First Shift


A.J. Skelly - 2021
    Too bad she's off-limits. She's human. He's not. When an accidental slip of his teeth endangers Megan and his entire werewolf pack, it's up to Sam to find a solution. Unbeknownst to them, Sam's bite has thrust Megan into the crosshairs of a killer. Sam and Megan must work together to find the threat, protect the pack, and maybe fall in love. But they better do it before the next full moon. #sambitmeg #wolvesofrockfalls #ajskellywrites

Last Shot


Jock Zonfrillo - 2021
    From reckless drug addict to one of Australia’s top chefs and television stars: MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo's powerful life story will shock and inspire. Jock’s life spiralled out of control when he tried heroin for the first time as a teenager while growing up in 1980s Glasgow. For years he balanced a career as a rising star amongst legendary chefs with a crippling drug addiction that took him down many dark paths. Fired from his job at a Michelin star restaurant in Chester, England, after a foul-mouthed rant, Jock made his way to London looking for work and found himself in front of the legendary Marco Pierre White. He credits White for saving his life, but Jock continued to struggle with addiction in a world of excess, celebrity, and cut-throat ambition. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Jock shot up his last shot of heroin before boarding a plane to Sydney, where he would find passion and new meaning in life in the most unexpected places. There would be more struggles ahead, including two failed marriages, the closure of his prized restaurant during COVID-19, his time on-country, and some very public battles.This is his unforgettable story.

The Generator


J. Sselxuyt - 2014
    Stuck in a dead end job, for an over bearing boss, living next to the girl of his dreams who only wants to be friends, things couldn't get any worse. Okay, I lied. Yes they can. When a strange woman shows up in his office, a woman only he can see, he realizes he needs to take some time off. Ending up in the hospital wasn't what he had in mind. Too bad that woman won't leave him alone, confesses she's a succubus, and drags him into a fantastical world where all of his dreams, and nightmares, become a reality.

An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith


John Kenneth Muir - 2002
    Filmed on a shoestring budget after hours at a convenience store, it was crude (in technique and language), realistic and, above all, hilarious. The movie's nationwide success helped launch the indepedent film boom of the 1990s and catapulted its director, Kevin Smith, to full-fledged stardom. Smith's work is explored in AN ASKEW VIEW, the first ever study of his films. John Kenneth Muir examines all of Smith's movies. including MALLRATS, CHASING AMY, and the hugely controversial and variously interpreted DOGMA. Muir discusses Smith's themes and obsessions in depth: his New Jersey boosterism, the cast of characters that pop in and out of all of his films, and the references to STAR WARS and other icons of pop culture. AN ASKEW VIEW is a fascinating and detailed history of the art of this visionary filmmaker, New Jersey's favorite local-boy-makes-good since Bruce Springsteen.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won


Victor Davis Hanson - 2017
    Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya.The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory.An authoritative new history of astonishing breadth, The Second World Wars offers a stunning reinterpretation of history's deadliest conflict.

Blood on the Bar (Lucas the Atoner #1)


Iain Rob Wright - 2018
    This isn't the first time Lucas Fergus has woken up next to the bins outside a bar, but it is the first time he's done so with no memory of the days before. Something bad has happened, but he has no idea what. And things keep getting worse. Is he finally paying the price for the things he's done during his long and debauched life? With a sudden and unexpected change coming over him, Lucas finds himself trapped inside an old english pub with a group of people he doesn't much like. Someone is toying with him it seems; someone that has been holding a grudge for a very long time. But messing with Lucas is a bad idea, for there is more to him than meets the eye. Soon there will be Hell to pay. A fantasy horror novel with hearty doses of mystery and humour. Iain Rob Wright scares the hell out of me!" - J.A. Konrath

Spin The Bottle


chellefillion45
    He's the dangerous, mysterious playboy, while she's the shy, innocent good girl. An unlikely pair, for sure, these two have never seen each other as anything more than just "friends." But, one day, Miles convinces Rachel to attend a party in celebration of their senior year of high school. Will an innocent game of "Spin the Bottle" change their relationship forever?

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia


Andrei Lankov - 2013
    A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. After providing an accessible history of the nation, he turns his focus to what North Korea is, what its leadership thinks, and how its people cope with living in such an oppressive and poor place. He argues that North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. A living political fossil, it clings to existence in the face of limited resources and a zombie economy, manipulating great powers despite its weakness. Its leaders are not ideological zealots or madmen, but perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world. Even though they preside over a failed state, they have successfully used diplomacy-including nuclear threats-to extract support from other nations. But while the people in charge have been ruthless and successful in holding on to power, Lankov goes on to argue that this cannot continue forever, since the old system is slowly falling apart. In the long run, with or without reform, the regime is unsustainable. Lankov contends that reforms, if attempted, will trigger a dramatic implosion of the regime. They will not prolong its existence. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive.

The Mediterranean Method: Your Complete Plan to Harness the Power of the Healthiest Diet on the Planet -- Lose Weight, Prevent Heart Disease, and More!


Steven Masley - 2019
    News and World Report in 2021--helps readers lose weight and improve the health of their heart, brain, gut, and microbiome.From southern Italy, Sardinia, and France to Spain, Greece, and Northern Africa the Mediterranean region is synonymous with sparkling azure waters and clear blue skies. It's also home to most of the world's longest-lived and vibrantly healthy people. Now we know why! Repeatedly ranked the #1 diet by U.S. News and World Report, the Mediterranean eating style--abundant seafood, vegetables, fruits, beans and nuts; lots of olive oil; a wide variety of herbs and spices; and even dark chocolate and red wine--has been scientifically proven to maintain a healthy gut and healthy weight, thereby reducing your risk for heart disease, dementia, memory loss, and many cancers in the process.Taking this famously healthy and life-enhancing "prescription" one step further, Dr. Steven Masley--renowned physician, nutritionist, bestselling author, and trained chef--offers all the flavors and benefits of the Mediterranean diet, but with a "skinny" twist: he focuses on delicious ingredients with a low-glycemic load. Including 50 recipes for food everyone at the table will love--from hearty breakfasts, crowd-pleasing appetizers, soups, and sides, to family-style salads, memorable main meals, and irresistible desserts--The Mediterranean Method is a revolutionary program for losing weight and maintaining the amazing health you regain. Slim down and protect your heart, your brain, and your healthy longevity--all while you enjoy the amazing bounty, variety, and joy of Mediterranean cooking!

Orphan


H. Jonas Rhynedahll - 2010
    To escape a world wide cataclysm created by sorcerers who cannot resist the lure of ultimate power, the infant is cast into a distant mundane future. In this powerless age, Magic has become nothing more than a despised fanatical religion and those who practice Magic are persecuted, hunted, and killed. In order to escape a destiny that magicians long dead have written for him, Mar must learn to use the inborn abilities that make him the last true master of magic. Orphan is the first book in the epic fantasy series, The Key to Magic.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin


Timothy Snyder - 2010
    Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.From BooklistIf there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections.

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings


Daniil Kharms - 2007
    In this brilliant translation by Matvei Yankelevich, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms s literary reputation a reputation that grew in Russia even as the Soviet establishment worked to suppress it.A master of formally inventive poetry and what today would be called micro-fiction, Kharms built off the legacy of Russian Futurist writers to create a uniquely deadpan style written out of and in spite of the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. Featuring the acclaimed novella The Old Woman and darkly humorous short prose sequence Events (Sluchai), Today I Wrote Nothing also includes dozens of short prose pieces, plays, and poems long admired in Russia, but never before available in English. A major contribution for American readers and students of Russian literature and an exciting discovery for fans of contemporary writers as eclectic as George Saunders, John Ashbery, and Martin McDonagh, Today I Wrote Nothing is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.About the EditorMATVEI YANKELEVICH is also a co-translator of Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006). His translation of the Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Cloud in Pants" appears in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky. He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work, and his writing has appeared in Fence, Open City, and many other literary journals. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York City and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Press in Brooklyn.

Washington: A History of Our National City


Tom Lewis - 2012
    From the moment the federal government moved to the District of Columbia in December 1800, Washington has been central to American identity and life. Shaped by politics and intrigue, poverty and largess, contradictions and compromises, Washington has been, from its beginnings, the stage on which our national dramas have played out. In Washington, the historian Tom Lewis paints a sweeping portrait of the capital city whose internal conflicts and promise have mirrored those of America writ large. Breathing life into the men and women who struggled to help the city realize its full potential, he introduces us to the mercurial French artist who created an ornate plan for the city "en grande" members of the nearly forgotten anti-Catholic political party who halted construction of the Washington monument for a quarter century; and the cadre of congressmen who maintained segregation and blocked the city's progress for decades. In the twentieth century Washington's Mall and streets would witness a Ku Klux Klan march, the violent end to the encampment of World War I "Bonus Army" veterans, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the painful rebuilding of the city in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. "It is our national center," Frederick Douglass once said of Washington, DC; "it belongs to us, and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and its destiny." Interweaving the story of the city's physical transformation with a nuanced account of its political, economic, and social evolution, Lewis tells the powerful history of Washington, DC " the site of our nation's highest ideals and some of our deepest failures.

Russia's Last Romanovs: In Their Own Words


Helen Azar - 2013
    The entire family, including their personal physician, retainers, and even their pets, became tragic victims of the Bolshevik revolution. They were arrested, exiled, and ultimately secretly murdered in a small cellar of a house in the Urals, in the summer of 1918. In this book, you will follow the events which led up to their eventual tragic fate through personal words of each family member, as well as their close friends and associates. Their letters, diaries, and postcards - many of which have been translated into English here for the first time - tell a unique story, and have yet a lot to reveal. Translated from Russian by Helen Azar, along with Eva and Dan McDonald, who translated most of the 1918 letters from French, this book offers an extraordinary glimpse into the very private world, and the final years, of the last Russian imperial family - which they chronicle in their own words.

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution


Yuri Slezkine - 2017
    Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.