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The Walmart Book of the Dead by Lucy Biederman
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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain - 2012
It explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
Shall We Not Revenge
D.M. Pirrone - 2014
His investigation proves difficult when the neighborhood's Yiddish-speaking residents are reluctant to talk. But when the rabbi's headstrong daughter, Rivka, unexpectedly offers to help Hanley find her father's killer, the detective receives much more than the break he was looking for. Their pursuit of the truth draws Rivka and Hanley closer together and leads them to a relief organization run by the city's movers and shakers. Along the way, they uncover a web of political corruption, crooked cops, and well-buried ties to two notorious Irish thugs from Hanley's past. Even after he is kicked off the case, stripped of his badge, and thrown in jail, Hanley refuses to quit. With a personal vendetta to settle for an innocent life lost, he is determined to expose a complicated criminal scheme, not only for his own sake, but for Rivka's as wel
Dying to Live
C.M. Wright - 2012
You think about it, fantasize about it, live through it in your head. But what would you do if zombies became a reality? If you actually were to see the dead walk, attack and kill people you know - who then rise right in front of your eyes? What would you do when the undead don't follow the script you've played out - over and over - in your own mind?Find out what happens to a woman in central Illinois when her life is turned upside down. Zombies become real and so does the danger. Her family means the most to her, but can she keep them alive? Can she keep herself alive?In this short story that begins the full-length series, you are a big part of it. The main character "speaks" to you often and you're invited into her thoughts - which can be quite humorous at times. She's not perfect and she knows it.She strong and she's a fighter...but she doesn't know it.
Complete Collection Of H. P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks With 100+ Audiobooks (Complete Collection Of Lovecraft's Fiction, Juvenilia, Poems, Essays And Collaborations)
H.P. Lovecraft - 2002
Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales is "The Call of Cthulhu", canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, Lovecraft saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46.
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov - 1962
His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be.Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.
Ars Botanica
Tim Taranto - 2017
Through examinations of the ways in which various cultures and religions carry grief, Taranto discovers the emotional instincts that shape his own mourning. He seeks solace in the natural elements of our world, divining meaning from the Iowa fields that stretch around him, the stones he collects, the plants he discovers on walks through the woods. His letters, then, are the honest wanderings of someone earnestly seeking meaning and belonging, ultimately resulting in a field guide for love, grief, and celebrating life. At times astonishingly personal and even painful, Ars Botanica is also playfully funny, a rich hybrid of memoir, poetry, and illustration that delightfully defies categorization."Ars Botanica is a gorgeous hybrid: a memoir in letters to a phantom addressee, an introduction to life on this planet, a primer for how to live, a meditation on family. It also winds up being a beautiful and highly personal field guide to the natural world. It’s one of the most wrenching and honest accounts of falling in and out of love, of moving through a season of grief, that I’ve ever read."—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed, FSG’s Works in Progress, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann’s Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
The Sellout
Paul Beatty - 2015
It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young - 1965
It is a picaresque, psychological novel--a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young's method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters--and the nature of reality. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard--these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The novel touches on many aspects of life--drug addiction, woman's suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: "What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?" What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know? In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself--in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.
Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories
A.M. Homes - 2002
M. Homes writes with terrifying compassion about the things that matter most. Homes's distinctive narrative illuminates our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and demonstrates how extraordinary the ordinary can be. With Uncanny emotional accuracy, wit, and empathy, Homes takes us places we recognize but would rather not go alone.
Poems that will Save Your Life: Inspirational verse by the world's greatest writers to motivate, strengthen and bring comfort in difficult times
John Boyes - 2010
In this superb anthology can be found the best of the English-speaking world’s inspirational and reassuring verse, including such classics as Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and W.H. Davies’ ‘Leisure’. This beautifully illustrated collection of over 120 poems is sure to offer solace, hearten the soul and motivate the human spirit.
The Interrogative Mood
Padgett Powell - 2009
Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”—Richard FordThe Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian Frazier hails as “one of the best writers in America, and one of the funniest, too.” A novel composed entirely of questions, it is perhaps the most audacious literary high-wire act since Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine or David Foster Wallace’s stories; a playful and profound book that, as Jonathan Safran Foer says, “will sear the unlucky volumes shelved on either side of it. How it doesn’t, itself, combust in flames is a mystery to me.”
The Horror Squad: An Apocalyptic Tale
T.J. Weeks - 2016
With the world now plagued by rotters, it's up to my team and I to take care of the living and take out the dead.
Alter
Jeremy Robinson - 2018
Gregory Zekser is on a mission to visit the furthest reaches of the Amazon, providing medical aid to recently contacted tribes. As a general practitioner and food pantry director, his life in Massachusetts can be chaotic, but serving people is what he does best, and he doesn't mind sacrificing his personal life to help others, at home or half way around the world.But any hope of returning home to his wife, daughter, and comfortable life are eradicated when the small plane carrying him back to civilization plummets into the unknown depths of the jungle. Swallowed by endless green, with both pilots dead, Greg struggles to stay alive in a world that wants to infect his body, suck him dry, and eat him whole. Ravaged by illness and dehydration, and stalked by a ruthless predator, Greg's life teeters on the edge of oblivion until a scream lets him know that he is not alone.His first encounter with an uncontacted tribe ends in death--the first of many. Driven to the brink of madness, and then beyond, Greg finds himself caught up in a feud that existed before his arrival, but will only end with his death--or his enemies'.International bestselling author Jeremy Robinson, the master of taking creative and original concepts and fusing them with realistic and emotive characters, explores the depths to which a man can descend, and what it takes to climb back out.
The Dice Man
Luke Rhinehart - 1971
Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.
The Embalmer
Vincent Zandri - 2017
1 Bestselling Thriller and Shamus Award Winning Author Vincent Zandri Comes a Brand New Private Detective Series.
"The Embalmer is dying to meet you..."
You might think that a guy with the name of Steve Jobz would be one lucky man. That he'd be rich and have the world at his fingertips. But instead, Jobz is barely making ends meet at the New York State Department of Unemployment Insurance Fraud. A former cop who was forced to retire early after shooting a young man of color during a convenience store holdup, Jobz has since resigned himself to wasting away his days in a four-by-four cubicle inside an office space that's more boring than watching the paint dry. ˃˃˃ But when his overbearing boss calls him in on a job that the Albany Police Department is heading up, Jobz has a chance to get out of the office for a while. But what he doesn't realize is that he's about to come face to face with a serial killer who embalms his victims alive. What he is also about to face down, is his own worst nightmare come true when that serial killer turns out not to be a stranger. ˃˃˃ The Embalmer culminates with an explosive climax and promises to keep readers glued to their chairs for hours. The novel combines wry humor with some serious hard-boiled action, adventure, and romance. For fans of Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Charlie Huston, Jim Crumley, Lee Child, Brett Battles, and more. ˃˃˃ Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting. - Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years. Tough, stylish, heartbreaking. -Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Savages.
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