The Ducks In The Bathroom Are Not Mine: A decade of procrastination 2007 - 2017


David Thorne - 2017
     Includes Overdue Account, Walter's Cargo Shorts, Simon's Piecharts, Missing Missy, Obviously a Foggot, Formal Complaints, Justin’s Floodlight, Matthew’s Party, Permission Slip and many more.

I’m Absolutely Fine!: A Manual for Imperfect Women


Annabel Rivkin - 2018
    not like that - here, I'll do it, do I have to do everything? WTF?'Is it just me? We gnaw on that, don't we? Is it just me? Well, look around. Look at the rage, the resolution, the 'hear me roar', the panic, the power, the chin hairs, the shame, the empathy, the conversation, the sheer potential.Welcome to Midulthood. A place where we recognise that we are all more alike than we are unalike. Of course it's not just you. If we're not in it together, we're not in it at all...From sex (What Could Possibly Go Wrong) to self-image (Does This Straightjacket Make Me Look Fat?), I'm Absolutely Fine is a wry look at real life, real wisdom and real information framed in fun.

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked


Steve Almond - 2019
    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

Remembering Anita Cobby: The Case, the Husband, the Aftermath – 30 Years On


Mark Morri - 2016
    Five men were caught and, amid unprecedented scenes, jailed for life. For young reporter Mark Morri, the case was a baptism of fire. Told to 'find the husband', he despaired: Cobby had changed his name and disappeared. But the Daily Mirror found him, and Morri's interviews sent newspaper sales soaring. For nearly thirty years, Morri and Cobby kept in touch. In this book, John finally opens up, recounting how he and Anita fell in love, travelled the world, suffered the pain of her miscarriage, and how he still believes today that they are soulmates. He also explains why they were apart at the time of the murder. Weaving in chilling material from the autopsy police files, and interviews with the detectives who hunted down the killers, Mark Morri explores the ripple effects of the murder that still shocks a nation.

Almost Damned


Christopher Leibig - 2021
    In Almost Damned, little does Sam know that his most challenging cases are all leading up to one monumental trial, in which he will lay before the Court the visceral complexities of good vs. evil.As Sam navigates his cases in Bennet County, it becomes increasingly apparent that his clients-old and new-are surprisingly interconnected, especially when old clients rise from the dead. Literally. He and his office are besieged by death threats and mysterious invitations, each one a clue that compels him to dig deeper into his own past. With each new discovery, Sam leads himself and his team deeper into a nether world in an attempt to bring redemption to his toughest clients of all-the descendants of the biblical Fallen Angels who have been walking the earth as humans for centuries, unable to find peace.

Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast


Lorna Crozier - 2001
    What is this craving that overpowers all else? What is it like to be addicted, and what does it take to get straight or sober? In this new and expanded edition of a widely praised collection, an outstanding roster of courageous writers present vivid renderings of the addiction experience in all its highs and lows.These first-person accounts describe battles with alcohol, heroin, smoking, food, gambling, and sex. Some contributors still struggle with their habits; others have managed to defeat them; two lost their lives to addiction's ravages. This is a book about compulsion, recovery, and struggle: a potent concoction that will have readers hooked.Contributors include Lorna Crozier, Peter Gzowski, Patrick Lane, Evelyn Lau, John Newlove, Stephen Reid, David Adams Richards, Lois Simmie, Sheri-D Wilson, and Marnie Woodrow.

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read


Virginia Woolf - 2019
    S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One’s Own.Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a “substitute for living” because she was “forbidden to scamper on the grass”. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.

Old Monarch: Poems


Courtney Marie Andrews - 2021
    Critically acclaimed songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews presents her first poetry collection.This poetry collection reads like a transformation, me, the narrator, being the figurative Old Monarch. Documenting this journey, the book is separated into three sections, "Sonoran Milkweed," "Longing In Flight," and "Eucalyptus Tree (My Arrival to Rest)."In the first stage of my journey, I explore my childhood in Arizona, and the naive assumptions of youth. At this stage in my journey, I am impressionable, seeing the world with all its nuances for the first time. Through the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, I explore some dark family dynamics and what a child sees. Several characters turn up in the early poems including my cowboy grandpa, and the single mother who raised me, despite many forthcomings. The early poems also explore my desire to see a brighter world of possibility beyond the dusty desert island, and see humans more clearly within the confounds of discovery.In the second stage, I have left home. I am falling in love for the first time, as I become a young woman.Finally, the last stage is the old monarch's arrival to the garden. There are a lot of metaphysical and philosophical poems in this section. I arrive at the figurative garden, and I finally understand the journey at the edge of my life. There are a lot of poems in the context of a garden here, accepting mortality and the ever-changing world. These are meant to be wise old woman poems.

All My Dogs Go to Heaven


Kay Bratt - 2021
    Kay Bratt explores these ideas in All (my) Dogs Go to Heaven. Touching on relevant Biblical scriptures, she chronicles her tumultuous past— including a traveling childhood and a near decade of domestic abuse— revealing how her beloved pets helped her cope, and instilled hope for better days ahead. Interspersed within this memoir are short essays from real people who have experienced signs from their departed pets as proof that they are still around in spirit. Included in the back of the book is a Grief Guide to help get us through those first devastating days after our loss.Insightful and fascinating, Kay Bratt has ultimately given us a message of hope with All (my) Dogs Go to Heaven. -Judy Morgan, Founder of Yorkie Rescue of the Carolinas

Prepare: Living Your Faith in an Increasingly Hostile Culture


J. Paul Nyquist - 2015
    Trend lines, unless altered, point to accelerated cultural change and even greater drift from the historic roots of this country. As a result, there is a growing intolerance towards believers and their message. Increasingly, followers of Jesus are being viewed as narrow, bigoted and hateful.  Yet all of this was predicted by Christ before His departure.Prepare: Living Your Faith in an Increasingly Hostile Culture will set forth a biblical, theological, and practical approach to navigating the challenging days ahead and a reason for hope and optimism - the power of the Gospel and the possibility of societal transformation.

No Name Woman


Maxine Hong Kingston
    Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston's mother's warning Kingston, "You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you."

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald


Therese Anne Fowler - 2013
    When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting


Sally Donovan - 2014
    This is the real stuff: dynamic, messy, baffling adoptive parenting, rooted in domestic life.Award-winning columnist and adoptive parent Sally Donovan offers savvy, compassionate advice on how to be 'good enough' in the face of both day-to-day and more bewildering challenges – how to respond to 'red mist' meltdowns, crippling anxieties about new routines and, most importantly, how to meet the intimidating challenge of being strong enough to protect and nurture your child.Full of affecting and hilarious stories drawn from life in the Donovan household, The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting offers parents a refreshing counterblast to stuffy parenting manuals -- read it, weep, laugh and learn.

Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life


Alice Childress - 1986
    They create a vibrant picture of the life of a black working woman in New York in the 1950s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts capture vividly her white employers’ complacency and condescension—and startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind. As Mildred declares to a patronizing employer that she is not just like one of the family, or explains to Marge how a tricky employer has created a system of “half days off” to cheat her help, we gain a glimpse not only of one woman’s day-to-day struggle, but of her previous ache of racial oppression. A domestic who refuses to exchange dignity for pay, Mildred is an inspiring conversationalist, a dragon slayer in a segregated world. The conversations in the book were first published in Freedom, the newspaper edited by Paul Robeson, and later in the Baltimore Afro-American. The book was originally published in the 1950s by in Brooklyn–based Independence Press, and Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudier Harris.

AOC: The Fearless Rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and What It Means for America


Lynda Lopez - 2020
    Seventeen writers explore the multiple meanings of a young Latina politician who has already made history. From the moment Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat a ten-term incumbent in the primary election for New York’s 14th, her journey to the national, if not world, stage, was fast-tracked. Six months later, as the youngest Congresswoman ever elected, AOC became one of a handful of Latina politicians in Washington, D.C. Just thirty, she represents her generation, the millennials, proudly working class, Democratic Socialist, of Puerto Rican descent, master of social media, not to mention of the Bronx and feminist.AOC investigates her symbolic and personal significance for so many, from her willingness to use her imperfect bi-lingualism, to the threat she poses by governing like a man, to the long history of Puerto Rican and anti-Israel activism. Contributors span a wide range of voices and ages, from media to the arts and politics: