Download or read book The League of Unusual Denizens written by Mark Cain and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only thing worse than the end of the universe is ... Casual Day.Six denizens of Hell, one saint and a small blue alien join forces to stop the ultimate catastrophe: the destruction of the cosmos. That most of them are dead is of little consequence, for they possess great powers. Halos and horns, strength and sarcasm, courage and comedy, oh, and a management textbook: this team has them all. They are THE LEAGUE OF UNUSUAL DENIZENS.LOUD: a superhero team par excellence on the ultimate voyage through what is truly the final frontier.LOUD: a stupid acronym, though it fits well on a T-shirt. And this team of misfit heroes will need every advantage if they hope to save the heavens and the earth from returning to Chaos.Here they go, into the breach. Get LOUD!The League of Unusual Denizens Is the eighth volume in the satire/fantasy comedy series, Circles in Hell. It has been compared to other works of "Hell Fiction" including The Screwtape Letters and Good Omens and to the paranormal humor of Tom Holt, Christopher Moore and Douglas Adams.Click on the book jacket to "Look inside."
Download or read book Book Row written by Marvin Mondlin and published by Carroll & Graf Publishers. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city has eight million stories, and this one unfolds just south of 14th Street in Manhattan, mostly on the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue bracketed by Union Square and Astor Place. There, for nearly eight decades, from the 1890s to the 1960s, thrived a bibliophiles' paradise. They called it the New York Booksellers' Row, or, more commonly, Book Row. It's an American story, the story that this richly anecdotal historical memoir amiably tells: as American as the rags-to-riches tale of the Strand, which began its life as book stall on Eighth Street and today houses 2.5 million volumes in twelve miles of space. It's a story cast with colorful characters: like the horse-betting, poker-playing go-getter and book dealer George D. Smith; the irascible Russian-born book hunter Peter Stammer, the visionary Theodore C. Schulte; Lou Cohen, founder of the still-surviving Argosy Book Store; gentleman bookseller George Rubinowitz and his legendary shrewd wife Jenny. Rising rents, street crime, urban redevelopment, television-the reasons are many for the demise of Book Row, but in this volume, based on interviews with dozens upon dozens of the book people who bought, sold, and collected there, it lives again.
Download or read book Doormen written by Peter Bearman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Little fascinates New Yorkers more than doormen, who know far more about tenants than tenants know about them. Doormen know what their tenants eat, what kind of movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, and whether they have kinky sex. But if doormen are unusually familiar with their tenants, they are also socially very distant. In Doormen, Peter Bearman untangles this unusual dynamic to reveal the many ways that tenants and doormen negotiate their complex relationship. Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen provides a deep and enduring ethnography of the occupational role of doormen, the dynamics of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. Here, Bearman explains why doormen find their jobs both boring and stressful, why tenants feel anxious about how much of a Christmas bonus their neighbors give, and how everyday transactions small and large affect tenants' professional and informal relationships with doormen. In the daily life of the doorman resides the profound, and this book provides a brilliant account of how tenants and doormen interact within the complex world of the lobby.
Download or read book Northern Waters written by Jan Zita Grover and published by . This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a chapter on Minnehaha Creek.
Download or read book Standard Hero Behavior written by John David Anderson and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When fifteen-year-old Mason Quayle finds out that their town of Darlington is about to be attacked by orcs, goblins, ogres, and trolls, he goes in search of some heroes to save the day.
Download or read book Nemesis written by Philip Roth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
Download or read book Virgil Wander written by Leif Enger and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man seeks to rediscover his broken Midwestern community in a novel that “brims with grace and quirky charm” by the author of Peace Like a River (Bookpage). Movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Though Virgil survives, his language and memory are altered. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together the past. He is helped by a cast of curious locals—from a stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son, to the vanished man’s enchanting wife, to a local journalist who is Virgil’s oldest friend. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a journey into the heart of America’s Upper Midwest.
Download or read book The Reluctant Demon written by Mark Cain and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satan has made a new demon, and he's a doozy, maybe the most powerful ever created. There's just one problem ... this freshly-minted hellion isn't sure he wants the job. In the wacky final volume of the Circles in Hell series, Steve Minion attends Beast Barracks, where he learns both the arcane and mundane arts of being a servant of the Devil. Strength, speed and endurance are all part of a demon's physical makeup, but he must be taught to be sneaky, cruel and ruthless... and of course to ignore personal hygiene. As Steve begins work as a full-fledged bad guy, he must confront the inevitable: demons exist to torment the damned, and Hell's former handyman-in-chief doesn't seem to have the stomach for the work. Still, there's no alternative for our hero. Once a demon, always a demon, as the saying goes. Steve's stuck in his new role, but really, what good to anyone is a reluctant demon? "The Reluctant Demon" is the fourth volume in the fantasy comedy series, "Circles in Hell." It has been compared to other works of "Hell Fiction" including "The Screwtape Letters" and "Good Omens" and to the paranormal humor of Tom Holt, Christopher Moore and Douglas Adams. Click on the book jacket to "Look inside." _______________________________________________ "Comedy Fiction Book Categories" >Satire and Humor >Fantasy Comedy >Hell Fiction >Devils and Demons >Fiction Humor >Paranormal Humor >Paranormal Comedy Romance
Download or read book So Help Me Golf written by Rick Reilly and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beloved New York Times bestselling author and golf aficionado shares his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in this cavalcade of original pieces about why we love the sport, now featuring three additional new pieces. This is the book Rick Reilly has been writing in the back of his head since he fell in love with the game of golf at eleven years old. He unpacks and explores all of the wonderful, maddening, heart-melting, heart-breaking, cool, and captivating things about golf that make the game so utterly addictive. We meet the PGA Tour player who robbed banks by night to pay his motel bills, the golf club maker who takes weekly psychedelic trips, and the caddy who kept his loop even after an 11-year prison stint. We learn how a man on his third heart nearly won the U.S. Open, how a Vietnam POW saved his life playing 18 holes a day in his tiny cell, and about the course that's absolutely free. Reilly mines all of the game’s quirky traditions—from the shot of bourbon you take before you tee off at Peyton Manning’s course, to the way the starter at St. Andrews announces to your group (and the hundreds of tourists watching), “You’re on the first tee, gentlemen.” He means that quite literally: St. Andrews has the first tee ever invented. We’ll visit the eighteen most unforgettable holes around the world (Reilly has played them all), including the hole in Indonesia where the biggest hazard is monkeys, the one in the Caribbean that's underwater, and the one in South Africa that requires a shot over a pit of alligators; not to mention Reilly’s attempt to play the most mini-golf holes in one day. Reilly expounds on all the great figures in the game, from Phil Mickelson to Bobby Jones to the simple reason Jack Nicklaus is better than Tiger Woods. He explains why we should stop hating Bryson DeChambeau unless we hate genius, the greatest upset in women’s golf history, and why Ernie Els throws away every ball that makes a birdie. Plus all the Greg Norman stories Reilly has never been able to tell before, and the great fun of being Jim Nantz. Connecting it all will be the story of Reilly’s own personal journey through the game, especially as it connects to his tumultuous relationship with his father, and how the two eventually reconciled through golf. This is Reilly’s valentine to golf, a cornucopia of stories that no golfer will want to be without. **The Sports Librarian’s Best of 2022 – Sports Books**
Download or read book The Marriage Plot written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Download or read book Entropy in Bloom written by Jeremy Robert Johnson and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds.
Download or read book L I E written by David Hollander and published by Villard. This book was released on 2001-01-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At once mordantly funny and achingly sad, L.I.E. is a soul map for modern suburbia." --Sheri Holman, author of The Dress Lodger Long Island, New York, 1987: Harlan Kessler--raised in Medford, a product of blue-collar Suffolk County, of housing developments and concrete strip malls--graduates from high school. He hangs out, he parties, he plays guitar for the Dayglow Crazies (the local rock-and-roll phenomenon), and he struggles diligently to lose his virginity. He doesn't think about the future much. The Long Island Expressway (L.I.E.) cleaves the landscape, permitting passage west, to the tonier climes of Nassau County and New York City, but to Harlan, this seems like an impossible journey, something beyond his Long Island birthright. And what's worse, evidence is accumulating that Harlan may not exist at all, that he may merely be a character in someone else's story, a fleeting thought in the mind of God. L.I.E. follows Harlan, his family, and his friends through two years of love, sex, death, betrayal, salvation, and enlightenment. In ten intimately interwoven stories, in prose that swings fluidly from gritty realism to heightened metafiction, David Hollander maps an American landscape that is at once vividly familiar and highly exotic, creating an unforgettable portrait of the passage to adult-hood and the search for identity, certain to resonate with legions of readers. By turns dark, funny, raw, and elegant, L.I.E. is the striking debut of a singular voice. The last wisps of afternoon streak and evaporate into blue-gray dusk, submersing Long Island in twilight. Harlan and Rik Giannati sit on the curb outside Rik's house, precisely 211 yards northeast of Harlan's house, the distance punctuated by no fewer than fourteen subtly distinct houses of three ilks: the square, steeple-roofed Granada; the split-level LaSalle; the two-story, three-bedroom Monte Carlo. This last model was the choice of Kessler and Giannati alike some ten years ago when they, too, were assimilated in the mass exodus from Queens to Suffolk County that had gripped the hearts and genitals of so many. The streetlamps began to glow along Rustic Avenue, a cold blue flicker spaced at even intervals, like isolated members of the same species, each shivering in its cage of frosted glass. --From L.I.E.
Download or read book Bucky F cking Dent written by David Duchovny and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author David Duchovny is back with Bucky F*cking Dent, a singular tale that brims with the mirth, poignancy, and profound solitude of modern life. Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American Novel, and spends the waning days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent. When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of Ted’s youth tries to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from Mariana—the Nuyorican grief counselor with whom Ted promptly falls in love—and a crew of neighborhood old-timers, Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Boston winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of. David Duchovny’s richly drawn Bucky F*cking Dent explores the bonds between fathers and sons and the age-old rivalry between Yankee fans and the Fenway faithful, and grapples with our urgent need to persevere—and risk everything—in the name of love. Culminating in that fateful moment in October of ’78 when the mighty Bucky Dent hit his way into baseball history with the unlikeliest of home runs, this tender, insightful, and hilarious novel demonstrates how life truly belongs to the losers, and that the long shots are the ones worth betting on.
Download or read book The Vanished Seas written by Catherine Asaro and published by Baen Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAJOR BHAAJAN RETURNS. Book three in the Skolian Empire Major Bhaajan series by Catherine Asaro. SURVIVE THE CITY OF CRIES Bhaajan grew up in the Undercity, a community hidden in the ruins buried beneath the glittering City of Cries. Caught between the astonishing beauty and crushing poverty of that life, and caught by wanderlust, she enlisted in the military. Now retired, Major Bhaajan is a private investigator who solves cases for the House of Majda, a powerful royal family centered in Cries. The powerful elite of the City of Cries are disappearing, and only Bhaajan, who grew up in the Undercity, can find them—if she isn’t murdered first. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). About the Major Bhaajan series: “. . . riveting. . . . The world is rich and vivid, with two distinct cultures in the Undercity and the aboveground City of Cries. This exciting novel stands alone for anyone who enjoys science fiction adventure.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Asaro plants herself firmly into that grand SF tradition of future history franchises favored by luminaries like Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Anderson, Dickson, Niven, Cherryh, and Baxter . . . They don't write em like that anymore! Except Asaro does, with . . . up-to-the-minute savvy!"—Locus "Baahjan, who starts out keeping an emotional distance from the people in the Undercity soon grows to think of them as her community once more. Asaro . . . returns to the Skolian empire's early history to tell Bhaajan's story."—Booklist "Asaro delivers a tale rich with the embedded history of her world and bright with technical marvels. Her characters are engaging and intriguing and there is even a bit of romance. What really touched my heart was Bhaaj's interaction with the children of the aqueducts. I spent the last fifty pages of the book sniffling into a tissue."—SFcrowsnest "I'm hooked, both on her writing and her Skolian universe. This book had everything I wanted: strong characters, a new and unique world, and a plot that isn't as simple as it first appears."—TerryTalk About the Skolian Saga: “Entertaining mix of hard SF and romance.”—Publishers Weekly “Asaro’s Skolian saga is now nearly as long and in many ways as compelling as Dune, if not more so, featuring a multitude of stronger female characters.”—Booklist “Rapid pacing and gripping suspense.”—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Key to Rondo written by Emily Rodda and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are four rules to the old, painted music box:Wind the box three times only. Never wind the boxwhile the music plays. Never shut the box while themusic plays. Never move the box until the musicstops.Leo wouldn't dream of breaking these rules, but hisstubborn cousin Mimi never does what she's told.She winds the box four times--and suddenly thepaintings on its side come to life and a powerfulwitch is released. Now Leo and Mimi must stop thewitch, if only they can find the key to the musicbox--and the magical world it contains.
Download or read book Generation Loss written by Elizabeth Hand and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, earned her a brief moment of fame. Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption. Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.
Download or read book Boomer at Midlife written by Mark Cain and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bold and bittersweet, a tragedy wrapped in a comedy. You can read it and laugh, or weep, but always with the shock of recognition."-Landon Y. Jones, best-selling author and National Book Award nominee for "Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation" Walter "Boomer" Stapleton has good reason to believe that he is the ultimate stereotype: divorced, middle-aged, tired of his job, involved with a much younger woman, and soon to lose his only child to college. He is a Baby Boomer, one of an anonymous seventy-seven million Americans at or approaching midlife. With his fiftieth birthday just around the corner, Boomer is finished being a poster child for his generation and determined to forge a new path despite his progressively shrinking set of life options. He quits his job and leaves friends and family behind to move to New Orleans to play zydeco on his accordion. But what he encounters in The Big Easy leads him even deeper into the realm of uncertainty about who he is and where he really belongs. From the halls of corporate America to the sidewalks and clubs of New Orleans, "Boomer at Midlife" lampoons the self-conscious Baby Boomers in a story that is at once comic, nostalgic, and melancholy.
