Jeremy's Loss


Jeff Menapace - 2011
    Just when it seems that his grief may turn into madness, a disfigured man appears and reveals to Jeremy that his mother's death was no accident: She was murdered for unearthing a deadly conspiracy.Now, if Jeremy wants to stay alive, he must trust this mysterious stranger at all costs and find a way to eliminate the impending threat--before it eliminates him.Short Fiction. approx. 26 pages

The Book of Questions


Lala Bohang - 2018
    

In Laws and Play Cousins


Robyn Gant - 2010
    Her childhood friend Tracie is a computer expert whose personal vendetta backfires. Eva is a jurist but uses men to hide her pain and mask her childhood tragedy, and her cousin Tina wears a sweet exterior but takes risks that threaten to jeopardize her professional career. Kevin and Aaron are sexy twins who go to great lengths to get the women they want; and Angelo, gorgeous and ambitious, lets nothing stand in his way to accomplish his career goals, even at the expense of friends.Pilar is a beautiful but naive orphan who overnight is catapulted to fame; and Denene, a woman scorned, is determined to wreak havoc in the lives of those she feels has wronged her in some way. From the heart of Los Angeles to the South of France, In Laws and Play Cousins tells a story about love and heartbreak, success and envy and the price it ultimately commands.

Person/a


Elizabeth Ellen - 2017
    Told in four volumes over seven years, with emails, g-chats, and an ‘interview’ with Lydia Davis (and a nod to Ms. Davis’s The End of the Story), the style of Person/a is often experimental, pushing the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, obsession and mental instability, female independence and a loyalty to current and former lovers, but with the ultimate loyalty being to oneself or one's writing, and is there a difference? and should we be ashamed?

The Paper Wife


Linda Spalding - 1981
    As evocative of an era as it is psychologically penetrating, "The Paper Wife" is the story of a friendship, a triangle, and a trial by fire as three young friends struggle to find their moral footing during the turbulent years of the Vietnam War.

Nothing


Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon - 2013
    I was moved."-Tao Lin, New York Times Book Review"A marvelously scathing indictment of a generation that has no choice but to burn. From Nothing’s outset, [Wirth Cauchon] crafts scenes with complexity and a scary prescience. [Nothing is] a riveting first piece of scripture from our newest prophet of misspent youth."-Paste"Like a movie adaptation of Daria as directed by Gregg Araki. The energy almost makes each page glow. Though this novel starts as Bret Easton Ellis, it ends as Nick Cave - thunderous, apocalyptic. The move into the grand and mythic separates Nothing from the usual stuff concerning the bored and the pretty."-Electric Literature"Nothing feels like the descendent of the masterful short stories of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. [A] noteworthy debut."-Bustle"A burning mean and darkly mysterious read."-Joy Williams"I could tell you that Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon has written an utterly contemporary novel of our fragmented culture, a novel that I think might be the great American novel of the selfie, brilliantly alternating the narratives of two young travelers partying and searching and losing themselves in the wild West — a Kerouac hitchhiker juxtaposed with the nihilistic, wanting, wandering Ruth and her toxic friendship with her prettier best friend. But this is what I want to tell you—this is what you need to know — Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon writes like a beast, brutal and ecstatic. You need to read this."-Kate Zambreno"An edgy debut. Cauchon's characters have serrated edges... they'll get under the reader's skin."-Publishers Weekly"Claustrophobic. It's August and the hills are on fire and I'm reading Nothing. I see Wirth Cauchon's characters lurking around Missoula, outside the bars and walking along the river, lost and fucked up, abused and abusers, seekers, trustafarians, and ne'er-do-wells. Stuck in the limbo of youthful identity crisis, desperate for a way in or a way out."-Jeff AmentRuth traded a dead-end life in Minneapolis for a dead-end life in Missoula. But in Missoula, she's got Bridget. "[Bridget] was gorgeous… but that wasn't it, that didn't quite explain it. What explained it was the curse. The curse of the unreasonably pretty, the curse of cult leaders and dictators. It sucked everyone to her, it consumed her, made her untouchable."After a local girl dies at a party, signaling the end of fun for the twentysomethings of Missoula, James and Ruth become involved. But jealousy over Bridget quickly complicates things.Nothing announces a nervy and assertive new voice, while also capturing the angst and foreboding that could mark it as an even grander generational statement.

The Barn Dance


James F. Twyman - 2010
    Three and a half years later, guided by a series of visions and dreams, James Twyman was mystically drawn to a barn deep in the Nevada wilderness where Heaven and Earth collide and magic changes lives.If you’ve ever wondered if we really can communicate with our loved ones who have passed to the other side, this book is your answer. If you’ve ever thought that Heaven and Earth never meet, then this story will reveal a world you never imagined . . . a world where love never ends and life goes on forever. Once you pick up this amazing book, you won’t want to put it down, and your life will never be the same.

The Season to Be Wary


Rod Serling - 1967
    Winner of six Emmys (he was nominated nine times), two Sylvania Awards, on Peabody Award, and one Christopher Award for his teleplays, Serling came as close as anyone to dominating an era that abounded with talented men. His plays "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and "Patterns" are usually the first items on the lips of television aficionados reminiscing about the good old days. Yet as television changed, Rod Serling kept pace. He became producer and chief writer for the famous "Twilight Zone" series. These bizarre and fantastic adventures into the occult and demonic were without doubt one of the most creative, imaginative and successful enterprises in the history of television.Now Rod Serling has applied his prodigious writing talents to a new medium: one in which he is perhaps destined to make his greatest mark. The three novellas that compromise THE SEASON TO BE WARY betray the skillful hand of a master storyteller and prose stylist. Fired with a savage yet disciplined irony, paced with deliberate cadence that rises to a starting denouement, each story explores the theme of a terrible vengeance delivered for terrible deeds performed.In "The Escape Route," ex-Gruppenfuehrer Joseph Strobe - ex-deputy assistant commander of Auschwitz, ex-confidant of Heinrich Himmler - putters about his little rathole in Buenos Aires chewing over the good times he had breaking Jews. Yet his snug little world is turned upside down b the capture of Adolf Eichmann, and Strobe soon finds himself on the wrong end of a terrifying hunt."Color Scheme" recounts the life and times of the great King Connacher, racist and rabble-rouser, who makes his living on the stump, preaching the lynching gospel, only to find himself one summer evening the victim of an extraordinary case of mistaken identity.In "Eyes," Miss Claudia Menlo, who in her fifty lifeless years has been denied nothing that she wanted - except her sight - manipulates people with the same purposeful indifference with which she fondles the expensive bric-a-brac in her lavishly cluttered dwelling. Yet her insistant will is brutally thwarted by the one set of circumstances she cannot control.Serling has infused these simple, forceful tales with an extraordinary richness of character and detail. There is, for example, the Prussian officer Gruber, who cannot stomach the pigs like Strobe he helped create and with whom he is forced to share his guilt. And there is Indian Charlie Hatcher, the most memorable portrait of a burned-out prizefighter since Serling's own justly famous Mountain Rivera.The power, the drive, the complexity and subtlety of these novellas mark Rod Serling as one of the most important and graceful fiction writers. Mr. Serling is a graduate of Antioch College and lives in Southern California with his wife and two children.

Corpus Chrome, Inc.


S. Craig Zahler - 2014
    develops a robotic body, dubbed a “mannequin,” that can revive, sustain and interface with a cryonically-preserved human brain. Like all new technology, it is copyrighted.Hidden behind lawyers and a chrome facade, the inscrutable organization resurrects a variety of notable minds, pulling the deceased back from oblivion into a world of animated sculpture, foam rubber cars, dissolving waste and strange terrorism. Nobody knows how Corpus Chrome, Inc. determines which individuals should be given a second life, yet myriad people are affected. Among them are Lisanne Breutschen, the composer who invented sequentialism with her twin sister, and Champ Sappline, a garbage man who is entangled in a war between the third, fourth and fifth floors of a New York City apartment building.In the Spring of 2058, Corpus Chrome, Inc. announces that they will revive Derek W.R. Dulande—a serial rapist and murderer who was executed thirty years ago for his crimes. The public is horrified by the decision, and before long, the company’s right to control the lone revolving door between life and death will be violently challenged…

Looking for Jane


Judith Redline Coopey - 2012
    Well, what if you don’t have no people? Or any you know of? What then? Are you doomed?” This is the nagging question of fifteen-year-old Nell’s life. Born with a cleft palate and left a foundling on the doorstep of a convent, she yearns to know her mother, whose name, she knows, was Jane.When the Mother Superior tries to pawn her off to a mean looking farmer and his beaten down wife, Nell opts for the only alternative she can see: she runs away. A chance encounter with a dime novel exhorting the exploits of Calamity Jane, heroine of the west, gives Nell the purpose of her life: to find Calamity Jane, who Nell is convinced is her mother.Her quest takes her down rivers, up rivers and across the Badlands to Deadwood, South Dakota and introduces her to Soot, a big, lovable black dog, and Jeremy Chatterfield, a handsome young Englishman who isn’t particular about how he makes his way, as long as he doesn't have to work for it. Together they trek across the country meeting characters as wonderful and bizarre as the adventure they seek, learning about themselves and the world along the way.

In the Shadow of the Vampire: Reflections from the World of Anne Rice


Jana Marcus - 1997
    In The Shadow Of The Vampire offers a close up view of her devotees and disciples, fangs and all. Over 100 photographs from Anne Rice's Memnoch Ball in New Orleans as well as other events serve as a portrait of this growing subculture. The photographs illustrate the themes the readers relate to in their fantasies and everyday lives and the extremes to which they will go to be close to their mentor. The subjects of the photographs, the fans themselves, explain in accompanying interviews their spiritual relationships to romance, eroticism, loneliness, bloodlust or outsider status of the characters in the book. From the people who sleep in coffins to the teenage Goth-rockers to the HIV-positive man who found a deep allegorical comfort in the vampire Lestat, their responses range from the burlesque to the sublime.

The Big Switch: It's never too late


John Thomas - 2017
    He is a software engineer at a reputable company and has a girlfriend whom he loves a lot.Yet, there is something missing in his life. He is not even close to being happy.Only after losing his girlfriend, he realizes what the reason for his unhappiness is.He realizes that he is caught up in the wrong career.With time running out, he knows that he must switch to a new career — one that makes him happy.But, is 24 too late to do that? Is he making a mistake?Find out as Keith follows his heart in pursuit of an impossible-looking dream.

Footprints in the Mind


Javan - 1979
    0-935906-00-2$5.00 / Javan Press

Nadaar Log / نادار لوگ


Abdullah Hussein - 1996
    The story of this novel takes place during 1897 to 1974. This is the story of a generation that has no urge to protect and fight for its rights, people who have accepted everything as fate and have left themselves to the flow of time. The story really gets a takeoff after 1947 when Pakistan gets independence and the people who fought for certain ideals are pushed to wall by those who happen to be in corridors of power. The novel describes those years of indifference, difficulties and turbulence which first germinate the seeds of undemocratic governments and then it leads to secession of the country in 1971. The novel suggests that this was the period where if truth was upheld the history and the geography of Pakistan would have been different but since people kept silence which tantamount to a sin, so they have to reap the wages of this in shape of disintegrating the federation and losing their brothers. Nadar Loog is the story of a people who had great ideals but were found wanting in action when it mattered to stand and assert. This is the story about poverty of action and deeds that leads a nation and people to a state of flux.

The Thorn Birds


Ann Ward
    [Penguin Readers Level 6]