Trash to Treasure is a collection of short stories resulting from the question, “What does a dinosaur, a pawnshop and graffiti have in common?”Sixteen authors took up the challenge and went in different directions. From the despair of a life that has sunk so low that a pawnshop is the only option, to the treasures to be found in one. From visiting a park that celebrates all that dinosaurs were, to life as one. From graffiti as a reflection of poverty and desperation, to an art form...

Violet Hopes is a collection of short stories resulting from the question: “What do a violet (flower or color), something living turning to stone, ash or dust, and a sweet life have in common?” Collected here are the results from a group of those authors who took up the challenge. Seventeen authors. Less than thirty days. Each in a different direction. From a violet as a harbinger of ill to a beacon of hope. From dust being the end of a sweet live or the begging of one, to an unfortunate s...

Of Past And Future is a collection of twenty-two short stories, from twenty-one authors, that explore the past and the future as experienced by those who can travel there.  Be it fifteen minutes into the future, forty years to meet yourself or your spouse as a child, or a thousand years into the past, traveling in time always has unexpected consequences - and sometimes that’s what the traveler is counting on. Come and experience these stories and see if you would handl...

The early years of the Cold War found the United States struggling to compete in the espionage war against the Soviet Union. With no history of a peacetime intelligence service, the newly created U.S. Central Intelligence Agency lacked the experience for conducting high-level espionage against the USSR.Viktor Neiman, a senior officer in the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence & Research, returns to Europe after serving in the wartime OSS. Teamed with an independent grou...

Southland Noir takes the reader back to the Jazz Age. No place is more evocative of the period than Los Angeles and Hollywood in 1926. Egan Walsh is an IRA veteran of the Irish War of Independence fought against centuries of British rule. Hostilities end by an unsatisfactory treaty threatening civil war. Walsh refuses to take up arms against former IRA comrades and leaves Ireland for Boston.As a former Irish newspaper journalist, he finds work at the Boston Globe. Writing ...

On January 30, 1972, elite troops of the British Army's Parachute Regiment killed 14 unarmed civilians in Derry, Northern Ireland. That Bloody Sunday set forth what became known as the Troubles. The beginning of decades of sectarian violence with ethnic Irish Catholics suffering oppression by a partisan British loyalist regional government.Terence Kelly, born in Belfast lived his life in Boston hearing stories of his legendary IRA grandfather that fought with Mich...

Douglas Clark reveals how moments of willing and will-making pervade English Renaissance drama and play a crucial role in the depiction of selfhood, sin, sociality, and succession. This wide-ranging study synthesizes concepts from historical, legal, philosophical, and theological studies to examine the dramatic performance of the will as both an internal faculty and a legal document. Clark establishes the diverse connections that Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and a range of overlooked pl...

The rise of China's economy has led to a substantial increase in disputes involving intellectual property rights, including patents. Not only are foreign companies suing domestic companies and vice versa, but patent disputes between foreign companies are also being litigated in the Chinese courts. The first edition of Patent Litigation in China provided practitioners from outside China with an essential guide to litigating patents in China. This edition offers many of the same fea...

Foreign gunboats forced China, Japan and Korea to open to the outside world in the mid-19th century. The treaties signed included rules forbidding local courts from trying foreigners; or, "extraterritoriality". Britain and the United States established consular courts in all three countries and, as trade grew, the British Supreme Court for China and Japan and the United States Court for China. These courts for many decades - over 100 years in China - dispensed British and American justice ...

The coalfields of West Virginia in 1920-1921 were a place of extraordinary labor violence between striking miners facing off against armed mercenaries employed by mining corporations. In the remote mountain valleys of Appalachia, a region made infamous by the Hatfield-McCoy feud, coal miners and their families lived at the margins. Coal mining was a poorly paid brutal and dangerous occupation. Mining companies controlled corrupt local government, exerting a form of institutionalized oppres...

In 1978, Italian journalist Emma Nicoletti comes into possession of confidential documents stolen from the Vatican Secret Archive by an activist whistleblowing priest. The dying priest has entrusted her with material that incriminates the Vatican Bank in a years-long international banking scandal.Italy is awash in widespread violence. Political terrorism parallels increasing violent actions by organized crime competing for control of drug trafficking making Italy arguably the most ...

Foreign gunboats forced China, Japan and Korea to open to the outside world in the mid-19th century. The treaties signed included rules forbidding local courts from trying foreigners; or, "extraterritoriality". Britain and the United States established consular courts in all three countries and, as trade grew, the British Supreme Court for China and Japan and the United States Court for China. These courts for many decades - over 100 years in China - dispensed British and American justice ...