Black Jesus is white as a dove"A young marine returns from Iraq, blinded and scarred by a roadside bomb and harboring a terrible secret. Called Black Jesus by his fellow soldiers on account of his name being Lionel White and his birthday being Christmas Day, he has returned to his decaying home town to sit in the back of his mother's junkshop, pop OxyContin, and try to forget what he's seen. Into his life one day rides Gloria, a mysterious young dancer who is fleeing darkness and violence of a different kind, and with whom he finds unexpected love.

    Get mad at him and even cry with him. Here's Don Quixote, Santa Claus, and Faust rolled into one "thick shadow" of a man. A joyous sixty-year-old American street painter lives on the Left Bank in Paris, making a living by creating rentable apartments out of the most unlikely spaces. Mostly, however, he paints with utter delight in the creative act and discovers remarkable characters along his path: crafts-men, students, prostitutes, motorcyclists. He scumbles and fails. He digs twisting tunnels under Paris streets and builds nests: nature nests, rats' nests, birds' nests. He collects clocks and designs his own life from the "inside." Wanting to be true beyond honesty, visible past seeing to being, Scumbler scrambles, tumbles, rumbles, rambles through the ecstatic pleasure of creation and the pangs of ordinary existence.

    Like Polaroids framing the years of a troubadour and family man afflicted with an excess of self-awareness, these are stories without any clear good guys or bad guys. Instead, in each of these vignettes, you will find dysfunctional humans trying to do their best and bouncing off each other in the process.

    Sitting through hundreds of hours of interviews and private conversations -- not only with Jayne but also with her husbands, her lovers, and her children -- gave Ray the opportunity to present a revealing portrait of the woman. He records her drive for fame and success and her overpowering need to be loved and to love, needs that led her into numerous affairs with rich and powerful men -- including President John F Kennedy -- and with younger men from all walks of life. And he discusses frankly Jayne's ultimately successful plan to become pregnant by Nelson Sardelli because she wanted to have an Italian child.Know to millions as the consummate sex symbol who rivaled Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield received more press coverage than anyone else in Hollywood. The headlines were often sensational, causing society matrons and Baptist ministers to shake their heads and point their fingers. But under those sensational headlines there was a woman of greater complexity that any reporter could hope to understand. Strait goes below the surface to examine Jayne's emotions and motivations, revealing the truth about her many lovers, her three unsuccessful marriages, her love affair with Mickey Hargitay that lasted to the end and her battle against and her surrender to alcohol and drugs.

    During the Cold War, a more monumental effort was made by America and her allies to intercept and exploit Russian and communist countries communications. In the mid-1950s a tunnel was built by British MI-6 and the CIA which tapped into a buried communications cable in East Berlin. They successfully intercepted and exploited East European and Russian communist communications for over a year. Suddenly, in 1956 the tunnel was “discovered” by the Russians, denying the allies this exceptionally valuable intelligence source. This novel, The Berlin Tunnel is a fictional account of how a second tunnel might have been built between East and West Berlin. It is a thriller which takes the reader into the super-secret world that the author occupied fifty years ago. Every scene in The Berlin Tunnel could have happened. The time—1960-1961, and the place—the Divided City of Berlin have been faithfully recreated using extensive research and the author’s personal experience. Young American Air Force Captain Robert Kerr arrives in a divided Berlin awash with spies who move freely between the East and West. His task—build a TOP SECRET tunnel under the River Spree into East Berlin—tap into highly classified communications links between civilian and military leaders in Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries. The knowledge gained from this source will help America’s leaders to manage an imminent confrontation between the East and West over Berlin, perhaps even prevent World War III. At all costs, knowledge that the tunnel is being built must be hidden from the Russian KGB and the East German Stasi as well as our closest allies—the British and French. Only those involved in its construction can be allowed to know of the existence of the tunnel. Love couldn’t have found him as a worse time. Soon after he arrives, Robert falls for a German girl, Anna Fischer. It is spy verses spy as the dreaded East German Secret Police—the Stasi use every means possible to determine what Robert and his construction crew are doing in Berlin. But it is Anna, who is often caught in the crossfire between the Americans and the Stasi. The conclusion of the novel centers around events that focuses the attention of the world on Berlin. First, the Wall is closed, trapping 19 million East Germans including Anna’s entire family behind the Iron Curtain. A few months later, the world held its collective breath when the Berlin Crisis occurs—High Noon at Checkpoint Charlie—the only time in the Cold War when Russian and American tanks faced each other. Robert and Anna are caught up in these momentous events as they try to free her family and survive in a very dangerous city.

    He continued to make great music while slowly returning to his Catholic roots. His hard-won wisdom filters through his stories whether he's recalling how he went shopping with John Lennon and ended up on the cover of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band or what it was like to travel in the Jim Crow South with Sam Cooke.Praise for Dion... "To this day nobody, nobody can rock like Dion."—Lou Reed "He always had the name that said it all...Dion."—Bruce Springsteen "If you want to hear a great singer, listen to Dion. His genius has never deserted him."—Bob DylanThe audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.

    But he soon learns that rats in suits are even worse. What do you do when rats invade your barn? Kill them or negotiate? Mason finds out the hard way that force does not always work! An allegory of war and violence? A statement on the arms race? Neal Asher’s work takes Orwell’s Animal Farm into a grimly humorous future where evolution is outrunning humanity. You may never trust a rat again! “I’ve never read anything like MASON’S RATS before … it’s sharp, funny and highly inventive. There’s more fun in this one slim volume than in many a full-length novel!” – Stephen Gallagher

    The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.Complainers --Air mail --Baster --Early music --Timeshare --Find the bad guy --The oracular vulva --Capricious gardens --Great experiment --Fresh complaint

    During the seven decades from the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 to the present, economic constraints rarely limited what the United States did in the world. Now that will change. The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programsaSocial Security and Medicareawill compel a more modest American international presence. In assessing the consequences of this new, less expensive foreign policy, Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy experts, describes the policies the United States will have to discontinue, assesses the potential threats from China, Russia, and Iran, and recommends a new policy, centered on a reduction in the nation's dependence on foreign oil, which can do for America and the world in the twenty-first century what the containment of the Soviet Union did in the twentieth.

    I have explored the interrelationship of race, class, and gender, not as abstract issues but as actual encounters and episodes, providing me with a "voice". Varied as the narrative may be, they are told by the same voice--that of a wounded but surviving writer and academic. So perhaps the story that all the narratives tell is one of self-preservation. Memoirs, after all, become the literary representation of memory."

    S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser at the top of his imaginative and storytelling powers. Here are the richly metaphorical, imagistically masterful, clear and accessible poems for which he has become widely known. Kooser writes for an audience of everyday readers and believes poets "need to write poetry that doesn't make people feel stupid." Each poem in Red Stilts strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that's right under our noses. Right under Kooser's nose is rural America, most specifically the Great Plains, with its isolated villages, struggling economy, hard-working people and multiple beauties that surpass everything wrecked, wrong, or in error.

    Rogue & Kat Savage.

    A. L. Kennedy’s men and women huddle in foreign hotel rooms, immobilized by travel-sickness and betrayal. They plan seductions on the line at a cheese shop. They’re undone by a passing embrace in the office men’s room. Their passion is so urgent and imperious that it invades the stories they tell their children.By turns chaste and ferociously sexy, funny and unbearably sad, every story in Indelible Acts is a testament to the lengths to which desire drives us. And all are marked by Kennedy’s wisdom and humanity, and language that captures the briefest tremor of the infatuated heart.

    Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter, Richard, and his idealistic neighbor, Jenny, - and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve.The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives with be changed forever.City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock 'n' roll, about what people need from each other in order to live... and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.

    The Skinwalker ranch is such a place. Unbelievable and still unexplained paranormal activities set the Skinwalker ranch apart. Download FREE with Kindle Unlimited Perhaps no place on Earth has been the focal point for as many strange phenomena as the little corner of Utah known as the Skinwalker Ranch. This nebulous stretch of terrain in the Uinta Basin has hosted numerous sightings of blue orbs, UFOs, wolfmen, Bigfoot and practically every other paranormal bogeyman you could think of. Despite these heady tales of the bizarre, the outside world knew very little about the strange happenings at Skinwalker Ranch until fairly recently. But for the Native Americans of the region, the history of high strangeness goes back at least 1,000 years. Deep in their ancestral memory, frightening tales of the skin-walker roam across their consciousness. The dread is so great, in fact, that many residents of the nearby Ute Indian Reservation still refuse to set foot in the area known as Skinwalker Ranch. For them, the land is hopelessly cursed and to be avoided at all costs. But for the purpose of this book, we are going to cast these ancient words of wisdom to the wayside and delve right into the thick of things. Come along with us as we march headlong right into the uncertain and unsettling world of the unknown—right into Skinwalker Ranch! Read on your favorite devices such as Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Android cellular phone, tablet, laptop, or computer with Amazon's free reading Kindle App. Scroll back up and click the BUY NOW button at the top right side of this page for an immediate download!