Download or read book The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady written by Elizabeth Stuckey-French and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively, intricately plotted, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly touching family drama combines the wit of Carl Hiaasen with the southern charm of Jill McCorkle. Seventy-seven-year-old Marylou Ahearn is going to kill Dr. Wilson Spriggs come hell or high water. In 1953, he gave her a radioactive cocktail without her consent as part of a secret government study that had horrible consequences. Marylou has been plotting her revenge for fifty years. When she accidentally discovers his whereabouts in Florida, her plans finally snap into action. She high tails it to hot and humid Tallahassee, moves in down the block from where a now senile Spriggs lives with his daughter’s family, and begins the tricky work of insinuating herself into their lives. But she has no idea what a nest of yellow jackets she is stumbling into. Before the novel is through, someone will be kidnapped, an unlikely couple will get engaged, someone will nearly die from eating a pineapple upside-down cake laced with anti-freeze, and that’s not all . . . Told from the varied perspectives of an incredible cast of endearing oddball characters and written with the flair of a native Floridian, this dark comedy does not disappoint.
Download or read book The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady written by Elizabeth Stuckey-French and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year Marylou Ahearn is going to kill Dr. Wilson Spriggs. In 1953, the good doctor gave her a radioactive cocktail without her consent, and Marylou has been plotting her revenge ever since. When she discovers his whereabouts in Florida, she hightails it to Tallahassee, moves in down the block from where he resides with his daughter, Caroline, and begins the tricky work of insinuating herself into his life. But she has no idea what a nest of yellow jackets she’s stumbled into. Spriggs is senile, his daughter’s on the verge of collapse, and his grandchildren are a mess of oddballs, leaving Marylou wondering whether she’s really meant to ruin their lives … or fix them.
Download or read book Mermaids on the Moon written by Elizabeth Stuckey-French and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2003-07-08 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thirty-five-year-old France’s father calls to say that her mother, Grendy, has run off, France suspects foul play and heads south to investigate. Recently reunited with fellow former “mermaids” from Mermaid Springs, FL—one of the Sunshine State’s premier, pre-Disney attractions—Grendy had successfully revived her career in kitschy underwater pageants. But if she doesn’t find herself or let herself be found soon, she’ll miss the big Labor Day show. While the other fin-toting “merhags” regale France with stories of old—particularly the night Elvis came to town—they’re suspiciously tight-lipped about Grendy’s disappearance. Increasingly convinced that Grendy is in trouble—and that a psychic cat might hold the clue—she makes a series of unexpected, extraordinary discoveries about Mermaid Springs, her mother, and, in turn, herself.
Download or read book The First Paper Girl in Red Oak Iowa written by Elizabeth Stuckey-French and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the stories in her first collection, Elizabeth Stuckey-French establishes herself as a smart new voice in American fiction and stakes her claim to a territory somewhere on the edge of stability, where normal is not just boring but nearly impossible, and where standing out in a crowd may just cause isolation. Her characters, mostly Midwesterners, are bizarre but endearing. A reform school graduate is placed in the care of her psychic aunt and in the servitude of a lucrative dog retrieval scheme. A mother who has accepted her son’s modest employment selling blue jeans bemoans the above-board lifestyle she discovers him leading as a wanted criminal. A rehab counselor lives vicariously through her already pregnant stepdaughter’s love affair with a drunk who spends his days in recovery and his nights in the bar. Full of wry wit, tender sympathy, and heartland attitude, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa is as strange, funny, and poignant as the real world it resembles.
Download or read book An American Tune written by Barbara Shoup and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name, a name she has not heard in more than 25 years. Not even her husband knows that back in the ‘60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, An American Tune illuminates the irrevocability of our choices and how those choices come to compose the tune of our lives.
Download or read book The Girl in the Torch written by Robert Sharenow and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Invention of Hugo Cabret meets True Grit in this heartfelt novel of resilience, hope, and discovering a family where you least expect it, from award-winning author Robert Sharenow. At the dawn of the twentieth century, thousands of immigrants are arriving in the promised land of New York City. Twelve-year-old Sarah has always dreamed of America, a land of freedom and possibility. In her small village she stares at a postcard of the Statue of Liberty and imagines the Lady beckoning to her. When Sarah and her mother finally journey across the Atlantic, though, tragedy strikes—and Sarah finds herself being sent back before she even sets foot in the country. Yet just as Sarah is ushered onto the boat that will send her away from the land of her dreams, she makes a life-or-death decision. She daringly jumps off the back of the boat and swims as hard as she can toward the Lady's island and a new life. Her leap of faith leads her to an unbelievable hiding place: the Statue of Liberty itself. Now Sarah must find a way to Manhattan while avoiding the night watchman and scavenging enough food to survive. When a surprising ally helps bring her to the city, Sarah finds herself facing new dangers and a life on her own. Will she ever find a true home in America?
Download or read book Naked Summer written by Andrew Scott and published by Press 53. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Naked Summer, Andrew Scott brilliantly conjures up my home state of Indiana, that in-between, mixed-up blend of farmland, suburbia, isolated towns and would be cities stuck in the flyover, but he accomplishes much more than this. His stunning collection of stories also deftly captures those in-between states that everyone finds themselves in at some point-those times of limbo when we're between jobs or relationships, or, most memorably, that last "naked summer" when childhood lingers and adulthood has not yet arrived. This is a heart-wrenching collection, at once hilarious and wise. I couldn't put it down." -Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady
Download or read book On the Come Up written by Hannah Weyer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NAACP Image Award Finalist An ALA/YALSA Alex Award Nominee AnnMarie is growing up fast. After years of living in foster homes and homeless shelters, the twelve-year-old girl can take care of herself and her ailing mother. At thirteen, she's competing with other girls for the attention of older boys in the hip hop and rap scene of Far Rockaway. At fourteen, she is in love and pregnant, but dreaming big. Taking a chance, she auditions for an independent film and—astonishingly—lands a lead role. As she tries to raise her baby girl and make sense of her relationship with her baby's father, her work on the movie offers AnnMarie a doorway to a wider world—Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Sundance Film Festival. With cinematic pacing and a vibrant voice, filmmaker Hannah Weyer’s unforgettable debut novel is a portrait of a tough, determined teenage girl striving to find the life she wants and the love she deserves.
Download or read book Citizen Hughes written by Michael Drosnin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2004-11-02 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese movie The Aviator, Howard Hughes is legendary as a playboy and pilot—but he is notorious for what he became: the ultimate mystery man. Citizen Hughes is the New York Times bestselling exposé of Hughes’s hidden life, and a stunning revelation of his “megalomaniac empire in the emperor’s own words” (Newsweek). At the height of his wealth, power, and invisibility, the world’s richest and most secretive man kept what amounted to a diary. The billionaire commanded his empire by correspondence, scrawling thousands of handwritten memos to unseen henchmen. It was the only time Howard Hughes risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires. Hughes claimed the papers were so sensitive—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my innermost activities”—that not even his most trusted aides or executives were allowed to keep the messages he sent them. But in the early-morning hours of June 5, 1974, unknown burglars staged a daring break-in at Hughes’s supposedly impregnable headquarters and escaped with all the confidential files. Despite a top-secret FBI investigation and a million-dollar CIA buyback bid, none of the stolen secret papers were ever found—until investigative reporter Michael Drosnin cracked the case. In Citizen Hughes, Drosnin reveals the true story of the great Hughes heist—and of the real Howard Hughes. Based on nearly ten thousand never-before-published documents, more than three thousand in Hughes’s own handwriting, Citizen Hughes is far more than a biography, or even an unwilling autobiography. It is a startling record of the secret history of our times.
Download or read book Acid West written by Joshua Wheeler and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking debut book of essays that takes readers on a trip through the muck of American myths that have settled in the desert of our country’s underbelly Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler’s great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world’s first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler’s stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape his family has called home for seven generations, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities, assembling a cabinet of narrative curiosities: a man who steps from the stratosphere and free-falls to the desert; a treasure hunt for buried Atari video games; a village plagued by the legacy of atomic testing; a showdown between Billy the Kid and the author of Ben-Hur; a UFO festival during the paranoid Summer of Snowden. The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico. Acid West illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening, Acid West is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.
Download or read book Geek Love written by Katherine Dunn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Download or read book The Revenge of Gaia written by James Lovelock and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-08-02 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Revenge of Gaia , bestselling author James Lovelock- father of climate studies and originator of the influential Gaia theory which views the entire earth as a living meta-organism-provides a definitive look at our imminent global crisis. In this disturbing new book, Lovelock guides us toward a hard reality: soon, we may not be able to alter the oncoming climate crisis. Lovelock's influential Gaia theory, one of the building blocks of modern climate science, conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living super-organism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gases have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from "flipping" into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself.
Download or read book This Must Be the Place written by Susan Jackson Rodgers and published by Northern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the summer of 1983. Ronald Reagan is in the White House, Princess Leia is on magazine covers, and Thea Knox is on the road. Fresh out of college, Thea is driving solo from California to New York. Her plan is to house-sit for her parents for the summer, but they sell her childhood home on a whim, leaving Thea (once again) to her own devices. She takes a detour to visit her Aunt Wendy in Merdale, a college town nestled in the Kansas prairie. Unlike Dorothy, Thea's adventure begins when she arrives in Kansas. Thea is immediately surrounded by her aunt's group of friends, including Julie, a bookstore owner; Nick, Julie's carpenter boyfriend; Bob, a stoner wildlife rehabilitator; and Amira, a lawyer who works with runaway girls. When she finds herself in love at first sight with Jimmy Ward, a local with a hazy past, Thea decides to extend her stay. Not everyone welcomes her into the fold, however, and Thea's own past—including her distant best friend and erstwhile boyfriends on either coast—is nipping at her heels. When she discovers a terrible secret that could upend Jimmy's world, the spell of happiness she has woven in this unlikely place threatens to break. This compelling coming-of-age novel explores the search for identity, love, friendship, and home, and celebrates the magic and mystery that exist in even the most ordinary places.
Download or read book Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman Color Edition Captain Underpants 5 written by Dav Pilkey and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George and Harold accidentally create a monster in the fifth book in this #1 New York Times bestselling series by Dav Pilkey, the author and illustrator of Dog Man! George and Harold are always good at using their imaginations, and that drives their mean homeroom teacher, Ms. Ribble, crazy! But this time, they've come up with much more than a silly prank... With her horrendous hairdo and two rabid robots, Wedgie Woman is well on her way to world domination, and only the Waistband Warrior can stop her!
Download or read book Writing Fiction written by Janet Burroway and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition of the classic, comprehensive guide to creative writing features new topics and writing prompts, contemporary examples, and more. A creative writer’s shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. This best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft. Now in its tenth edition, Writing Fiction is more accessible than ever for writers of all levels—inside or outside the classroom. This new edition continues to provide advice that is practical, comprehensive, and flexible. Moving from freewriting to final revision, Burroway addresses “showing not telling,” characterization, dialogue, atmosphere, plot, imagery, and point of view. It includes new topics and writing prompts, and each chapter now ends with a list of recommended readings that exemplify the craft elements discussed. Plus, examples and quotations throughout the book feature a wide range of today’s best and best-known creators of both novels and short stories.
Download or read book The Sweetheart written by Angelina Mirabella and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's 1953 and seventeen-year-old Leonie Putzkammer is cartoonishly tall and curvaceous, destined to spend the rest of her life waiting tables and living with her widowed father Franz in their Philadelphia row house. Until the day legendary wrestling promoter Salvatore Costantini walks into the local diner and offers her the chance of a lifetime. Leonie sets off for Florida to train at Joe Pospisil's School for Lady Grappling. There, she transforms into Gorgeous Gwen Davies, tag-team partner of legendary Screaming Mimi Hollander, and begins a romance with the soon-to-be Junior Heavyweight Champion Spider McGee."--
Download or read book The Invisible Boy written by Alyssa Hollingsworth and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If no one sees him, does he exist? This superhero-inspired adventure story with short comics between each chapter explores friendship and what it means to be truly brave. Nadia looks for adventure in the pages of her Superman comic books, until a mysterious boy saves her dog from drowning during a storm and then disappears. Now she finds herself in the role of Lois Lane, hunting down the scoop of the Invisible Boy. Suddenly she’s in a real-life adventure that’s far more dangerous than anything in her comic books. The Invisible Boy is a mystery and an adventure story, as well as a story about child labor trafficking. Like Katherine Applegate, author of Crenshaw and Wishtree, Alyssa Hollingsworth takes a difficult subject matter and makes it accessible for middle-grade readers. Featuring illustrations by Deborah Lee
