Book picks similar to
Writing & Other Blood Sports by Charles Willeford
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20th-century
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The Case of the Running Bag (Jonas Watcher #1)
Gene Poschman - 2014
Her missing husband. A dead private detective. And a dangerous game of mistaken identity...It all started when Jonas Watcher found a business card along with some keys – curious... some money – a really good thing... and a gun...It's the nineteen thirties and Jonas Watcher must solve the mystery of the dead PI if he wants to stay alive.“The Case of the Running Bag” is the first novel of the Jonas Watcher Detective Adventure series. It features a traditional P.I. dealing with extortion, kidnapping, and murder. Author Gene Poschman brings back the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring the romance and humor reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.Pick up a free copy of the first book in the Jonas Watcher series and step into the exciting age of the 1930s gumshoe.live.
Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick - 1979
An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.
Ana: A Memoir of Anorexia Nervosa
Syanne Centeno - 2018
If I was starving, then that meant that I did not have to face reality. I did not have to think. When you’re starving, you cannot think. Every day feels like an out-of-body experience, and everything sounds like you are swimming underwater. When you have Anorexia Nervosa, you aren’t living… you are merely existing. You become a walking corpse of the person you once were. Your life becomes about finding ways to satisfy your disorder and nothing else really matters. You know that there is a chance that you won’t wake up the next morning, but keeping the Anorexia alive is more important than keeping yourself alive. You convince yourself that as long as you are hungry that somehow everything is okay. This was my life for 10 ½ years. My name is Syanne Centeno and I found Anorexia as an eight-year-old little girl. You could say that I accidentally stumbled upon this illness, or maybe IT actually found ME. I didn’t know what Anorexia was, and had never heard of it. I actually didn’t hear the term “Anorexia Nervosa” until I was 14, but had unknowingly been engaging in eating disorder behavior for years prior. Anorexia is such a complex, perplexing disorder. Trying to explain why I developed this as a child is nearly impossible. The only thing I can do is write down my experience and take you on a journey in my shoes in hopes that this will help someone somewhere understand the realities of living with an eating disorder." This is the account of Syanne's journey with severe Anorexia Nervosa (which she named "Ana"), a deadly psychiatric illness that haunts thousands of young girls and women each year. Throughout her honest, gut-wrenching tale she relives the horror of battling "Ana" for over a decade starting at the age of just eight-years-old, and how it nearly took her life. Along with Anorexia Nervosa, Syanne speaks of the other mental illness's she struggled with such as Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and self- mutilation. Without holding back, Syanne highlights the realities of living with an eating disorder, and what it took for her to overcome it.
Broken Dreams
Nick Quantrill - 2010
When Jennifer Murdoch is found bleeding to death in her bed, Geraghty quickly finds himself trapped in the middle of a police investigation. With everything at stake, some will go to any length to get what they want, Geraghty included.
Inside the Heart of Hope
Rishabh Puri - 2017
But unlike others around him, he sees this not as a curse, but as an opportunity to cherish life and all the bitter-sweet gifts it brings with it.Amidst frequent visits to the doctor, multiple surgeries that risk his life being, and a life that meant surveillance all the time, Rick has to fight for himself each day. But he pulls through, thanks to his family and friend Jacob, who become his pillars of strength.And then, at a time when he is least expecting it, and with someone he meets by accident – love happens. It’s a new feeling for his heart and he is scared to lose it.Will Lisa really understand the goodness of his heart or just walk away?Inside the Heart of Hope is a story of strong will, perseverance and optimism which will make you wonder if sky is really the limit.
December Magic
Tracey Mayhew - 2017
A single father too busy for love. Could their chance meeting be the start of something magical? With Christmas fast approaching, Kayla Jones is preparing for another cold, and lonely, December. But a lost little girl and her father soon change all that and, with them by her side, Kayla finds herself rediscovering the magic of the season… DECEMBER MAGIC is the perfect winter romance, full of love and laughter, ideal for fans of Kirsty Greenwood, Sophie Kinsella and Becky Monson.
After: Taras and Theron / Beyond Jerusalem
David McAfee - 2011
Tired, weak, and nearly broken under the weight of his guilt, he wanders the streets waiting for death to catch up to him. But when he is beset by bandits, he gains a new perspective. Maybe he doesn't have to feel guilty about feeding, after all.Theron - Theron travels by ship to his long ago home of Athens, Greece. He soon discovers the Council of Thirteen has put a price on his head so large every Bachiyr in the city will try to collect it, which leads to a very tense reunion with an old lover.The Ugliest Thing, by Daniel Arenson - Just what is it about the image in the telescope that makes people lose their sanity? Is it worth the risk to see for yourself?Also included is a preview of 61 A.D., the thrilling sequel to David's 2010 horror bestseller, 33 A.D.
Sibling Rivalry
Samantha Jillian Bayarr - 2014
When they discover a handsome Englischer barely conscious on the bank of Willow Creek, rivalry comes out in its ugliest form as they argue over who will get to care for him. Despite knowing their father would never approve of their actions, they decide to stow away the Englischer in the loft above their barn. While they compete for his attention, it becomes evident that the Englischer has a few secrets of his own. While Nate recovers, he finds himself getting lost in the care of these two young Amish women, leaving him wondering if he might want to stay. But when another woman shows up looking for him, things become more complicated than any of them could have possibly anticipated.
The Job: Fighting Crime From the Frontline
Charlie Bezzina - 2010
The Job is an explosive and intriguing account of what it takes to be a criminal investigator at the highest level.
New York Days
Willie Morris - 1993
It was the 1960s, when New York City was a place "throbbing with possibility" and "in which everyone seemed to know everyone else and where everything of importance seemed to happen first". These were Willie Morris's New York days - with William Styron, David Halberstam, Woody Allen, Bobby Kennedy, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, George Plimpton, Leonard Bernstein, and the other leading figures of the time. For he knew them all: the writers, the poets, the intellectuals, the editors, the actresses, the tycoons, the detectives, the athletes, and not a few fakirs and charlatans. He wined with Sinatra at the Players Club and eavesdropped in the trattorias on the Mob; sat next to DiMaggio in the Garden ringside seats and spent evenings at Elaine's. And during the day, Morris worked to transform Harper's from an uninspired literary magazine to its apex as the groundbreaking political and cultural voice of the '60s, until the editorial rift and the mass resignations of 1971 - possibly the most notable dispute in American publishing history. New York Days is a portrait of an era, but it is also a poignant, deeply personal yet universal story of a man's life: a man who attains everything he has ever hoped for only to realize that what he has sacrificed is even greater. For in the process of reaching the pinnacle of his career, Morris also experiencedprofound loss: the dissolution of his marriage and the breakdown of the magazine as he helped create it. Now, from a vantage point of more than twenty years and a thousand miles, Morris asks his younger self: "Where on earth, fast-moving boy, are you going now?" And what, i
Amateur: An inexpert, inexperienced, unauthoritative, enamored view of life. (How To Be Ferociously Happy Book 2)
Dushka Zapata - 2016
It's meant to be a very easy read; not a book you read systematically from beginning to end but rather a book to read during those times you find reading a book overwhelming. How we choose to look at something is essential to our happiness, and the author, Dushka Zapata, hopes to leave readers with a little of that.
In Love
Alfred Hayes - 1958
Here, he visits her, erratically, and not always happily. All is soon inexorably overturned when a rich interloper comes between the couple with an indecent proposal-a thousand dollars for a night.
So Many Doors
Oakley Hall - 1950
It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered—Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That’s where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, SO MANY DOORS is Hall’s masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.
The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7000 Movie and Put It All On His Credit Card
Joe Queenan - 1996
Following in the maverick mold of Quentin Tarentino, Spike Lee, and Richard Rodriguez, Joe Queenan becomes an auteur and, in the process, funnier than ever, as he tries to master the art of writing, directing, scoring, casting, and marketing a movie--all by himself.
Danger, Man Working: Writing from the Heart, the Gut, and the Poison Ivy Patch
Michael Perry - 2017
Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling." The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."