debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Paul moved to the community to set up his dream job, a dog resort that specializes in ex- military dogs and veterans. Things do feel a bit too easy, and I could have used a bit of higher stakes, but not every story has that, and that’s okay.

Breakfast: sausage sizzled in oil, two slabs of pumpernickel slathered with margarine, coffee in a chipped mug. Fox News Media seeks to expand its conservative empire through Fox Nation’s slate of real estate, lifestyle and reality programming.

Media companies are hungry for original content to win market share among the morass of competing platforms.

In any case, all of them are beautifully crafted and lovely to read, some taking you to remote worlds you most likely will never go to yourself.

Teams of European paleontologists had found something like the Chinese caudipteryx—a small, feathered reptile—in the limestone hills west of Tanga and the museum was eager to get one for itself. THE SHELL COLLECTOR is a heartwarming tale about a blind man who on a verge of losing his eyesight develops the love for smooth and delicate shells on the beach of Florida. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. Sometime later, a local cleric arrives pleading with the collector to find another cone snail to bite his eight-year-old, malaria-stricken daughter, Seema. It's a story of real friendships and community that I hope will remind you to pick up the phone and check in with your best friends, and make some new ones too.