As the Vietnam war took more and more of his friends, and many of those who returned sank further into drugs and despair, Stan looked for meaning and found nothing. His life's purpose lay thirty-three hundred miles northwest, deep in the Tozitna River Valley in the heart of Alaska's frozen interior. Deadly cold, famine, grizzly bears, and one unruly sled dog with a grudge kept Stan on the knife's edge between survival and death. Humbled by the power of nature, the Boston greaser who was destined for prison found a new life in the wild, where one mistake can prove fatal. This is the true story of Stan Zuray's incredible journey; the reformation of a man's heart and mind in the forbidding darkness of Alaska's endless winter.

    Included are The Very Strange Mr. Fish, The Butcher of Plainfield, From the Pros to the Penitentiary, Nightmare on Elm Drive, The Brown's Chicken Murders, The Kitty Genovese Murder, The Wichita Horror, The Hi Fi Murders, The Poster Boy for Capital Punishment, The Yogurt Shop Murders, The Vampire Rapist, The Murder of James Bulger, Thrill Killers: Leopold and Loeb, The Killing of Anita Cobby, Death in a Bottle: The Tylenol, Excedrin and Sudafed Murders, The Easter Sunday Murders, Murder at McDonald's, The Luby's Massacre, Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. Part Two: Quick Hits holds 13 shorter chapters that include Eric Smith, The Camden Killer, Killed Over a Kiss, The Bed & Breakfast Murders, Who Shot the War Hero?, The Colorado Springs Killings, Joseph Vacher, Jeanne Weber, Michael Hernandez, The Tourniquet Killer, Patricia Johnson and Killed Over Facebook Status. The book ends with I Don't Like Mondays.

    In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and so much more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot.His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone.Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux at his very best.

    "Bailey White's sketches evoke a sort of real-life Lake Wobegon."--The New York Times.

    Mine was 1989. In that year, I travelled the length and breadth of a chunk of South-East Asia, started a new business in India, wrote two travel guidebooks, got married in a Balinese village, nearly killed the King of Thailand, got attacked by giant spiders in Australia, had bombs raining down on me on the Cambodian border, and received the death penalty in Malaysia.That's what you get when you go off the beaten track...

      Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.   With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.Lulu --Hotline girl --New fruit --Field notes on a marriage --Flying machine --On the street where you live --Shanghai murmur --Land of big numbers --Beautiful country --Gubeikou spirit

    Overwhelming are the loss of friends, the thrill of achievement, and the soul-shattering moments of risk and survival; but it is precisely these experiences that compel him to write and to continue climbing.In Mixed Emotions, Child remembers the mountains, the people, and the episodes that have made him feel his life acutely, including the 1986 K2 tragedy that killed 13 climbers; a near-fatal snakebite in his native Australia; and the loss of climbing partner Pete Thexton. He recalls his associations with world-renowned mountaineers Doug Scott, John Roskelley, Voytek Kurtyka, and Don Whillans. Child also narrates fascinating off-mountain journeys to a secluded Hindu shrine, and the remote, harsh landscape of the Baltoro Glacier, where progress has left its indelible mark.Finally, Child comments on some less tangible aspects of climbing, such as the ghostly presence that accompanies climbers under duress, and the meanings of and inevitable meetings with death.

    Like an overstuffed stocking on Christmas morning, NPR Holiday Favorites is full of unexpected pleasures and evergreen delights.• David Sedaris contributes his now classic “Santaland Diaries,” his account of his experiences playing Santa’s little helper at Macy’s in New York.• Susan Stamberg sneaks her mother-in-law’s recipe for cranberry relish onto the air—again.• Storyteller Kevin Kling finds an invitation to participate in a production of The Nutcracker too tempting to resist.• Ghanian-born commentator Meri Danquah shares her thoughts on Kwanzaa.• Cowboy poet Baxter Black describes a Christmas cookie with “the denseness of an anvil and the half-life of a radial tire.”• Robert Siegel goes in search of the correct spelling for December’s Jewish holiday.• The Thanksgiving tables are turned on unsuspecting Bostonians in “When Turkeys Attack.”And more...

    A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

    Imbued with his love for India, and informed by his experience of India (where he worked for the BBC for over 20 years), Mark Tully has woven together a series of stories set in Uttar Pradesh, which tell of very different lives.

    His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.

    'Burma Chronicles' presents a personal and distinctively humorous glimpse into a political hotspot, putting a popular spin on current affairs.

    They did not know that the war they were fleeing had in fact ended—25 years earlier. Corinne Purtill was one of the first journalists to meet the families upon their incredible return to society. Years later she returned to Cambodia to learn the truth about their time on the run. What she found was a darker and more complicated tale than the one they first shared, a story of terror, isolation, fierce loyalty, appalling choices and murder. The result is a story that examines the unyielding human need for family and connection and the meaning of survival. Corinne Purtill is a journalist who has reported around the world for publications including Quartz, GlobalPost, CNN, Salon and the Cambodia Daily. She lives in California with her family. Cover design by Hannah Perrine Mode

    Through eight chapters and over 800 pages, 150 writers present scores of myths, stories, poems, essays, and journals that document Montana's significant literary tradition. The selections range from pre-white Indian days to the present, and, taken as a whole, they offer a powerful microcosm of the entire western experience.The chapters, each prefaced by an original essay, progress chronologically from myths and tales of the Indian people to accounts of exploration and the fur trade, followed by the mining and stockmen's frontiers, the agricultural and small town experience, as well as a special chapter on Butte--the richest hill on earth.Contemporary chapters take up the emergence of the modern West in the middle years of the twentieth century as well as the renaissance of western literature in contemporary fiction and poetry. These chapters include many authors who have earned national reputations in fiction, poetry, and criticism, but they also include many younger writers whose careers are just beginning.

    The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk the minefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and to explore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war gone terribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, If I Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content