Accidental It Girl


Libby Street - 2006
     Photographer Sadie Price is known for her thick skin and infallible instincts. A lofty education has made her skilled in her craft, and a fear of poverty -- and love for Jimmy Choo -- has made her one of the East Coast's most savvy paparazzi. She keeps her exhilarating but sometimes hectic life manageable by staying on the right side of the razor-thin line between celebrity photographers and the stalkerazzi. But all that changes when Sadie locks horns with one of Hollywood's hottest bachelors. ...goes around. Something about Ethan Wyatt's charisma and startling good looks throws Sadie off her game. Something about Sadie's dogged determination -- and a very compromising picture she snaps -- throws Ethan off his. Hatching a scheme befitting the silver screen that made him famous, Ethan sets out to give Sadie a taste of her own medicine. And when her life almost instantly becomes as frenzied as those of the "It Girls" she follows, Sadie starts to see her career, her love life, and Ethan Wyatt in ways she never had before....

Build up your Chess 1: The Fundamentals


Artur Yusupov - 2007
    Yusupov guides the reader towards a higher level of chess understanding using carefully selected positions and advice. This new understanding is then tested by a series of puzzles.Artur Yusupov was ranked No. 3 in the world from 1986 to 1992, just behind the legendary Karpov and Kasparov. He has won everything there is to win in chess except for the World Championship. In recent years he has mainly worked as a chess trainer with players ranging from current World Champion Anand to local amateurs in Germany, where he resides.

The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal


Victoria Zackheim - 2007
    In truth, she is someone's daughter, mother, friend, confidante. She seduces husbands, breaks up marriages, and occasionally becomes a stepmother. Sometimes, she is even a victim. So who is this creature who arrives like a wrecking ball to destroy lives and families? She is the Other Woman--but she's only half the story. For every Other Woman, there is a wife or girlfriend whose relationship has been devastated--or surprisingly--blissfully liberated. Some women find themselves playing both roles during the course of a lifetime. With 21 insightful essays (20 written specifically for this anthology) from the list of America's most respected and award-winning female authors, this collection explores the highly personal, sometimes anguished, sometimes hilarious, but always compelling experiences of women on both sides of these highly charged and emotional situations.

McSweeney's #21


Dave Eggers - 2006
    With work by Roddy Doyle, Stephen Elliott, Peter Orner, Joyce Carol Oates, Yannick Murphy, and Miranda July, as well as the triumphant return of Arthur Bradford and stories concerning fistfighting Mormons, New Zealand policemalfeasance, and a man named Trang, and with all of those works interspersed with heartfelt letters to Ray Charles and storyboards by some of the finest pen-and-ink artists of our day, our twenty-first issue is sure to be one of our best assemblages yet.

The Strange Case of Rachel K


Rachel Kushner - 2015
    Written prior to the publication of Kushner’s acclaimed debut novel Telex From Cuba, these stories, like Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp, burst forth with the genesis of her fictional universe. From the mythical “Great Exception,” to the ominous “Debouchment”—originally published in her too-short-lived journal Soft Targets—to the sexy and noirish title story, Kushner saddles up for a journey into the wilds of modern fiction.

Check Mates


Stewart Foster - 2019
    But the thing is, I’m not a problem child at all. I’m just a child with a problem. Felix is struggling at school. His ADHD makes it hard for him to concentrate and his grades are slipping. Everyone keeps telling him to try harder, but no one seems to understand just how hard he finds it. When Mum suggests Felix spends time with his grandfather, Felix can’t think of anything worse. Granddad hasn’t been the same since Grandma died. Plus he’s always trying to teach Felix boring chess. But sometimes the best lessons come in the most unexpected of places, and Granddad soon shows Felix that there’s everything to play for.

Striding Folly


Dorothy L. Sayers - 1972
    Each of the stories introduces a different side of the twentieth century's most ingenious detective hero.This book also features a biographical essay by Janet Hitchman, Sayers' first biographer.

The Mouse-Proof Kitchen


Saira Shah - 2013
    So when she discovers she’s pregnant, she prepares for a perfect new life in Provençe, France, with her perfect new baby-to-be. Anna’s partner, the easy-going Tobias, shouldn’t have too much difficulty tagging along—after all, he’s a musician who rarely starts his day before noon. But all that changes when their baby is born severely disabled.Anna, Tobias, and their daughter, Freya, end up in a rickety, rodent-infested farmhouse in a remote town in France—far from the mansion in Provençe they had imagined. Little do they know that this is the beginning of what will become an incredible journey of the heart—one during which they learn there really is no such thing as a mouse-proof kitchen. Life is messy, and it’s the messy bits that make it count.

The Chess Garden


Brooks Hansen - 1995
    Gustav Uyterhoeven left the chess garden that he and his wife, Sonja, had created together in Dayton, Ohio, and journeyed to South Africa to serve as a doctor in the British concentration camps of the Boer War. Over the next ten months he sent twelve chess pieces and twelve letters back to Sonja. She set out her husband's gifts as they arrived and welcomed all the most faithful guests of the garden to come and hear what he had written - letters which told nothing of his experience of the camps but described an imagined land called the Antipodes, where all the game pieces that cluttered the sets and drawers of the garden collection came to life to guide the doctor through his fateful and wondrous last adventure. Brooks Hansen offers a tale of spiritual progress disguised in the most exotic visions of the imagination. And yet The Chess Garden encompasses a very real world, too. Alongside the doctor's visions of the Antipodes, the story of his life gradually unfolds as well. History and allegory are expertly woven until finally both lead back to the chess garden itself, a place where ideas give way to vision, reason meets faith, and fact and figment are finally reconciled.

Read This if You Want to Be a Great Writer


Ross Raisin - 2018
    The author explains expert technique in a clear and jargon-free way, with examples from the fifty greatest writers of our time. For aspiring writers of all ages and abilities, Read This If You Want to Be a Great Writer will motivate and strengthen your writing talent.

The Bride / In the Rich Man's World (Anetakis Tycoons, #2)


Maya Banks - 2013
    But Isabella Caplan had known from the moment she'd met Theron as a girl that she was meant for him, and he for her. And now she was going to make him realize it, too…by seducing him to one knee. But if becoming his bride came at the cost of his honor, could he forgive her? Could she forgive herself?INCLUDES THE BONUS BOOK "IN THE RICH MAN'S WORLD" BY CAROL MARINELLI

My Best Friend's Brother


Kennedy Claire - 2015
    Attractive, young and equally strong-headed, Scarlett Sommerfield and Dev Bashir were never meant to be a match--at least if his very wealthy and traditional Indian parents have anything to say about it. So it's a good thing that they've despised each other for most of their young lives.But that's about to change. Growing up poor and motherless, smart and ambitious Scarlett is graduating from high school and becoming a new adult in the big scary world without a safe place to land, so when she's invited to move in with her best friend's palatial home on the right side of the tracks for her senior year, things couldn't be better.There, she finds security and kindness--with the exception of her best friend's brooding and arrogant older brother, Dev, who returns home from college struggling with his own demons and seemingly focused on making her the object of his contempt. Over time--and some ill-timed run-ins--Scarlett learns that he's not at all what he seems, and a forbidden love sparks between them, burning out of control when she least expects it. But when there's fire, there's smoke, and controlling Mrs. Bashir catches onto their young romance...and everything goes to hell.Steeped in outdated rules and traditions about love and marriage, the matriarch of the Bashir Family makes no secret that Scarlett simply doesn't measure up as a match for their eldest son. And the very people who made her feel part of the family now want nothing more than to see her gone for good.Including her former best friend. Will Scarlett and Dev's love survive against his intolerant mother's sabotage, her personal misfortunes and a dark life-changing secret he's kept simmering just under the surface? Or will Scarlett end up back where she started: facing her future utterly alone.

Life Work


Donald Hall - 1993
    It will remain with me always."—Louis Begley, The New York Times"A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall's particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form."—Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times"Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall's Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work--as distinguished from labor--as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm."—Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe“Donald Hall’s Life Work has been strangely gripping, what with his daily to do lists, his ruminations on the sublimating power of work. Hall has written so much about that house in New Hampshire where he lives that I’m beginning to think of it less as a place than a state of mind. I find it odd that a creative mind can work with such Spartan organization (he describes waiting for the alarm to go off at 4:45 AM, so eager is he to get to his desk) at such a mysterious activity (making a poem work) without getting in the way of itself.”—John Freeman’s blog (National Book Critics Circle Board President)

Project Smoke: Seven Steps to Smoked Food Nirvana, Plus 100 Irresistible Recipes from Classic (Slam-Dunk Brisket) to Adventurous (Smoked Bacon-Bourbon Apple Crisp)


Steven Raichlen - 2016
    Smoke is the soul of barbecue, the alchemy that happens when burning wood infuses its magical flavors into food. Project Smoke tells you how to make the alchemy happen, with Raichlen’s seven steps to smoking nirvana; an in-depth description of the various smokers; the essential brines, rubs, marinades, and barbecue sauces; and a complete guide to fuel, including how each type of wood subtly seasons a dish. Then the recipes for 100 enticing, succulent, boldly-flavored smoked dishes, including Bacon-Crab Poppers, Cherry-Glazed Baby Back Ribs, Slam-Dunk Brisket, Jamaican Jerk Chicken—even Smoked Chocolate Bread Pudding.     Illustrated throughout with full-color photographs, it’s a book that inspires hunger at every glance, and satisfies with every recipe tried.

Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies


Brian Coleman - 2007
    & Rakim • The Fugees • KRS-One • Pete Rock & CL Smooth • Public Enemy • The Roots • Run-DMC • Wu-Tang Clan • and twenty-five more hip-hop immortalsIt’s a sad fact: hip-hop album liners have always been reduced to a list of producer and sample credits, a publicity photo or two, and some hastily composed shout-outs. That’s a damn shame, because few outside the game know about the true creative forces behind influential masterpieces like PE’s It Takes a Nation of Millions. . ., De La’s 3 Feet High and Rising, and Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). A longtime scribe for the hip-hop nation, Brian Coleman fills this void, and delivers a thrilling, knockout oral history of the albums that define this dynamic and iconoclastic art form. The format: One chapter, one artist, one album, blow-by-blow and track-by-track, delivered straight from the original sources. Performers, producers, DJs, and b-boys–including Big Daddy Kane, Muggs and B-Real, Biz Markie, RZA, Ice-T, and Wyclef–step to the mic to talk about the influences, environment, equipment, samples, beats, beefs, and surprises that went into making each classic record. Studio craft and street smarts, sonic inspiration and skate ramps, triumph, tragedy, and take-out food–all played their part in creating these essential albums of the hip-hop canon.Insightful, raucous, and addictive, Check the Technique transports you back to hip-hop’s golden age with the greatest artists of the ’80s and ’90s. This is the book that belongs on the stacks next to your wax.“Brian Coleman’s writing is a lot like the albums he covers: direct, uproarious, and more than six-fifths genius.” –Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop “All producers and hip-hop fans must read this book. It really shows how these albums were made and touches the music fiend in everyone.” –DJ Evil Dee of Black Moon and Da Beatminerz “A rarity in mainstream publishing: a truly essential rap history.” –Ronin Ro, author of Have Gun Will Travel