Book picks similar to
Voices In My Head by Cindy J. Smith
poetry
straight-novellas-81-181-p
standalone-novels
signed-books
Playing Games
Candace Wondrak - 2019
Free spirit. Troublemaker. That’s me.I never thought I’d meet my match, but I was wrong. Levi Harlen is an unstoppable force just like me, and together we make something truly amazing. Hot, heated, passionate. He does things to me no other guy ever has. I love the way it feels, but I hate it, too.Levi’s a liar, you see, and I stepped into his web unknowingly.This frat boy is about to find out that I’m not going to play his games, I’m going to play my own. He thinks he can hurt me by doing the sh*t he does? He’s wrong. Nothing can hurt me, even as my life spirals out of control.My name is Kelsey Yates, and I’m about to show this liar what it feels like to be rejected and beaten at his own game.Game on.Playing Games is the first in a M/F duology, and it includes steamy scenes. There are some mentions of self-harm, along with some bullying. Kelsey and Levi are both forces to be reckoned with, and neither one will back down. If you’re looking for a story with perfect characters who don’t make mistakes, look somewhere else.
The Poseidon Network
Kathryn Gauci - 2019
“One never knows where fate will take us. Cairo taught me that. Expect the unexpected. Little did I realise when I left London that I would walk out of one nightmare into another.” 1943. SOE agent Larry Hadley leaves Cairo for German and Italian occupied Greece. His mission is to liaise with the Poseidon network under the leadership of the White Rose. It’s not long before he finds himself involved with a beautiful and intriguing woman whose past is shrouded in mystery. In a country where hardship, destruction and political instability threaten to split the Resistance, and terror and moral ambiguity live side by side, Larry’s instincts tell him something is wrong. After the devastating massacre in a small mountain village by the Wehrmacht, combined with new intelligence concerning the escape networks, he is forced to confront the likelihood of a traitor in their midst. But who is it? Time is running out and he must act before the network is blown. The stakes are high. From the shadowy souks and cocktail parties of Cairo’s elite to the mountains of Greece, Athens, the Aegean Islands, and Turkey, The Poseidon Network, is an unforgettable cat-and-mouse portrait of wartime that you will not want to put down.
Malcriada & Other Stories
Lorraine Avila - 2019
Mal porque tengo miedo. Miedo porque yo era como t�, llena de ideas y verdad, y por mi sabidur�a lo perd� todo. T� no eres Malcriada. Lo que pasa es que tu sabes demasiado." __In the middle of the Caribbean Sea, aboard an illegal voyage from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, a twelve year old learns her name; a former cacao farmer finds a constellation on his lover's thighs; best friends become strangers and find the essence of themselves in the face of deception; an old man exchanges his homeland for a New York City bodega storefront; preteen boys grapple with authority; female cousins come to terms with their first shared sexual experience; an alcoholic woman finds serenity at the bottom of the sea; feminism is deconstructed by opposing views; on the back of a motorcycle, self-awareness is found; and a woman discovers that healing is a series of choices.__ "My mother didn't teach me dependency, I want to yell and enunciate. I cannot force myself to need you. Mami taught me to use my tongue like a sword, and I haven't sharpened it in years. Too afraid, I find myself, to pain him, to say things that might strike him the wrong way. Some feelings just don't translate. " __ " You know that Malcriadas can love the world awake."
Through the Barricades
Denise Deegan - 2016
They form a legacy that she carries in her heart, years later when, at the age of fifteen, she tries to better the lives of Dublin's largely forgotten poor. 'Don't go getting distracted, now, ' is what Daniel Healy's father says to him after seeing him talking to the same Maggie Gilligan. Daniel is more than distracted. He is intrigued. Never has he met anyone as dismissive, argumentative . . . as downright infuriating. A dare from Maggie is all it takes. Daniel volunteers at a food kitchen. There, his eyes are opened to the plight of the poor. It is 1913 and Dublin's striking workers have been locked out of their jobs. Their families are going hungry. Daniel and Maggie do what they can. Soon, however, Maggie realises that the only way to make a difference is to take up arms. The story of Maggie and Daniel is one of friendship, love, war and revolution, of two people prepared to sacrifice their lives: Maggie for her country, Daniel for Maggie. Their mutual sacrifices put them on opposite sides of a revolution. Can their love survive?
House of Lords and Commons: Poems
Ishion Hutchinson - 2016
Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.
Up Against It
M.J. Locke - 2011
They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes that are the million eyes of 'Stroiders, a reality-TV show whose Earthside producers have paid handsomely for the privilege of spying on every detail of the Phocaeans' lives.Life isn’t as good as it seems, though. A mysterious act of sabotage kills Geoff's brother Carl and puts the entire colony at risk. And in short order, we discover that the whole thing may have been cooked up by the Martian mafia, as a means of executing a coup and turning Phocaea into a client-state. As if that wasn't bad enough, there's a rogue AI that was spawned during the industrial emergency and slipped through the distracted safeguards, and a giant x-factor in the form of the Viridians, a transhumanist cult that lives in Phocaea's bowels.In addition to Geoff, our story revolves around Jane, the colony's resource manager -- a bureaucrat engineer in charge of keeping the plumbing running on an artificial island of humanity poised on the knife-edge of hard vacuum and unforgiving space. She's more than a century old, and good at her job, but she is torn between the technical demands of the colony and the political realities of her situation, in which the fishbowl effect of 'Stroiders is compounded by a reputation economy that turns every person into a beauty contest competitor. Her manoeuverings to keep politics and engineering in harmony are the heart of the book.
By Sea & Sky: An Esowon Story
Antoine Bandele - 2020
She wasn’t blessed with magic. But she knew the Sapphire Seas well. Plundering and raiding was an art of its own, and she got by on her wits. Yet she was running out of time. She needed the big score to save her husband.What was her next move?Before she even knew it……the game changed.High above them, off the coast of the Ibabi Isles, a strange airship was headed their way. Zala had never seen anything like it. The battle was imminent.And she was going to need more than her bag of tricks.You’ll love this adventure inspired by the West Indies, The Swahili Coast, and Arabia, because Zala will encounter ruthless raiders, arrogant aristocrats, and imperial secrets. It will keep you turning the pages.
No Matter the Wreckage
Sarah Kay - 2014
No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.
The Archer
Shruti Swamy - 2021
As a child, Vidya exists to serve her family, watch over her younger brother, and make sense of a motherless world. One day she catches sight of a class where the students are learning Kathak, a precise, dazzling form of dance that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Kathak quickly becomes the organizing principle of Vidya’s life, even as she leaves home for college, falls in love with her best friend, and battles demands on her time, her future, and her body. Can Vidya give herself over to her art and also be a wife in Bombay’s carefully delineated society? Can she shed the legacy of her own imperfect, unknowable mother? Must she, herself, also become a mother? Intensely lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as rhythmically mesmerizing as Kathak itself, The Archer is about the transformative power of art and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.
The Good for Nothings
Danielle Banas - 2020
Unfortunately, she's a total disaster. After landing herself in prison following an attempted heist gone very wrong, she strikes a bargain with the prison warden: He'll expunge her record if she brings back a long-lost treasure rumored to grant immortality. Cora is skeptical, but with no other way out of prison (and back in her family's good graces), she has no choice but to assemble a crew from her collection of misfit cellmates—a disgraced warrior from an alien planet; a cocky pirate who claims to have the largest ship in the galaxy; and a glitch-prone robot with a penchant for baking—and take off after the fabled prize. But the ragtag group soon discovers that not only is the too-good-to-be-true treasure very real, but they're also not the only crew on the hunt for it. And it's definitely a prize worth killing for.
What Your Soul Already Knows
Salma Farook - 2018
We have lost touch with our inner selves, the self that has all the answers, that is imbued with the natural balance of joy and productivity. What have we forgotten? What have we lost to this mechanical lifestyle? The secrets to joy, aren’t secrets at all. They aren’t being whispered. You are just not listening loudly enough to the wisdom of your inner voice. This book is a reminder to listen.It is a detailed exploration of elements such as personal qualities, interpersonal skills and healthy habits that make up the path to intuitive happiness and productivity.
The Girl in Between
Sarah Carroll - 2017
Ma says I'm supposed to be so the Authorities don't get me. She goes out into the streets almost every day but I'm not allowed. I've got to stay inside the mill so they don't see me. In an old, abandoned mill, a girl and her ma take shelter from their memories of life on the streets, and watch the busy world go by. The girl calls it the Castle because it's the biggest place they've ever stayed, a home of her own like no other. The windows are boarded up and the floorboards are falling in but for her neither of those things matter. Then developers show up, and it's clear that their lives are about to change forever. Desperate to save their refuge from the Authorities and her mother from her own personal demons, the girl seeks out the ghosts of the mill. And with only Caretaker the old man who's slept outside the mill for decades around to answer her questions, she begins to wonder what kind of ghosts are haunting both the mill and her mother.
Un-American
Hafizah Geter - 2020
The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.