Jerry Renfrow runs an innovative freelance business. He helps others to be nice—for a price. Jerry deals in dreams and affections. A ferocious comedy and love story, Nice offers a rollercoaster of a read, a straight-on look at human foibles, and a sharp portrait of contemporary America.

Rod Gass is accused of being a criminal. He’s failed at careers that people didn’t know existed. Now a custodian at the Van Allen School of Mortuary Science, he is enjoying himself immensely.His niece, Judy, wants to know why. She is the only one ready to unveil this man, and to challenge him on his own terms. Rich in humor and with an acute sense of the absurdities of everyday life, Apology for Big Rod is an American success story of an altogether different sort.

Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth's cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein's secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven?From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination.

When an ex-basketball star and poetry aficionado discovers lost love letters from Emily Dickinson to an unknown Irish lover, she must confront academic conformism and risk embarrassing exposure in order to defend larger truths about American culture in a nation still divided by war.Meet Holly Winegarten, a campus celebrity and painfully self-conscious young woman trying to come to terms with being six feet, nine inches tall. Sidelined by injury from a basketball career, she develop...

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment o...

A portable collection of polemical bedtime stories for adults, addressing such timely topics as: erectile dysfunction during the national anthem, what happens when Nancy Pelosi comes calling, and what Model A Fords say under certain conditions.

In a time of global environmental crisis, pastoralism may seem beside the point. Yet pastoral ideals are still alive even though they often manifest themselves by ironic indirection. What can the pastoral tradition teach us about our ties to particular places?The contributors to this volume attempt to lay the groundwork for the ongoing concern with pastoral and with its critical revision.This volume brings together new essays that focus on painting, photography, poetry, essay...

Available together in ebook for the first time ever, this trio of brilliant short stories showcases the writing talent of number one Sunday Times bestseller Mark Billingham.Dancing Towards the Blade:They are waiting for the boy on his way home, the racist thugs. For Vincent, it is the latest in a string of violent events his family has faced since moving to England. But Vincent knows something that the thugs don't: he has in him the spirit of his father who,...

**THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER—FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOONThe extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.**The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father capture...

When Axi Moore decides to take a road trip across the US, the only person she wants to go with her is her best friend Robinson – who she also happens to be secretly in love with. She’s planned it all out, and all he has to do is say yes.Axi has had a tough life: her little sister died young, her mother walked out and her father turned to the bottle for comfort. Her parents escaped their grief in their own ways; this trip will be hers.But life doesn’t always work out as you ...

Everyone loves cats! What's not to love? In this book you will find 101 Hilarious jokes about the cats, and everything we enjoy laughing about our feline friends. Fill your days with laughter, give this book as a gift, or use it to entertain your loved ones. These punny jokes make great icebreakers and will lighten any mood. Great to use in a classroom, near events, or times when you just need a laugh.This collection of jokes is clean fun and family friendly, with no violence or of...

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic phi...