It was the U.K.’s worst rail disaster in years. On the morning of October 5, 1999, two rush-hour commuter trains collided just outside London. Hundreds were feared dead. Though he was traveling in the front-most carriage, the novelist Andrew Rosenheim survived the crash. In “The Secrets of Carriage H,” Rosenheim recalls in heart-pounding detail the events of that day and opens up about the emotional rollercoaster that consumed him for months thereafter. Told with the rich textures of a novel and the bare heart of a memoir, “The Secrets of Carriage H” explores the unspoken consequences of survival and offers brutal, sometimes hilarious insight into the human condition. Andrew Rosenheim was born and raised in Chicago, but has lived in England for the last thirty-five years. He worked in publishing for many years at Oxford University Press and then as the Managing Director of Penguin Press. He is the author of seven novels, most recently Fear Itself and The Little Tokyo Informant. His writing has appeared in The Times, The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. Married, he lives with his wife and twin daughters near Oxford and is the editor of Kindle Singles in the U.K.Cover design by Evan Twohy.

    

    A wonderful read.' - Kevin Hand, BBC London. You’re in Greece and are given a €20 note with an email address scribbled on it. What would you do:1. Spend it? 2. Slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy’s birthday card?3. Send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter.Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he’s about to walk Spain’s fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply. Incredibly, it’s from a woman who lives on the 1000-year-old pilgrim path, far away from where the money first crossed his palm. She invites him to sleep… ‘on her house’. Hiking nine hundred kilometres on the Road to Santiago to a blind date with the mystery €20 woman, he discovers the utopia of his fantasies, befriends a Hungarian who speaks English in song titles and has his raison d’être revealed to him by a barefoot Mayan mystic. Will he meet his happily-ever-after too? Buy this pacy, exuberant, laugh-out-loud travelogue laced with tips for fellow pilgrims to find out...

    More recently, a number of science fiction, fantasy, media, and game works have found devoted fan followings. The advent of the Internet has brought these groups from relatively limited, face-to-face enterprises to easily accessible global communities, within which fan texts proliferate and are widely read and even more widely commented upon. New interactions between readers and writers of fan texts are possible in these new virtual communities. From Star Trek to Harry Potter, the essays in this volume explore the world of fan fiction--its purposes, how it is created, how the fan experiences it. Grouped by subject matter, essays cover topics such as genre intersection, sexual relationships between characters, character construction through narrative, and the role of the beta reader in online communities. The work also discusses the terminology used by creators of fan artifacts and comments on the effects of technological advancements on fan communities. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

    It's time for the brave, hilarious women of comedy to finally get the recognition they deserve. The people who say women aren't funny are actually saying something else: that humor in the hands of women is radical and scary. Nevertheless, women have persisted for generations now, deploying their wit in game-changing ways. The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women showcases fifty women -- past and present -- who used humor to deliver cutting social commentary, tangle with sensitive subjects, challenge traditional ideas about femininity, and above all, do anything but sit still and stay quiet when laughs are on the line. This book explores where the women are today and how they got there, as well as how they helped change the conversation on what role women played in comedy. This sisterhood of empowering and often under-recognized figures includes generations of trailblazers who went on to become standups, writers, and actresses. These women include Mae West, Lucille Ball, Gilda Radner, Tina Fey, Amy Sedaris, Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres, Mindy Kaling, Jessica Williams, and many more.

    Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist.This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions--movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays--some narrative, others lyrical and poetic--explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.

    The author doesn't pull any punches describing the good, the bad, the funny and the just plain ridiculous of the Submarine Service. Besides a wealth of information about what it's like to serve on a submarine, you'll meet real life characters like Tongue, Snake and Button Butt John. Did submarines make them rude, crude, and crazy. Or does the Submarine Service act as a magnet for every nut in the Navy? One thing is sure, after two months underwater, and with their back pay in their back pocket, Sub Sailors are as wild as cowboys after a cattle drive. Bar the doors and hide your daughters. Every reader owes it to themselves to use Amazons "Look In" feature to take a peek inside this unique and entertaining book.

    Like many simple plans it went wrong before it started and they ended up with two dogs and a campervan named Tinkerbelle. On the second day of their journey Tinkerbelle begins to self-destruct, helped by the new dog who does his best to eat her from the inside out. This is their story, as they travel from sandy beaches to snow-topped mountains exploring the diverse cultures, cuisines and countryside making up the country called France. Their journey takes them to places out of the ordinary, meeting interesting characters and witnessing ancient traditions. While the dogs rejoice in the freedom they find running on the beaches, Susie and Terry spend a lot of time holding their breath, wondering whether Tinkerbelle will manage to negotiate impossible mountain routes and get them home before she completely disintegrates. Travels with Tinkerbelle is a revision of "A Perfect Circle," previously published by Transworld Publishers. Enhanced features of this edition include chapter by chapter map links of the journey.

    Others find refuge and tranquility in the mountains, a place where they can seek their selves, perhaps even God. And over millennia, the mountains have cradled civilization itself and nurtured teeming, irrepressible life.With over fifty essays, this comprehensive volume brings together a dazzling range of voices—among others, Fa-Hsien, Pundit Nain Singh, Heinrich Harrer, Fanny Parkes, Dharamvir Bharati, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Rahul Sankrityayan, Amitav Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Frank Smythe, Paul Brunton, Edmund Hillary, Mark Twain, Sarat Chandra Das, Dom Moraes, Manjushree Thapa—and the two editors themselves—in an unparalleled panorama.Here you will find stories of great ascents and descents; The madness of war on the ‘world’s highest battlefield’; Tales of exploratory derring-do in Tibet and elsewhere; A drunken jaunt in Kumaon and even the probable sighting of an 'Abominable Snowman in the Valley of Flowers'. A seeker has an intense spiritual experience on Mount Kailas, another among shamans on a mountaintop in Nepal and looking for the snow leopard in Ladakh, an author finds himself. A resident of a Sherpa village writes a heartfelt account of the aftermath of an avalanche which killed porters and climbers on Everest and residents of Langtang record an oral history of the earthquake which wiped out their village. A matriarch describes her life and family in Almora of a bygone time; A prisoner in Dehra Dun jail draws solace from visits by birds and small animals and the fragrance of lime makes a traveler's night in a remote Garhwal village memorable for all time.Edited by Ruskin Bond, India’s most-loved writer and acclaimed novelist Namita Gokhale, this anthology spans the entire range, from the foothills to the highest peaks and from its easternmost to its westernmost ends. Himalaya will keep you riveted.

    Twelve-year-old Donny is a real-life cross between Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield. Donny is doing his best to navigate the world he shares with his cruel and neglectful mother, his mother's abusive boyfriends, churchgoers who want to save Donny's soul, and a best friend who wants Donny to go to work for a dangerous local thug doing petty theft and dealing drugs. Donny does everything he can to take care of himself and his younger brothers, but with each new development, the present becomes more fraught with peril--and the future more uncertain. "Heartrending and humorous. In scene after vivid scene, Dempsey presents his inspiring true story with accomplished style. Dempsey's discipline as a writer lends the real-life tale the feel of a fictional page-turner." Kirkus Reviews "This memoir is for everyone who has ever known someone abandoned, someone unloved, someone with barriers that seem impenetrable. With wit and delicacy, Dempsey exposes wounds that we would prefer to ignore, without ever pushing the reader away with any sense of melodrama. A truly unforgettable memoir." San Francisco Book Review--An estimated 700,000 children are victims of child maltreatment in the United States each year: 78% suffer neglect, 18% are physically abuse, 9% are sexually abused, 8% are psychologically maltreated, and an astonishing 78% suffer neglect. (Source: National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System) Don Dempsey experienced childhood abuse and neglect first hand, but went on to find business success and a fulfilling family life as an adult. "If you're lucky, you make it to adulthood in one piece," says Don. "But there's no guarantee the rest of your life is going to be any better. Abused kids are often plagued by fear and insecurity. They battle depression and have trouble with relationships. In the worst cases, abused children perpetuate the cycle." But Don is living proof that you can overcome a childhood of abuse and neglect. "You start by letting go of as much of the guilt (yes, abused kids feel guilty) and as many of the bad memories as possible. At the same time, you hold on to the things that helped you survive. For me, it was the belief that you can make life better by working at it and earning it. It helps to have a sense of humor, too." Some of Don's experiences will make you cringe, but you'll want to keep reading because of Don's natural storytelling ability and sense of humor. And in the end, you'll appreciate hearing Don's inspiring story.

    In the tradition of “true crime” books, The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the center of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set including the infamous Lord Lucan who disappeared following the murder of his children’s nanny.

     After November 8, 2016, first came the sadness; then came the rage, the activism, and the protests; and, finally, for thousands of women, the next step was to run for office--many of them for the first time. More women campaigned for local or national office in the 2018 election cycle than at any other time in US history, challenging accepted notions about who seeks power and who gets it.Journalist Caitlin Moscatello reported on this wave of female candidates for New York magazine's The Cut, Glamour, and Elle. And in See Jane Win, she further documents this pivotal time in women's history. Closely following four candidates throughout the entire process, from the decision to run through Election Day, See Jane Win takes readers inside their exciting, winning campaigns and the sometimes thrilling, sometimes brutal realities of running for office while female. MEET THE CANDIDATES: Abigail Spanberger, a mom of three young girls and a former CIA operative, running for Congress in Virginia to unseat Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat.Catalina Cruz, a Colombian-born attorney whose state assembly bid could make her the first Dreamer elected in New York and only the third in the country.Anna Eskamani, an Iranian-American woman running for state office in Florida, with a campaign motivated by her mother's health-care struggles and the Pulse Nightclub shootings.London Lamar, a Memphis native looking to become the youngest female representative in the Tennessee state house, running in one of the only Democratic and Black-majority areas of a largely conservative state.Beyond the 2018 victories, Moscatello speaks with researchers, strategists, and the leaders of organizations that helped women win. What she discovers is that the candidates who triumphed in 2018 emphasized authenticity and passion instead of conforming to the stereotype of what a candidate should look or sound like, a formula that will be more relevant than ever as we approach the 2020 presidential election.

    Her voice is wry and relatable, her takes often surprising.Meet the Woman Behind the Books…In this collection of original and previously published nonfiction essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers readers an introspective look into various facets of her life. Her childhood and school years, her successful career as a newspaper reporter, the challenge of balance, her life as a novelist and a reader—Lippman’s takes on these universal subjects offer as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction. Of the 16 essays, only three have appeared in book form before. “Game of Crones,” published online by Longreads in May 2019, has more than 100,000 unique views to date.Essays include:· Men Explain The Wire to Me· Game of Crones· My Life as a Villainess· My Father’s Bar· The 31st StockingFans of Laura Lippman will gain a better understanding in these candid essays of who she is and of the life choices that influenced her writing and helped her to become the successful author she is today.

    These pioneers have forged new identities for themselves and for future generations, and they speak out about the hijab, relationships, sex and sexuality, activism, spirituality, and much more. Contributors: Su'ad Abdul-Khabeer, Sham-e-Ali al-Jamil, Samina Ali, Sarah Eltantawi, Yousra Y. Fazili, Suheir Hammad, Mohja Kahf, Precious Rasheeda Muhammad, Asra Q. Nomani, Manal Omar, Khalida Saed, Asia Sharif-Clark, Khadijah Sharif-Drinkard, Aroosha Zoq Rana, Inas Younis

    After a quarter century serving on the highest court in America and fighting tirelessly for gender equality and civil rights, RBG has become one of the most influential legal figures in the history of the country. From her landmark cases working with the ACLU to her brilliantly meme-worthy moments of dissent, RBG is a true American trailblazer.