Download or read book Hairstyles of the Damned Punk Planet Books written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut novel from Akashic’s new imprint, Punk Planet Books. Also check out the smash hits How the Hula Girl Sings, Tender as Hellfire, and The Boy Detective Fails. “A funny, hard-rocking first-person tale of teenage angst and discovery.” —Booklist “Captures the loose, fun, recklessness of midwestern punk.” —MTV.com Hairstyles of the Damned is an honest, true-life depiction of growing up punk on Chicago’s south side: a study in the demons of racial intolerance, Catholic school conformism, and class repression. It is the story of the riotous exploits of Brian, a high school burnout, and his best friend, Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling. Based on the actual events surrounding a Chicago high school’s segregated prom, this work of fiction unflinchingly pursues the truth in discovering what it means to be your own person.
Download or read book Hairstyles of the Damned written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Hairstyles' is an honest depiction of growing up punk on Chicago's south side: a study in the demons of racial intolerance, Catholic school conformism and class repression. It is the story of the riotous exploits of Brian, a high school burnout, and his best friend Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling. Joe Meno won the 2003 Nelson Algren Literary Award and is the author of 'Tender as Hellfire' (St. Martin's, 1999) and 'How the Hula Girl Sings' (HarperCollins, 2001). His online fictional serial, 'The Secret Hand', is published through 'Playboy Magazine'. His short fiction has been published in 'TriQuarterly', 'Bridge', 'Other Voices Washington Square', and has been broadcast on National Public Radio. He lives in Chicago, and he is a columnist for 'Punk Planet' magazine.
Download or read book Demons in the Spring written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Between Everything and Nothing, “an inspired collection of twenty stories, brilliant in its command of tone and narrative perspective” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Demons in the Spring is a collection of twenty short stories by Joe Meno, author of the smash hits The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned, with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds—Todd Baxter, Kelsey Brookes, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Nick Butcher, Steph Davidson, Evan Hecox, Kim Hiorthoy, Paul Hornschemeier, Cody Hudson, Caroline Hwang, kozyndan, Geoff McFetridge, Anders Nilsen, Laura Owens, Archer Prewitt, Jon Resh, Jay Ryan, Souther Salazar, Rachell Sumpter, and Chris Uphues. In these stories, oddly modern moments occur in the most familiar of public places—from offices to airports to schools to zoos to emergency rooms. A young girl refuses to go anywhere unless she’s dressed as a ghost. A bank robbery in Stockholm goes terribly wrong. A teacher becomes enamored with the students in his school’s Model United Nations club. A couple is affected by a strange malady. A miniature city begins to develop in a young woman’s chest. These inventive stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and unusual. A portion of the author’s proceeds from the book will go directly to benefit 826 CHICAGO, a nonprofit tutoring center, part of the national organization of tutoring centers with branches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle. Finalist for the 2008 Story Prize Time Out Chicago Best Books of 2008 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2008 “This short story collection succeeds word to word, sentence to sentence, and cover to cover.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Download or read book The Boy Detective Fails written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “charming” and melancholic novel, a former child sleuth “investigates the hard-to-crack case of Lost Innocence” (Entertainment Weekly). A Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist Book of the Year In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St. Vitus’ Hospital for the Mentally Ill to discover the world full of unimaginable strangeness: office buildings vanish without reason, small animals turn up without their heads, and cruel villains ride city buses to complete their evil schemes. Lost within this unwelcoming place, Billy befriends two lonely, extraordinary children—one a science fair genius, the other a charming, silent bully. With a nearly forgotten bravery, he experiences the unendurable boredom of a telemarketing job; encounters a beautiful, desperate pickpocket; and confronts the nearly impossible solution to his sister’s case. Along a path laden with hidden clues and codes, the boy detective may learn the greatest secret of all: the necessity of the unknown. “Haunted by the mystery of his sister’s death and feeling that a lapse in his sleuthing may be to blame, Billy is determined to find out the reason for her suicide and to punish those responsible . . . The story of Billy’s search for truth, love and redemption is surprising and absorbing. Swaddled in melancholy and gentle humor, it builds in power as the clues pile up.” —Publishers Weekly “The author gives Billy a gallery of rogues to combat and even sends him to investigate the Convocation of Evil at a local hotel (‘Featured Panel: To Wear a Mask?’). Meno sets himself a complicated task, marooning his straight-arrow, pulp-fiction protagonist in a world uglier than the Bobbsey Twins ever faced but refusing to go for satire. Instead, the author takes his compulsive investigator at face value.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Comedic, imaginative, empathic . . . investigates the precincts of grief [and] our longing to combat chaos with reason.” —Booklist
Download or read book You Must Be This Happy to Enter written by Elizabeth Crane and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Crane seems to be carving out a younger, brassier, less dystopic territory to complement the fiction of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace.” —The Quarterly Conversation In her third short story collection, following When the Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory, Elizabeth Crane presents a quirky cast of characters all searching for, showing off, or seriously questioning what makes them happy. There’s a woman who speaks in all exclamation points, one enamored by her boyfriend’s closet, a zombie reality TV star, a mother whose baby turns into Ethan Hawke, and a woman whose moods are printed on her forehead. Whether breathlessly enthusiastic, serenely calm, or really concentrating right now on their issues, Elizabeth Crane’s characters shine a spotlight on our spirituality-starved, self-improvement-seeking, celebrity-obsessed culture. “In her third collection of inventive short stories, Crane continues to ingeniously satirize our muddled quest for meaning in all the wrong places.” —Booklist “A well-crafted collection of short stories, one whose clarity of tone and theme unites each and every piece into a cohesive whole. At a time when it seems almost antediluvian to be optimistic, Crane’s sincerity stands as a bewitching reminder that there is more to literature than tragedy.” —Bookslut “Zombies, time travelers, reality TV contestants and even a few normalish folks populate the pages of Elizabeth Crane’s quirky, charming new collection.” —PopMatters
Download or read book Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir written by Joe Meno and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist, music journalist, and playwright Meno writes squarely in the American tradition of wringing large effects from small change, revealing the subtlety in the broad stroke and conveying complexity with seeming simplicity.
Download or read book Tender As Hellfire written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2007-08-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-edition of Meno's debut novel, in which he paints a near-fantastical world of trailer park floozies, broken-down '76 Impalas, lost glass eyes and the daily experiences of two boys trying to make sense of their random, sharp lives. Dough and Pill are two brothers living in a trailer park, surrounded by the strange and displaced, who must navigate through a world of constant pain and confusion. 'The power is in the writing. Mr Meno is a superb craftsman.' - Hubert Selby, Jr
Download or read book Lessons in Taxidermy A Compendium of Safety and Danger Punk Planet Books written by Bee Lavender and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting tale of sickness and survival from the first female author on the Punk Planet Books imprint that brought you the indie hit Hairstyles of the Damned. “[One of] the reigning mother superiors of the crowd [is] Bee Lavender.” —Time Magazine Diagnosed with cancer at age twelve and perilously pregnant at eighteen, surviving surgeries and violent accidents: sometimes you can’t believe Bee Lavender is still alive; sometimes you think nothing could kill her. Lessons in Taxidermy is Lavender’s fierce and expressive search for truth and an elusive sense of safety. This autobiographical tale is stark and resolved, but strangely euphoric, tying together moments and memories into a frantic, delicate, and often transcendently funny account of anguish and confusion, pain and poverty, isolation and illusion. While staying conscious of the particulars of her circumstances, Lavender frames her life in the context of history, traveling, landscape, and freak show culture. Lessons in Taxidermy is apocryphal, troubling, cathartic, and important.
Download or read book The F ing Epic Twitter Quest of MayorEmanuel written by Dan Sinker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Primary Colors for the social media era, the wildly profane, viral phenomenon that resulted from a fake Twitter account deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel is the first significant Twitter epic in today’s digital age. Primary Colors for the social media era, the wildly profane, viral phenomenon that resulted from a fake Twitter account deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel is the first significant Twitter epic in today’s digital age. With web sensations such as Stuff White People Like and Sh*t My Dad Says making the leap from the Internet to the bestseller lists, it’s no surprise that this unique and hilarious first-person account of Rahm Emanuel’s fake mayoral campaign via Twitter has already been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, The Colbert Report, and is still an unfolding story. Now, fans can read the entire six months of collected tweets of @MayorEmanuel with commentary and annotations from creator Dan Sinker. When rumors circulated that Rahm Emanuel would enter the Chicago mayor’s race, suddenly the “real” Rahm became overshadowed by a decidedly different Rahm, @MayorEmanuel. Via Twitter, this fake Rahm spun a faux-insider’s story unlike any other—in real time. Garnering a passionate following on Twitter and hailed by the press, @MayorEmanuel’s journey is an entertaining, modern-day anti-hero's quest as he travels a surrealistic Chicago landscape, picking up friends along the way, including advisor David Axelrod, Carl the Intern (a high-school-aged MacGyver), a puppy named Hambone, and a duck named Quaxelrod, to name a few. Both a surprisingly literary romp as well as an inside peek into an historic mayoral race, The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel is a bold and exciting foray into a new form of participatory, real-time storytelling.
Download or read book How the Hula Girl Sings written by Joe Meno and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunted ex-con returns to his hometown: “Fans of hard-boiled pulp fiction will particularly enjoy this novel” (Booklist). Luce Lemay is out on parole three years after an awful tragedy sent him to prison. In his small Illinois town, he does his best to find hope: in a new job at the local Gas-N-Go; in his companion and fellow ex-con, Junior Breen, who spells out puzzling messages to the unquiet ghosts of his past; and finally, in the arms of the lovely but reckless Charlene. But sorrow and violence lie in his path, in this suspenseful exploration of a country bright with the far-off stars of forgiveness and dark with the still-looming shadow of the death penalty. “A wonderful accomplishment . . . The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.” —Hubert Selby Jr., bestselling author of Last Exit to Brooklyn “The author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace.” —Kirkus Reviews “Moving . . . Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Sit Down and Shut Up written by Brad Warner and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2003, Brad Warner blew the top off the Buddhist book world with his irreverent autobiography/manifesto, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth about Reality. Now in his second book, Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo, by thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogen’s enigmatic teachings in plain language, Brad intertwines musings on sex, meditation, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the punk rock ethos. In chapters such as “Evil Is Stupid,” “Kill Your Anger,” and “Enlightenment Is for Sissies,” Brad melds the antiauthoritarianism of punk with that of Zen, mixing in a travelogue of his triumphant return to Ohio to play in a reunion concert of Akron punk bands. For those drawn to Buddhist teachings but scared off by their stiff austerity, Brad writes with a sharp smack of truth, in teachings and stories that cut to the heart of reality.
Download or read book The Residue Years written by Mitchell S. Jackson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner Whiting Writers' Award Winner Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.
Download or read book Burn Collector written by Al Burian and published by Pm Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of the first nine issues of the author's sporadically published and widely acclaimed personal zine, this volume reflects the do-it-yourself attitude of the 1990s punk music scene and includes humorous anecdotes, philosophical musings, and nuanced descriptions of odd locales and curious characters, all of which were taken mostly from outside of the punk milieu. This new release of a cult classic shows the far reaching influence of self-publishing with contemporary popular indie culture and bridges the gap between sub-culture and the world at large.
Download or read book A Taste of Power written by Elaine Brown and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Profound, funny ... wild and moving ... heartbreaking accounts of a lonely black childhood.... Brown sees racial oppression in national and global context; every political word she writes pounds home a lesson about commerce, money, racism, communism, you name it ... A glowing achievement.” —Los Angeles Times Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing black communities and white supporters across the country—but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery. Brown’s story begins with growing up in an impoverished neighborhood in Philadelphia and attending a predominantly white school, where she first sensed what it meant to be black, female, and poor in America. She describes her political awakening during the bohemian years of her adolescence, and her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers, who seemed to hold the promise of redemption. And she tells of her ascent into the upper echelons of Panther leadership: her tumultuous relationship with the charismatic Huey Newton, who would become her lover and her nemesis; her experience with the male power rituals that would sow the seeds of the party's demise; and the scars that she both suffered and inflicted in that era’s paradigm-shifting clashes of sex and power. Stunning, lyrical, and acute, this is the indelible testimony of a black woman’s battle to define herself.
Download or read book Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them written by Jenny Boully and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boully reads between the lines of a text in this case J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at.
Download or read book Ask a Manager written by Alison Green and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together
Download or read book Transcendence written by Christopher McKitterick and published by Hadley Rille Books. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humankind rushes toward self-destruction and must evolve or die. Our perspective: a scientist exploring an alien artifact on Triton, a teen-aged hacker in a city gone mad, three actors manipulated into igniting interplanetary war, the de-facto ruler of half the solar system, a soldier fighting in Africa to entertain his audience, an artificial intelligence facing personal crisis, and a cast of billions.--Publisher description.
