A Dishwashers Diary is the fictionalized diary of Rev. Joshua Thornbee. Thornbee ends up leaving the ministry after suffering a nervous breakdown. He then tries to find other work but has no luck. Finally, as last resort, he takes a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant that he used to go for local ministerial association luncheons. The diary is for the year he worked there and deals with subject ranging from his personal life, poetry, dreams, literature, history, romance, and special entries for holidays. It is truly a delightful read!
A major literary event—the long-awaited publication of George Orwell's diaries, chronicling the events that inspired his greatest works. This groundbreaking volume, never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interior life of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century political thought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the eleven surviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among miners and itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrific drama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personal entries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s own decline as he battled tuberculosis. Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasured dispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds of famous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as the autobiography he would never write.
Teenager Christopher “Ducky” McCrae deals with feeling isolated in this spin-off from the Newbery Award–winning author’s Baby-sitters Club series. Ducky has great new friends in Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, and Amalia. But as much as he enjoys spending time with the girls, sometimes he misses the connection he had with his former friends Jay and Alex, who’ve recently drifted away. With his parents always traveling and his brother too busy to spend time with him, lately Ducky feels like the loneliest teenager on the West Coast. So when one of his female friends develops a crush on him—no one is more surprised than Ducky . . . The next chapter following Ann M. Martin’s bestselling Baby-sitters Club series, the California Diaries are the first-person journals of Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, Amalia, and Ducky—five teenagers dealing with the ups and downs of growing up. This collection includes the complete set of Ducky’s three California Diaries.
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
Spiritwind: A Book for Spiritual Adventurers is a book that teaches you and your friends about many religions, philosophies and spiritual paths. It is a spiritual adventure that is only a beginning to a journey that lasts a lifetime. Spiritwind is also a book that models for you how to have a study group for “spiritual adventuerers.”
Another instalment of The Stardust Diaries'¦what does 2006 have in store for Tarn and Twinkles? Only time and Tarn will tell. Funny, romantic, thought provoking and endearing'¦ a glimpse into the life of an unusual couple and their alternative lifestyle.
Treat yourself to a fine selection of sensual fiction! This collection includes three books from Giselle Renarde’s Lesbian Diaries series: Maggie's Diary, Poppy's Diary, and Heaven's Diary. Maggie has just started her first year at university, but living at home is cramping her style. When she meets another student commuter, it's clear that Patience is looking for more than just a study buddy. When Patience brings her home to a nudist household, she can't control her desires. But what will Maggie do when her world of lust comes crashing down around her? Poppy's a small-town girl and that's the way she likes it. When she proposes to her long-distance girlfriend, Kristen is hesitant to leave her lucrative job in the city. She likes their relationship the way it is. Can Poppy sell her girlfriend on the small-town experience, or is life about to send her more surprises than she can handle? There's drama around every corner in Poppy's Diary! Will Heaven's dream house turn into a nightmare? From the moment Heaven, her girlfriend, and her best friend move in, strange things happen in the home. But why is Heaven the only one seeing ghosts and sensing a presence in her bed? Terra and Elle tell her she's hallucinating, but is that really true? Is Heaven imagining the haunting or is a succubus stealing her soul? Lesbian fiction from award-winning queer Canadian author Giselle Renarde.
They come into our homes. They see us in our most fragile moments. Plumbers are a fixture in our lives. When a toilet clogs, a faucet leaks, or a sewer line plugs, we call those unsung heroes, desperately seeking help. They scoop out our poop and pull underwear, toothbrushes and cotton balls out of our toilets, doing whatever it takes to get the job done. On a late Wednesday evening, after my toilet clogged, I asked our plumber to share his top five “greatest hits.” The stories were so hilarious, I had to share them with the world. The Poop Diaries features true stories told by my plumber, and many other plumbers, about the most memorable service jobs they have worked on and most unique people they have helped. Whether it’s nudity, rats, fake vaginas, dildos, snakes, weapons and so much more, these plumbers have seen and smelled it all.
Diaries of a Forgotten Parent: Divorced Dads on Fathering Through and Beyond Divorce opens an intimate window on the lives of divorced men. Literature on divorce focuses primarily on its effects on women and children, but fair and personal accounts of the lived experiences of custodial and non-custodial fathers are less available. In this highly accessible text, ten American men share intensely personal reflections of guilt, pain, frustration, sacrifice, loneliness and pride. The men do not see themselves as exemplary; rather, their stories are graphically honest, revealing what Paterson calls ordinary men “with all their warts.” The author reviews significant works on the male experience of divorce from psychological, legal, educational and sociological experts, interspersing commentary and research with the men’s own voices. From the initial discussion of why men marry and why they divorce through the men’s painful memories of being pushed out of their children’s lives by angry and resentful mothers, the author illuminates the legal, fiscal, emotional and practical experiences of men struggling to reinvent their fathering while they find themselves reconfigured into deserters, deadbeats and visitors. The societal myth that fathers are less valuable parents than mothers is thoroughly deconstructed in this text. The book will help divorced and divorcing men and those who work with them to fully understand the experiences of fathers who never stopped loving and caring for their children, in spite of the fact that the contributions of fathers are still largely discounted by schools, courts, and worst of all, by their children’s mothers. From this book, readers will understand that there are just too many reasons why fathers must never be forgotten in the lives of their children.
