The Lehrmans, who run a small hat factory, lost their beloved son Harold in a blizzard. The Chimbrovas, who run a saloon, lost three of their boys on the SS Eastland when it sank in 1915. Each family holds out hope that one of their remaining children will rise to carry on the family business. But Benny Lehrman has no interest in making hats. His true passion is piano—especially jazz.At night he sneaks down to the South Side, slipping into predominantly black clubs to hear jazz groups play. Along the way he meets a black trumpeter, a man named Napoleon who becomes Benny’s close friend and musical collaborator. Their adventures together take Benny far from the life he knew as a delivery boy. Pearl Chimbrova recognizes their talent and invites them to start playing at her family’s saloon, which Napoleon dubs The Jazz Palace. Even as the novel charts the story of its characters, it also tells the tale of the city where they live. It is a world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs, in which black musicians are no freer than they were before the Civil War, white youths head down to the South Side to “slum,” and Al Capone and Louis Armstrong become legends. As The Jazz Palace steams through the 1920s, Benny, Pearl, and Napoleon forge a bond that is as memorable as it is lasting.

    Despite her new sunny locale, her plans go awry when she finds that she can’t quite outrun the past or bring herself to face an unknowable future. Every day of tropical bliss may be an invitation to disaster, but with her twin brother on her trail and a new relationship on the horizon, Libby is determined to forget about fate. Will she risk it all to live—and love—a little longer?From critically acclaimed author Camille Pagán comes a hilarious and hopeful story about a woman choosing between a “perfect” life and actually living.

    It has the potential to be groundbreaking in its raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family. Billy Lombardo is interested in the beauty of words. He is also a great observer of the world around him, and he is exquisite and precise in getting that world onto the page.Billy Lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, a Chicago Tribune “Best Fiction of 2005” selection. His novel Man With Two Arms is due from The Overlook Press in 2010.

    The authoritative account of the B-17 Flying Fortress, the most formidable heavy bomber of World War II, with 32 pages of photographs.

    Like many couples, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th-century fairytale château, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat.Throwing caution to the wind, Dick and Angel swapped their two-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with their two young children Arthur and Dorothy.Sharing their full journey for the first time, A Year at the Château follows Dick and Angel from when they first moved to France in the depths of winter and found bedrooms infested with flies, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through cracked windows, and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat, through to the monumental efforts that went into readying the château for their unforgettable wedding and their incredibly special first Christmas.Along the way we'll read glorious descriptions of rural life in France, with charming characters, delicious food and wonderful seasonal produce, together with the extraordinary list of renovations and restorations Dick and Angel completed, many of which were never shown on TV.As warm and entertaining as their much-loved show, A Year at the Château is a truly irresistible story of adventure and heart, epic ambitions and a huge amount of hard graft.

    

    Damn, now I sound stupid, too." -Bomani Jones, ESPN "It's great, and I have no idea what just happened, but Jerry Jones dick exploded and that's enough for me." -Spencer Hall, SB Nation "The only parody Twitter account worth following" -Deadspin.com "This is the least influential book of anything I've ever read. I hated it." -Adolf Hitler In what is being hailed by many, probably, as the best, funniest, most gut-shittingly poignant literary work since The New Testament, PFT Commenter takes you on a realistic-fiction journey through the backdoor politics of today's NFL. Set in the 2014 offseason, Roger Goodell and President Barack Obama become locked in a mano a mano battle over the future of the Dallas Cowboys, culminating in a literal fight to the death. Starring NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Barack Obama, Mike Ditka, Joe Biden, Michael Vick, Peter King, Ron Jaworski, Dan Snyder, Robert Griffin III, Danny Woodhead, J.J. Watt, Jerry Jones, Russell Wilson, Pete Carroll, and many more of your favorite NFL stars and media personalities; "Goodell vs. Obama: The Battle for the Future of the NFL" will take you on a journey that any NFL fan is sure to love, or at least not hate. WARNING: Told through the narrative eye and screaming mouth of an uneducated internet commenter, this book is filled with grammatical errors. It was written by a someone who was raised on scorching hot sports takes, light beer, and an undying love for Roger Goodell. He cares about TELLING, not about spelling. If that's going to be a problem,, there's the door.

    When he accepted the hit, Russ would not have believed whose interests he was actually serving. Now, with the job done, an otherworldly being is giving him with one hand what was just taken from him with the other. His life. Skills are everything and what doesn't kill you makes your skills stronger. Placed into the world of skills, Russ found himself faced with a new life governed by a system he did not completely understand. It is, however, a completely new start. Will Russ continue doing what he does best? Or will he be able to achieve the things that he had always wanted but considered to be a lost cause in his old life? Why not some of both? This is a litrpg story where the main character acquires skills and levels them up by using them. He gets ability choices as he levels up and as a reader you will be going through the choices with him, in most cases.

    Neither of them is 100 percent legitimate but they are not heavy thieves either. They beat the system as best they can with the various inside hustles of New York’s bar and restaurant scene.Charlie, managing a Village restaurant at age thirty-five, needs one shot to realize his dreams of owning his own place in New England. Meanwhile, he’s just a jump ahead of two shylocks and into the worst streak of losing horses he has ever gone through.Paulie is only a five-foot-three-inch waiter but he thinks big. Very image-conscious, he even tips toll booth attendants. And he went into hock to become part-owner of a “turrow bed” racehorse. Now he has an idea for one foolproof burglary that will solve all his problems for good, and he enlists Charlie in his scheme.The third member of the team is Barney. A semi-retired Irish safecracker from the Bronx, Barney has a retarded son as is willing to take one last gamble to provide for his future. A clean break-in, a three-way split, and each of their dreams will come true.Maybe. Before it’s over, they find themselves relentlessly hunted by both the Mafia “wise guys” and the police. And each of them grasps for survival in a different way.Acutely realistic yet wondrously funny, The Pope of Greenwich Village captures the speech, the scams, the flavor, the dread, and the humor of ordinary people scrambling to make it big in a neighborhood that prides itself on creating and enforcing its own laws. It marks the impressive debut of a gifted writer.

    The story of Elizabeth and her mother Jenny is remarkable for its fullness of details: the pieces of family silver the grandmother mails to Jenny, piece by piece, over the years; Jenny's vivid memories of her uncle's viola d'amore lessons; the smell of the wood floors in the family's Vienna home. It's an emotional story of what is inherited from one generation to the next.

    A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants’ perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance. It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.” Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.

    Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student, he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure. Gang Leader for a Day is an inside view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between two young and ambitious men, a universe apart.

    On their travels, Edward works to overcome the challenge of reintegrating with his siblings and parents. They try to work together in search of a brighter future, all feel the strain of losing their home and livelihood. Edward is not the same boy as when he left home and must balance his hard-fought independence with his role as brother and son.Despite optimism for the future and escaping the destruction of Azalon, a dark threat looms over the family’s hope of rebuilding. Edward’s skills continue to progress, but will it be enough to protect the family’s fragile beginnings? Overcoming his own fears and personal demons is the biggest challenge Edward must face as he chooses a future with his family, or one of an adventurer.

    Constricted by the rigid rules of the East End orphanage she is brought up in, she escapes to dazzling streets of Soho where she is adopted by a group of prostitutes. Soon enough, she too is earning her living 'on the game'.When Billy 'Apples' Rafferty, a Cockney villain with a heart of gold, becomes her protector, Sue swears to give up her racy life. But when Billy is sent to prison, she soon breaks her promise and her earthy beauty makes her one of Soho's most popular hostesses.When a lucky encounter secures Susan a respectable job as a manageress of a small hotel in Devon, things finally seem to be going her way. But then her past catches up with her . . .

    Settle down in a magical place that time forgot, where the snow glistens on the frosty ground, the fairy-lights glow like magical stars in the trees and romance blossoms against all the odds.When the new vicar and his family move to Dream Valley just before Christmas, they need a lot of help.Local playboy, the gorgeous Brad Hudson, takes one look at the vicar’s daughter and, he is the first in line.He will do anything to win Dolly’s heart, but having heard of his reputation, her father has other ideas and does everything in his power to tear them apart.Not used to having to work for love, Brad tries his best but he has never come up against a protective father quite like Scott Macmillan.Ex special forces soldier, turned military vicar, he proves a tough adversary.Brad is determined to make Dolly fall in love with him and rises to the challenge until her father reveals his trump card, leaving Brad and Dolly battling to stay together.Will love blossom under the starry skies of winter or will the vicar have his prayers answered and keep his daughter’s heart safe?Curl up with a sweet, delightful romance to brighten your day and discover an array of quirky characters in a place where magic happens and dreams come true.