O, Democracy!


Kathleen Rooney - 2014
    Colleen Dugan works for the other one—not on Capitol Hill, but in a Chicago skyscraper that overlooks Lake Michigan, among coworkers with little to do but field calls from angry constituents while the future of the nation gets decided elsewhere. In the coming weeks, Colleen will navigate the perils of costumed protestors, thuggish union reps, vacuous interns, trifling bureaucrats, dirty tricks by the senator’s Republican rival, and the unexpected discovery of a scandalous secret that will give her the power to change the course of the election and shape her own fate—though not necessarily for the better. A quarter-life crisis viewed from the ghostly perspective of the Founding Fathers, this is a hilarious and heartbreaking story about American politics and the difficult business of being a good citizen: walking the tricky line between self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, between doing your part and knowing your place.

Die You Doughnut Bastards


Cameron Pierce - 2012
    Burroughs on crack!" - Thomas F. Monteleone, New York Times bestselling authorThe bacon storm is rolling in. We hear the grease and sugar beat against the roof and windows. The doughnut people are attacking. We press close together, forgetting for a moment that we hate each other. In Die You Doughnut Bastards, amputees, lonely young people, and talking animals struggle for survival against the freakish whims of nature. A typewriter made of fetuses is the source of woe for an expecting couple. A girl with a glass jaw hides an otherworldly secret. A demonic loner goes to a birthday party in Hell. You'll encounter a killer in a marsupial mask, a prison for anorexics, haunted pancakes, and a songwriter with a cult following.Surreal prose poems give way to personal accounts of alienation and modern love. Vegetarian narwhals are sold at the supermarket. And in a city that might be your own, zombie doughnuts are rising up. Kill yourself before they kill you. Or just kill yourself.Featuring original illustrations in the style of Daniel Johnston, Die You Doughnut Bastards is the latest way to drown, brought to you by Wonderland Book Award-winning author Cameron Pierce.

Divorcer


Gary Lutz - 2011
    DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.

The Marriage of True Minds


Stephen Evans - 2008
    When Nick’s charmingly erratic behavior finally became too much for Lena, the marriage and the partnership ended. But—like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord—it seems that Lena and Nick just can’t quite separate.Lena works out fiercely, keeps her dates with the boring and conventional Preston Winter, and daily battles on against corporate greed. But Nick’s not doing so well.Still brilliant and devilishly clever, he is now also almost crazy. He is prone to fantasy and the big gesture, and he engages frantically in guerrilla activism for the sake of animals wild and domestic. Nick doesn’t make plans; he has visions. And eventually his antics put him back into Lena’s hands. While she tries to navigate the legal waters into which he’s thrown them, Nick veers out of her wake and into the midst of a strange set of companions, including Oscar, his psychiatric attendant and Action Comics collector; Ralph and Alice Wilson, the rebellious managers of the city animal shelter; and an aging Russian hound named Wolfram.Often laugh-out-loud funny, with bright wit and brilliant machine-gun dialogue, The Marriage of True Minds sweetly explores modern love, undying idealism, and one cracked partnership that can’t be sundered—from without or from within.If you like screwball comedies, like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, then you’ll love The Marriage of True Minds!

Gripped: Your Personality is What's Holding You Back


Jason Donnelly - 2013
    Have you ever read an advertisement and felt like it was written directly to you? Well, what if it was? And if I told you that there's an underground group telling you and those around you what to buy, what to wear, and what to consume? Join the fun. The only thing holding you back is your own personality.We recommend that you read Gripped with a nice bottled water. "If Kurt Vonnegut and Sarah Silverman had a literary offspring, it might look something like this." Richard Thomas, authoe of Staring Into the Abyss"Donnelly dances on the line of comedic grace and brutal honesty to show how ugly personal growth can be." Michael Paul Gonzalez, author of Angel Falls"This is a hilarious yet poignant tale of how disjointed society has become." Jonny Gibbings, author of Malice in BlunderlandJason Donnelly is a writer in NYC currently seeking world domination. He has an MFA in creative writing and a horrible amount of debt from a University in Pennsylvania that shall not be named. Over the years, he's held the title of juggler, college recruiter, adjunct professor, headhunter and is currently a copywriter at a NYC ad agency. Find out more than you ever wanted to know about him here, www.jasonwdonnelly.com and then like the book page here, www.grippedbook.com You can now purchase from amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/Gripped-Your-Pe...

Without A Trace / Beyond A Doubt


Colleen Coble - 2008
    

Nobody Girl


Leslie DuBois - 2011
    This might explain why she fell for a no good womanizer like Jason James. When their short painful marriage comes to a heartbreaking end, Delia must find the courage to start her life again. A new successful career as a high school teacher and a passionate summer romance with sexy Chase Donovan finally make her feel like she’s more than just a nobody. But her world is shattered once again when Chase turns out to be one of her students.

Dancing on Thorns


Rebecca Horsfall - 2005
    Michel have come to London separately in pursuit of their dreams. Michel is haunted by the man who abandoned him as a child. Driven by his determination to forge a life for himself outside the shadow of his father’s famous name, he’s ambitious, talented, and dangerously attractive–but suspicious of emotional attachments. Full of courage but naïve, Jonni is determined to excel as an actress. Just nineteen, she’s made up her mind to escape the narrow, parochial life her parents have planned for her. When Michel rescues Jonni one night and takes her home, there’s an immediate attraction. Jonni soon finds herself embraced by an exciting new world filled with bohemian dancers and musicians, a family of planets orbiting around their sun–Michel. But before Michel can commit to any kind of future–with or without Jonni–he must free himself from his past. And when tragedy brings him to the edge of a fiery burnout, Jonni and the pair’s friends must rally to save all they have come to count on.

Pascal's Wager


Nancy N. Rue - 2001
    In a quest to cope with this devastating situation, Jill seeks out philosophy professor Sam Hunt. Savvy Sam challenges Jill to make "Pascal's wager" -- to "bet" that God exists by acting as if he does. The results not only change Jill's mind but transform her life in ways she never could have imagined. An exciting, faith-building thriller!

Cargo of Orchids


Susan Musgrave - 2000
    Her work as a translator draws her into an underworld of family-controlled drug cartels operating out of South America, and she falls in love with a son in one such family. Pregnant, she is kidnapped to an island off the coast of Colombia and slowly tricked into a dependence on cocaine. Her narrative - violent and bizarre, but also riveting, erotic and filled with the heady flamboyance of orchids - runs parallel to her account of life in "Death Clinic," as Death Row is called at the Heaven Valley Facility for Women. It is a moving story of friendship amongst three female inmates - portrayed with devastating wit - who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner.Cargo of Orchids swings through comedy and tragedy to shed a gradual, eerie light on the questions of guilt and innocence and moral ambiguity that lie at its heart.Excerpt from Cargo of Orchids:"Despite the freight of anger she carries, Rainy seems so frail it is hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears. Rainy gave birth to twins and six months later left them on the railway tracks. She claims it prejudiced the jury. If she'd smothered them or driven them off a pier, it would have been more socially acceptable.-- But abandoning your kids on the tracks wasn't in fashion. She wishes now she'd gone out drinking for the evening instead, but she didn't have enough money to hire a babysitter and pay for the beer."

The Alias


Mandi Slack - 2011
    But when the FBI reveals some disturbing information about her ex-husband, she is forced into hiding to protect herself and her son. In the process, she risks losing her identity, her future, and her heart. Thrilling and suspenseful, this novel is an edge-of-your-seat read.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky


David Connerley Nahm - 2014
    In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray county roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.Leah's little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.David Connerley Nahm was born and raised in a small town in central Kentucky. Currently, he lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches law and literature at James Madison University. His short stories have appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Eyeshot, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

The Interrogative Mood


Padgett Powell - 2009
    Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”—Richard FordThe Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as “one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too.” A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace’s stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, “will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn’t, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me.”

Click


Kristopher Young - 2006
    Click is urban grit of the highest order - a first person romp through the unreality of an unnamed metropolis in which the protagonist is stalked by his inner demons while half-heartedly trying to save the world. Fun and excitement for the whole dysfuntional family, Click is not to be missed. Plot Summary - Click's hero is experiencing glitches in the universe. He may have tapped into a strange ability which gives him control over the world around him. Or, there's the disturbing possiblity that he's a case study in paranoid schizophrenia. After all, -they- might be after him. He's falling apart -- and to make matters worse, his girlfriend may just be crazier than he is. Forced to face his fears and come to terms with his own flawed nature, he must discover what it means to truly evolve.

Fight for Your Long Day


Alex Kudera - 2010
    Meet Cyrus Duffleman "Duffy" for short an adjunct professor who can barely afford his two-room apartment. Forget about an unfinished novel: He'd be thrilled with health insurance. Still, he gamely shuffles to four urban universities each day to teach, and works a security guard graveyard shift once a week. Cobbled together, he can almost make a living. But today, Duffy's routine isn't quite so predictable: The cryptic mumblings of a possibly psychotic student. Government protests and a bow-and-arrow assassination. Frenzied attempts to spare his sanity (and safety) all while a female coed quietly eyes him. Part A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole), part Straight Man (Richard Russo), FIGHT FOR YOUR LONG DAY is a promising debut from a new literary talent. It will resonate with anyone who has ever known, been taught by, felt sorry for, or lived the life of an adjunct professor."