This is the true story of a long-vanished Singapore and the dangerous carnival known as Bugis Street. James Eckardt arrived in 1970s Singapore only to fall in love with a Singaporean nymph named Milly. Thirty years later an email arrived that would lead Eckardt to discover what had happened to the Singapore girl, who, at the time he had loved her, had not technically been female.

Running with the Sharks is a novel of stark human conflict set in the lawless isolation of an uninhabited island off Thailand's Andaman coast.Tony DeLupo, alias "Loopy da Loop", is a man with a past. On an around-the-world orgy of spearfishing — "I enjoy killing things. And then eating them." — he retreats to the coral world of Koh Adang in the Andaman Sea, but, instead of finding the solitude he seeks, meets up with a group of marine biologists from Hat Yai's Prince of Songkhla Un...

From boxers, business tycoons, bargirls and body-snatchers to street vendors, slum-dwellers, socialites and singers, Bangkok People takes the reader into the daily lives of city denizens, both Thai and expat, and from the filthy rich to the just plain filthy. Penned by one of Thailand's best-known expat writers, this fascinating, funny, sometimes serious, and occasionally odd collection plunges right into the heart of the myriad masses who make this mad metropolis tick.The profiles...

Boat People is a panoramic novel of greed and compassion, violence and family love, desperation and hope. It is September 1981, the high tide of boat people flight from Vietnam. From the Mekong Delta port of Rach Gia, one boat, crammed with fishermen, farmers, political refugees, and urban hustlers, runs a 300-mile gauntlet of pirates and storms for the safe haven of Songkhla Refugee Camp. Here the survivors meet the West in the form of religious idealists and burnt-out aid workers. Some b...

Legendary expat writer and beer connoisseur James Eckardt proves that just because you're middle-aged doesn't mean you can't be immature. Here, among other high jinks, he mounts elephants with polo mallet in hand, skitters about slippery yacht decks, presides over songfests at the Peachy Flophouse School of Journalism, stars in a Thai movie and soap opera, and is adopted as a guitar-playing mascot by a tribe of masseuses in Phuket. Covering nearly thirty years of calamitous carousals in Th...

Alabama Days by James Eckardt, cover design by Colin CotterillA few weeks after the 1965 Selma March, four teenage Catholic seminarians from Long Island arrive in Birmingham, Alabama, to work for Father Edmund Fraser in a door-to-door voter registration campaign. Nights, they return to the same black neighborhoods to play guitars and lead crowds in singing freedom songs. While their celibacy is tested by seductive black girls, they party nightly with the priest's free beer and ciga...

****Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List“Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine**Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and William Hill Sports Book of the Year: Barbarian Days is a deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer looking for transcendence 'that recalls early James Salter' (Geoff Dyer, Observer)Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing...

Bestselling author Bill Arnott has done it again — he’s gone “viking”! — voyaging around the world by foot, bus, train, boat, and a couple of questionable planes.Gone Viking II features a series of remarkable excursions occuring over a number of years — before, during, and after the voyages recounted in Gone Viking: A Travel Saga. All of these journeys are now reflected in a changed world in which travel restrictions have become our new normal and...

Seventeen year old Marcy is changing, but not the way she expected. And she doesn't know why someone wants her dead.The Changeling is a short Fantasy story.

Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene have been called to Exmouth, a small town on the wild Atlantic coast of Massachusetts, to investigate a seemingly innocuous theft. But what they discover at the crime scene changes the course of their investigation: a sealed burial chamber, complete with rusted leg irons, fragments of bone and claw marks on the inside-face of its bricks.Then a historian is found murdered in the desolate salt marshes that surround the town, his face muti...

What you don't expect when on a world cruise could fill a book. And it did!On our first try we crashed off Egypt. The second try, we made it, but not without some wild stuff happening.I promise this book will make you laugh!