. . It was only cheap glass, a fraud, a come-on for the suckers who paid Doc Magus to gaze into its depths and tell them tomorrow would be better. And Doc--a decent man, a smart man--pitied them. Yet tonight, even Doc had to believe the Madball. There was nothing left to lead him to the money--enough money to spring him free of the raucous, sordid world of the pitchmen and the pickled punks, the cotton candy and the kewpie dolls--and the belly dancers who needed him for all-night alibis.Doc was shrewd, but not quite shrewd enough. Someone else knew about the $42,000--a specialist in death, who was only yards away. . .MADBALL is a novel of one traveling show, and of the lives of its carneys, who live to close to the edge of frenzy.

    A rich compendium of looniness!

    This rich collection, filled with interviews, essays, and color reproductions of testosterone-heavy thirty-five-cent magazines with names like Man's Exploits, Rage, and Escape to Adventure (to name a few), illustrates the culture created to help veterans confront the confusion of jobs, girls, and the Cold War on their return from World War II and the Korean War.Contributions from the original men's magazine talent like Bruce Jay Friedman, Mario Puzo, and Mort Künstler bring the reader inside the offices, showing us how the writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers put together decades of what were then called "armpit slicks." Reproductions of original paintings from Norman Saunders, Künstler, and Norm Eastman are featured within, and Bill Devine's annotated checklist of the many thousands of adventure magazines is essential for collectors of the genre.The expanded paperback edition includes wartime illustrations and advertisements from mass-produced magazines that preview the xenophobia and racist ideas later seen throughout men's adventure magazines of the '50s and '60s.

    This book presents the best of them: pipe-smoking robots, clairvoyant pennies, zoo jailbreaks, literary cannibals, corned beef in space, revolving squirrels, disappearing Scottish lighthouse keepers, reincarnated pussycats, dueling Churchills, horse spectacles, onrushing molasses, and hundreds more. Plus the obscure words, odd inventions, puzzles and paradoxes that have made the website a quirky favorite with millions of readers -- hundreds of examples of the marvelous, the diverting, and the strange, now in a portable format to occupy your idle hours.

    Edgar Pool is "The Horn," the hero, and the man who helps change the face of American music. He becomes the legend whose triumphant and tragic career is reconstructed through the memories of his friends and lovers.

    foreign policy? How about cute angst-filled teenage vampire toyboys? Well, too bad. None of those things are in this book. Instead you'll join a guy in a Viking suit on an absurdly epic quest to figure out the meaning of life. There will be obstacles, of course: rabid gangs of disgruntled grannies, rival cults of pie-enthusiasts, toasters, anti-matter conversion do-hickeys, Shadow Men, bandits, hippies, annoying celestial bodies, the Department of Internationally Sexy Affairs, and probably way too many dick jokes for this book to ever be considered for any serious academic curriculum. You know, the usual. So what are you waiting for? Light a few candles, pour another glass of wine, and grab the lube. You're about to LOVE ME.

    In this scandalous memoir, America's favorite politician discusses his early years, before he became ultimate wingman to the leader of the free world. For the first time ever “Diamond” Joe discusses the formative experiences of his life, including his childhood selling hooch in Scranton, his years cruising college campuses picking up co-eds in a Del Rio, the grade-A tang he plowed in the summer of '87, and his "sweet ass gig" as Senator of Delaware. Speaking of his own work, Vice President Biden says, "Amigo, you're just one click away from buying Uncle Joe's tell all autobiography. My sweetest guitar riffs, bustiest lays, wildest benders, and sexiest appropriation bills, it's all in there. You'll not only hear about me and my buddy Barack, but I guarantee you'll pick up some tricks that'll serve you well in the sack. Plus, I'm deep in the hole right now and really need the scratch."

    More than just a clever piece of black humour, in Joko's Anniversary Topo urges the reader to a very serious consideration of the potential degredation of any individual by society.

    Spending his lunch hours in a porno theater to relieve his boredom, a young advertising executive discovers an obscure film called Throat Sprockets and develops a fascination for women's throats that gradually consumes his life.

    But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger’s lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife.Threaded throughout Angels & Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-“concrete” poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.

    It’s a nice, quiet, peaceful life. Apart from the kidnappings. And the aliens. Michael Marshall Smith is the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, the August Delerth Award, the International Horror Guild Award, six British Fantasy Awards and the Prix Bob Morane, nominated for five World Fantasy Awards and CWA Silver Dagger — and the only author ever to win the BFS Award for Best Short Story four times. Now, for the first time, his internationally-revered short fiction is finally becoming available in ebook format...

    The only defense against the Alliance's creeping totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot team of rebels that includes Rick Rickenharp, a retro-rocker whose artistic and political sensibilities intertwine, and John Swenson, a mole who has infiltrated the Alliance. As the fight continues and years progress, so does the technology and brutality of the Alliance... but ordinary people like the damaged visionary Smoke, Claire Rimpler on FirStep, and Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth are bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the darkness from becoming humankind's Total Eclipse - or die trying John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent."-William Gibson. An omnibus of all three novels-revised by the author-of the prophetic, still frighteningly relevant cyberpunk masterpieces: Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. With an introduction by Richard Kadrey and biographical note by Bruce Sterling.

    A novel by Mark Shipper - The Life and Times of the Beatles: The spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs & Disasters Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion.

    Ordered to destroy the comet, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal...2034: Then a reply is heard. Searching for the source of this signal that comes from outside the solar system, Nigel discovers the existence of a sentient ship. When the new vessel begins to communicate directly with him, the astronaut learns of the horrors that await humanity. For the ship was created by an alien race that has spent billions and billions of years searching for intelligent life...to annihilate it.In the Ocean of Night is a 1977 hard science fiction novel by Gregory Benford. It is the first novel in his Galactic Center Saga. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1977. It was first published as a novelette in the May/June 1972 edition of Worlds of If Science Fiction.

    The soldiers virtually wait out the war--indulging in various hobbies, exploring the castle's excesses (including a replica of Venice, complete with canals and gondolas), in other words, trying to do something other than war--until a German counterattack puts them in the fray. Semi-autobiographical, ?"Castle Keep"?was the first major novel to use the real language of the soldier, uncensored and true-to-life. Inventive and brilliantly comic, this novel is the quintessential portrait of man at war.