A traveling salesman consigned to a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate stripped of everything but his pride. A teenage runaway. Mismatched lovers. In his debut collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Craig Lancaster returns to the terrain of his Montana home and takes on the notion of separation in its many forms - from comfort zones, from ideas, from people, from security, from fears. These ten stories delve into small towns and big cities, into love and despair, into what drives us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every pag

    An entire year has been included in this book, and as we go into 2019, it's important to remember not only the shocking events that took place, but also to acknowledge the many that lost their lives at the hands of others this year.The types of cases included are: Serial killersFamily murdersMass murdersSchool shootingsMajor hacking incidentsTerrorist ActsCold CasesThere have been many advances in technology that has led to the uncovering on many suspects in cold cases, including the identity of the Golden State Killer, a secret that had remained hidden for decades. A number of cold case murders were solved this year, bringing an end to the torture the affected families and the investigators had endured for so many years.Tragically, school shootings were still prevalent, and mass shootings seem to be on the rise. Terrorism struck many corners of the world, in a variety of ways, but results were swifter in identifying perpetrators and taking action.Some of the featured events in this anthology include: Marshall County High School ShootingThe Turpin FamilyLarry Nassar and Harvey WeinsteinCoincheck HackingBruce McArthur - Serial KillerAtlanta CyberattackInternational Spy PoisoningsScottsdale Spree KillingsMiles Family MurdersMurder of XXXTentacionPittsburgh Synagogue MassacreMail BombingPlus many, many more. If you are a lover of true crime, and want an anthology to add to your collection, this is the book for you.

    This brilliant new collection is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of “Americana” marked by Stone’s characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor. Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender and wacky, filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet’s poet. Her following is devoted and ever-growing. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone’s subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald’s as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

    What she seeks is adventure. What she finds is much more.Rose is thrown into the lives of the varied people and towns of the Mississippi while working on river boats, going to a prep school in St. Louis where she lives with a black family in the Ville, and working in a bordello in New Orleans (not as a call girl, of course. She is a Catholic girl from the Midwest after all). What she doesn't anticipate are the close relationships that develop with many of the women she encounters. She also discovers the harshness of the world far away from the security of home. Ultimately, Rose realizes what is most important in her life: her family and her friends.Rosebloom takes place at a time in history that buffets Rose between the great depression and the coming wave of World War II. She gets herself into situations through her naiveté and also just by chance that test her resolve and teach her not only about herself but about the world of others which she would have never know if she hadn't left her small farm in Southwest Wisconsin.A percentage of the profits of each book sold will be donated to help in the education of disadvantaged children, because Christine believes that knowledge is a powerful tool.

    He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. Through it, he has managed to transform the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, tavern brawls, ambushes, fires, every hazard in a raw West---these, in his hands, become presentable. Everywhere on the frontier, which erupts with life and death, he offers his skill: to the rich of San Francisco, the bawds and ruffians of the Barbary Coast, to Kansas cowboys, outlaws, soldiers, and sheriffs. He is devoted to dignifying the dead.She is devoted to making her marriage whole, in spite of the tragedy that surrounds it and, most especially, in spite of the tragedy that in one terrible afternoon strikes at its center.Today the undertaker is called to disguise the suicide of a famous financier. It is high drama, for only his art can save America's financial markets. Her task on this day is secret, an act of understanding and dedication.In the end, it is the undertaker's wife who, through love, is able to transcend death.

    R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."

    Leonard Woolley observed that "Amongst the shadowy characters of ancient history, Abraham stands out as a living personality--whom we can know, and with whom we can sympathize...and now, alongside this living personality, we find Sarah--perhaps the most remarkable, yet mysterious woman of all time!"ABRAHAM AND SARAH is an epic love story, an engrossing page-turner for the ages, a must read for every person of faith.

    From fugitive to Medal of Honor winner, Mann carries on to rise above the ignorance and intolerance of those who seek to bring him down; somehow gaining strength from the unimaginable losses he suffers and his own self doubt. Troy Smith does a great job of telling this man's story; providing a real insight not only to the emotional struggle that made Alfred Mann the individual he was, but the era that forged his heroic character. – Kit Prate 2001 WWA Spur Award Winner for Best Original Paperback

    Miserable at his day job, he decided to take a leap of faith. His path to success was all or nothing, victory or death.He quit his job and dropped out of the white-collar world with all its trappings and amenities. Unemployed, he had to give up his residence. With a sleeping bag and a sackful of clothes he headed to Northwest London's Gladstone Park, settling in among the homeless, transients, dog walkers and the occasional irritated park worker. His only solace, an A4 notepad and a pen.Like the author, the main character Colossus Sosloss also quits his job, becomes homeless and sleeps in the park. Colossus observes the other homeless who reside at the park. Many of them with treatable or controllable mental illness but, in the post-Margaret Thatcher England, such individuals are human refuse. Dumped into society to fend for themselves and spiral downward amongst the neatly-trimmed hedges and glistening, manicured lawn of the sprawling public space.The character's travails are reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll-type adventure with subtle Dickensian undertones. Which include a lost parrot and an unfortunate man named Squirrel. We follow Colossus on his journey to the edge of sanity, with humorous interjections and clever idioms. A hero's quest, that inevitably ends with subterfuge, realization and reflection.Today, no longer homeless, Craig Stone is probably one of the most promising young writers to grace the indie and self-publishing world. Though at 31, Stone is a surprisingly mature author who transcends the generations. His literary work is suitable for the very young and for those who have lived an interesting life.The Squirrel That Dreamt Of Madness is an imaginative tale that can only come from a brilliant, albeit delightfully demented, mind. Stone mixes humour with the cold, stark reality of life. Everything and everyone, is a metaphor for something either sinister or truthful. Gifted students may soon find this book on their required reading list for their advanced High School contemporary literature class.The author does not have a long laundry list of writers who inspired him, though he definitely channels some Steinbeckian qualities (the novel was written during the height of the Great Recession) and J.D. Salinger's, The Catcher in the Rye.Like Hemingway who retreated to the wild and lawless pre-Castro Cuba to pen his magnum opus The Old Man and the Sea, Stone chose to immerse himself in a colder and wetter climate to experience what his character had to endure. The old adage, you write what you know, still rings resonantly true. Stone certainly writes what he knows, and writes it exceptionally well." --http://enovelreviews.com/thesquirrelt...Interview with the BBC: http://bit.ly/BBCComedyCafeInformation on the Dundee Book Prize:http://www.dundeebookprize.com/http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/?p=51086You can find Craig Stone here:Twitter: https://twitter.com/robolollycopWebsite: www.thoughtscratchings.comA NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR...The simple truth is, I will get nowhere without your help. I need readers to read The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness, so if you are looking for a book to read, or wanting to try a new author, please try me.It would mean the world if you did.Thank You.Craig.

    Job heading nowhere? Check. Mastermind criminal boss discovering you have unravelled their plot? Check. Talking cat with an addiction to catnip deciding to take control of the situation? Check. Welcome to the lives and adventures of the ginger moggy Ben and his human, Ellie.Ellena Blackwell is your average woman- desperate to make the best of her Degree and failing miserably. Falling into such a hole of self-pity, even her cat, Ben, is sick of her and tells her to snap out of it.And that's when Ellena realises she has a talking cat, and he's not going to go away anytime soon.Having a devious crime boss as Principal to the college she works at, Ellena discovers a dangerous secret that the Head Office would very much rather that she didn't know. Deciding to take control of her life, Ellena enlists the help of Ben to investigate as soon as her friend goes missing.But Detective Calloway is determined to get involved, and Ellena soon learns that Ben isn't the only one who thinks he has nine lives.

    Being a hospice nurse she spends her days caring for and visiting the terminally ill. But in the pre-dawn hours, as her patients near death, they occasionally pay her a visit instead.Whether it's perfume drifting through a room or a touch on the shoulder, the strength of spirit displayed at the end of life is as unique as the individual. Alchemy of the Afterlife is a memoir of life AFTER death based on Linda's childhood as an orphan combined with her adult experiences as a hospice nurse. These encounters reveal both a glimmer of heaven and a flash of hell.This is a child's story about surviving abuse and neglect, only to be comforted by a visit from her mother, a visit that took place four years after her mother's death. It's a nurse's story about patients of all beliefs, and their evolution from life to afterlife minus the harps and halos. Most of all, it's an uplifting and universal story of the golden transformation we will all experience at death, a transformation with the heart of pure love.

    The delicate negotiation that follows is a carefully constructed reality between what Jamie is willing to acknowledge and what she is not.Jamie Patterson is a writer, teacher, runner, and dog lover. A former spokesperson for the American Red Cross and the Girl Scouts, Jamie is now an academic editor.

    S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

    On a spur of the moment decision, John leaves his suburban married life to spend six months in an abandoned house in the quiet eerie town of Cafeville, where secrets lurk in every corner. The town's biggest source of gossip is the Greens who live right next door. As John attempts to put his finger on what it is about the house that has everyone steering clear, he finds himself captivated by the seductively charming Eva Green who is as dangerous as she is irresistible. A gruesome story begins to take form in his mind. As the lines between fiction and reality become blurred, something sinister emerges from the shadows and demands to be heard...

    This famous shipwreck was known as the Wreck of the Ten Sails. Jonathan was not lucky enough to survive the wreck along with eight other seamen. Problem was, no one ever knew he was even on board.Two centuries later strange sightings have been reported of ghost ships, screams and eerie lights off the east end of Grand Cayman. Brandon Wallace, a troubled teen seems to acquire a strange affliction and begins to have bizarre encounters from the sea where he befriends a mystical sea turtle who holds the secrets to the mysterious sightings as he plunges into the world of the paranormal . Here he is compelled to embark on a dangerous journey, risking his life to uncover the dark secret of Jonathan’s death. This task proves to be even more dangerous when one of Brandon’s closest friends has other plans for him.