A haunting and intimately observed new collection from David St. John, a poet of soaring imagination and passionate candorIn The Last Troubadour, David St. John has given us a collection of new and selected poems of astonishing beauty, precise and keenly observed but also touched with sensuality and deep feeling. Nothing is too small to escape notice (in “Guitar” St. John reflects on the beauty of that word) or too large to be explored-the suicide of a friend, the ...

As cigar smoke hangs heavy in Mark Twains sitting room, the members of the Monday Evening Club eagerly await his presentation, which they think will be the reading of his paper The Decay of the Art of Lying. Instead, Twain changes his mind and enthralls his audience with the true tale of one mans unconventional and fascinating journey through life.It is 1849 when a thirty-one-year-old Jewish South African immigrant sails into San Francisco Bay with forty thousand dollars in his poc...

This is a book for everyone who really cares about cats. Vividly written, sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted, it is bound to be found uplifting by anyone who has ever fallen for a cat, however much against their better judgement. While cat people are nice, the real heroes in this book are naturally the cats themselves. A rich portfolio of feline characters including the authors own cats step off the page, or perhaps lie curled in seductive curves on it, so vividly that you can feel...

Celebrate the days when trains were trains, individual expresses had their own character, serving their passengers in style in restaurant car, and connecting services ran over picturesque branch lines that were a very part of the countryside they served.Railway Season by David St John Thomas whose Country Railway sold an astonishing 170,000 copies, captures all our railway yesterdays with panache. This is indeed a railway book like no other, a portfolio of word portraits b...

Cats Work Like This was started by David St John Thomas in his 80th year and has been finished by his son Gareth. It gives a rare insight into the workings of cats’ elusive minds, gleaned from the authors’ two generations of watching their cats work. Learn about political and ‘eco’ cats, what cats do while you sleep, and what a cat’s eyes can tell you. Focusing on attention, emotion, manipulation and cunning, it explores both the scientific nature and daily habits of these puzzling creatur...

Originally published in 1963, this book was the first to survey the rural transport problem as a whole, and it includes the results of extensive research in an important but until then neglected field. The issues of increased car ownership and the reduction of train and bus services and the social impact of this is discussed, as well the question of subsidies in the UK as a whole. Three area specific studies deal with the Lake District, Northumberland and Devon.

Possibly read more than any other railway book, The Country Railway has sold over 170,000 copies. This is a redesigned edition of the original text and photographs.Everyone loved the country railway with its neat stations and colourful gardens, the shining brasswork of its tank engines, viaducts daringly built over gushing rivers, embankments carpeted with flowers, and guards whose appearance and voice as well as the traffic they carried in their vans reflected exactly the characte...

*The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to himDid not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself becameA darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.*--from "Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It"The Darkening Trapeze collects the last poems by Larry Levis, written during the extraordinary blaze of his final years when his poetry expanded into the ambitious operatic masterpieces he is known for. Edited and with an afterword by ...

**John Dies at the End's "smart take on fear manages to tap into readers' existential dread on one page, then have them laughing the next" (Publishers Weekly) and This Book is Full of Spiders was "unlike any other book of the genre" (Washington Post).Now, New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin is back with What the Hell Did I Just Read, the third installment of this black-humored thriller series.**It's the story ...

John Dies at the End is a genre-bending, humorous account of two college drop-outs inadvertently charged with saving their small town--and the world--from a host of supernatural and paranormal invasions.Now a Major Motion Picture."[Pargin] is like a mash-up of Douglas Adams and Stephen King... 'page-turner' is an understatement."—Don Coscarelli, director, Phantasm I-V, Bubba Ho-tepSTOP.

From Jason Pargin, the New York Times bestselling author of the cult sensation John Dies at the End, comes another terrifying and hilarious tale of almost Armageddon at the hands of two hopeless heroes.Warning: You may have a huge, invisible spider living in your skull. THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR.You will dismiss this as ridiculous fear-mongering. Dismissing things as ridiculous fear-mongering is, in fact, the first symptom of parasitic spider...