Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?)Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his ...

A disease . . . the end of the times . . . a quest for survival? Where is a safe place to hide from the dangers that lurk behind a mask of lies?Daniel Gains and his best friend Carson Dennison own a retail establishment outside of town and have expectations in expanding their business. Little did they know that those plans were about to change. One day Dan is inspired by God to deliver a message to his church. Deeply disturbed by it, he ministers to them anyways. Shortly afterward,...

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Jernigan introduced David Gates as a novelist of the highest order. "Full of dark truths and biting humor," wrote Frederick Exley, "a brilliant novel [that] will be read for a long time."After that blackly comic handbook of self-destruction--whose antihero shoulders up to such crucial American figures as Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Harry Angstrom, Heller's Bob Slocum, Percy's Binx Bolling and Irving's Garp--Gates's new novel investigates the essenti...

A moving manifesto in poems and essays, inviting readers to embrace their humanity and live fully alive in our age of social change, hyper-capitalism, and pervasive lonelinessyes, everyone is struggling right nowso please be graciousbe kind & patient, but subvertevery institution that relies on our sufferingSomething isn’t right. Every generation thinks that, but we have more cause than most. The way...

Known collectively as the 'Great War', for over a decade the Napoleonic Wars engulfed not only a whole continent but also the overseas possessions of the leading European states. A war of unprecedented scale and intensity, it was in many ways a product of change that acted as a catalyst for upheaval and reform across much of Europe, with aspects of its legacy lingering to this very day.There is a mass of literature on Napoleon and his times, yet there are only a handful of scholarl...

A woman moving calamitously into middle-age; a musician taking in a friend with terminal cancer; a failed actor moving to the country: cynical, unreliable, sinking into middle age or alcoholism, dealing with physical decline or mediocrity, Gates's characters are a dark reflection of our own urban and suburban lives. Terrifyingly self-aware, overcome by the burdens of the human condition, they find their impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. But wherever i...

From Holden Caulfield to Moses Herzog, our best literature has been narrated by malcontents. To this lineage add Peter Jernigan, who views the world with ferocious intelligence, grim rapture, and a chainsaw wit that he turns, with disastrous consequences, on his wife, his teenaged son, his dangerously vulnerable mistress—and, not least of all, on himself. This novel is a bravura performance: a funny, scary, mesmerizing study of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open—wisecrackin...

**From the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Jernigan—and one of America's most talented, witty, and emotionally intelligent writers—come eleven "gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories" (The New Yorker) and a novella populated by characters who carry the full weight of the human condition.A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young, old or somewhere in between, who are broadly knowledgeable and...

This book explores the mingling of two rather different perspectives, those of the naval and aeronautical schools of thought, and the impact that they had upon one another in natural, professional and geopolitical settings. To explain the manner in which air power was incorporated into warfare between 1914 and 1945 it studies the deeds of practitioners, the limitations of technology, the realities of combat and the varying institutional dynamics and strategic priorities of the major mariti...

Unlike land and maritime military warfare, which has evolved over thousands of years, the history of war in the air is as short as it has been spectacular: only 100 years have passed since the first flight in a powered aircraft. Despite its brief history, however, military air power is not an insignificant part of the modern military machine: on the contrary, it has played a strikingly prominent role in recent conflicts and humanitarian relief operations, and is likely to take the leading ...

The Falklands, at the time of this story, were a little known group of islands miles away from anywhere that most people hadnt even heard of. Of course, nearly everyone has now heard of them and most even have a good idea where they are. Back in the late 60s and early 70s they were a sleepy spot on the map where nothing much happened. They didnt bother anyone and no-one bothered them. For two hundred years nothing much had changed in that respect and the modern world had only just begun to...

924 Miles tells the story of a man searching for God while trying to figure out what life is all about. It explores the true purpose of life, the grace of God, and the connection between the two. It will make you cry, laugh, and ultimately examine your purpose in life; many are calling 924 Miles a must-read book!