“Marvelously told; a middle-grade fantasy for everyone.” -Kirkus Reviews Tired of being teased about his name and his stutter, twelve-year-old Hobart sets out to do a few heroic deeds and earn a place in Knight School. But the local damsels he hopes to save assure him that the last thing they need is rescuing. The runaway bull he tries to catch wears him like a hat. And don't even ask about the ogre. Finally, in desperation, Hobart sets out on the most daring quest he can think of--he will slay a dragon. Or that's his plan anyway. The Legend of Hobart is a hilarious, heart-felt adventure, for the would-be hero in all of us.
A raucous, bawdy, and hilarious investigation of the South through the unforgettable voice of Fanny, Nickole Brown's fierce, tough-as-new-rope grandmother.
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a breathtaking elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?
FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY) A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.” Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.
Dancer Stonemason is three days from his major league debut. With his wife and son cheering him on, he pitches the greatest game of his life. And then loses everything. Told against the backdrop of America's postwar challenges from Little Rock to the Bay of Pigs to Viet Nam, American Past Time is the story of what happens to a man and his family after the cheering stops.
Learn how to live the life you want, not just the life you can afford in this highly engaging, step-by-step guide to winning at personal finance! Managing your money is like going to the dentist or standing in line at the DMV. Nobody wants to do it, but at some point, it's inevitable: you need to clean your teeth, renew your license, and manage your personal finances like a grown-up. Whether you're struggling to pay off student loan debt, ready to stop living paycheck to paycheck, or have finally accepted that your Beanie Baby collection will never pay off, tackling your finances may seem immensely intimidating. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, by approaching it as a game--or something that requires you to set clear goals, as well as face challenges you must "beat"--personal finance can not only be easy to understand, but it can also be fun! In Get Money, personal finance expert Kristin Wong shows you the exact steps to getting more money in your pocket without letting it rule your life. Through a series of challenges designed to boost your personal finance I.Q., interviews with other leading financial experts, and exercises tailored to help you achieve even your biggest goals, you'll learn valuable skills such as: Building a budget that (gasp) actually works Super-charging a debt payoff plan How to strategically hack your credit score Negotiating like a shark (or at least a piranha) Side-hustling to speed up your money goals Starting a lazy investment portfolio...and many more! Simply put, with this gamified guide to personal finance, you'll no longer stress about understanding how your finances work--you'll finally "get" money.
Gabriel and Ingrid Santerre are a wealthy, highly connected couple with a savage kink: In the privacy of a posh New York City hotel suite, they like to subject teenage prostitutes to extremely rough sex. This time, though, they've gone too far, and their victim is dead. As Gabriel goes out to buy a golf bag to hide the body in, Ingrid, strangely passive and long brutalized by her husband, suddenly feels remorse and calls the police. The two are swiftly taken into custody and separated; Gabriel calls in his high-powered lawyer and calmly schemes to frame his wife. But NYPD detective Caroline Reese won't let him get away with it. Despite Gabriel's connections--reaching right into the district attorney's office--and a warning from her lieutenant that she's proceeding at her own risk, Reese finds the one woman who can lead her to the truth. Reese's quest is blocked not only by Gabriel's pull, but by a violent episode in her own past--one that has left her with a blind spot that keeps her from seeing the whole picture about Gabriel and his wife. Bringing an exciting new voice to the noir thriller, Heather Lewis coolly and masterfully builds the tension until the novel's shattering--and deeply satisfying--payoff.
A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids. Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months. As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all? Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.
