This beautiful book will go perfectly on the coffee table of your formal living room or displayed prominently in your office. As the first book in the 'Bookshelf Collectibles' series, this will instantly add class to whatever room you put it in. Impress a girl by showing her your collection of beautiful books, have your co-workers in awe of your reading and knowledge and get that raise & promotion that you deserve.
250 book titles that have never seen the light of day (and one haiku). Family-friendly fun for chronic quipsters and perpetual punsters! Guaranteed G-rated groans on every page."Managed to read it all in one sitting. For me, that's quite an accomplishment."Ivan Auflitch, author of Can't Sit Still."Took this along on our latest expedition and roared with laughter."Claude Yarmoff, author of The Lion Attacked."Captivating!"Barb Dweyer, author of Prison Security.
This is a story of simpler but harder times. This story takes place during the Great Depression in a small Midwestern town in Indiana where Harry and his friends are young boys looking for adventure. These boys set off on a project to dam the river, which takes them on an adventure beyond their imagination. Through this story we learn about friendship, teamwork, love, and family. It is witty, funny, and tender, and carries us back to what it means to be a child. This is a coming-of-age story that is reminiscent of Stand by Me and October Sky. It is the story of lifelong friendships that develop as we grow and learn together.
From the very first page of My Story His Glory, readers quickly connect with the colorful characters of this engaging work by first time author, Gwen Lewis. We are quickly introduced to the main character of the story, a little girl born into poverty and inequality. We learn that she grew up during a time when all the social institutions were segregated, and Jim Crow laws prevailed. She is the ninth of ten children born to Ruth and Ab Mason. Demoralized by bigotry and hatred, her parents tried to instill a sense of pride and goodness into their children. Though neither of her parents were formally educated, they championed education as the vehicle to independence and a better way of life for their children.The book reveals intimate details about her impoverished home life in an honest, unpretentious way. Life was sometimes hard, but there were also times of contentment and joy. As we continue to follow her story, we also see ourselves in the struggles she faced when she eagerly left home for college. Choosing to attend the historic Tuskegee Institute located forty miles from where she grew up was a point of great pride for her.We witness the grace and goodness of God and how he never left her alone. It is interesting as well as inspiring to witness the love and compassion of God as he carried her when she didnaEUR(tm)t even know he was there. Later she would learn to recognize his gentle hand. We laugh at her childhood antics, cry with her as she painfully recalls personal losses, and rejoice with her as she triumphs over her enemies! After reading My Story His Glory we walk away inspired, with a desire to know this ever-present God she affectionately calls Father.
Hailed by Frank O’Connor as one of “the greatest living storytellers,” J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest. Powers’s thoroughly human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption. These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life.
first paperback edition: To the outside world, Walter de Milly's father was a prominent businessman, a dignified Presbyterian, and a faithful husband; to Walter, he was an overwhelming, handsome monster. This paperback edition of In My Father's Arms: A Son's Story of Sexual Abuse adds a reflective preface by the author and a foreword by Richard B. Gartner, author of Beyond Betrayal: Taking Charge of Your Life after Boyhood Sexual Abuse. "A sensitive and compelling account of father-son incest. In spite of the suffering portrayed, the account also gives testimony to the strength of family bonds, and to the courage and resilience of the human spirit."—Fred S. Berlin, MD, Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma "This is the most detailed and utterly plausible account I've ever read of what it feels like to be an abused child, and it is told with cinematic presence and verisimilitude. The anger, the love, the evasiveness and jealousy and confusion, the need to dissociate oneself from one's own actions and reactions—all are presented in a harrowing narrative, which is as tragic as a Greek drama and as engrossing as a Victorian novel. The unexpected element in this book—which falls on it like manna—is its nourishing, exquisite lyricism."—Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story cloth: "Walter de Milly has written a sensitive and compelling account of father-son incest. In spite of the suffering portrayed, the account also gives testimony to the strength of family bonds, and to the courage and resilience of the human spirit."—Fred S. Berlin, M.D., Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma "This is the most detailed and utterly plausible account I've ever read of what it feels like to be an abused child, and it is told with cinematic presence and verisimilitude. The anger, the love, the evasiveness and jealousy and confusion, the need to dissociate oneself from one's own actions and reactions—all are presented in a harrowing narrative, which is as tragic as a Greek drama and as engrossing as a Victorian novel. The unexpected element in this book—which falls on it like manna—is its nourishing, exquisite lyricism."—Edmund White The TV-perfect family of Walter de Milly III was like many others in the American South of the 1950s—seemingly close-knit, solidly respectable, and active in the community. Tragically, Walter's deeply troubled father would launch his family on a perilous journey into darkness. To the outside world, this man is a prominent businessman, a dignified Presbyterian, and a faithful husband; to Walter, he is an overwhelming, handsome monster. Whenever the two are together, young Walter becomes a sexual plaything for his father; father and son outings are turned into soul-obliterating nightmares. Walter eventually becomes a successful businessman only to be stricken by another catastrophe: his father, at the age of seventy, is caught molesting a young boy. Walter is asked to confront his father. Walter convenes his family, and in a private conference with a psychiatrist, the father agrees to be surgically castrated. De Milly's portraits of his relationships with his father and mother, and the confrontation that leads to his father's bizarre and irreversible voluntary "cure," are certain to be remembered long after the reader has set aside this powerful contribution to the literature of incest survival. Walter de Milly is a writer living in Key West, Florida.
This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wisława Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force. Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen. One tells the story of young lovers "warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts," while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room." Another poem defines the speaker via a "packing slip" of her parts--"brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia." The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection. From The Two Yvonnes: WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK Her cries impersonated all the world; The fountain's bubbling speech was just a trick But still I turned and looked, as she implored, Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks: Just radio, whose waves might be her wav- ering, whose pitch might be her quavering, I turned toward, where, the sirens might be "Save Me," "Help me," "Mommy, Mommy"—everything She, too, had said, since sloughing off the world. She took to bed, and now her voice stays fused To air like outlines of a bygone girl; The streets, the lake, the room—just places bruised Without her form, the way your sheets still hold Rough echoes of the risen sleeper, cold.
S.I.R WEDS S.E.C. Barbara Stone can't believe her wedding-wary eyes. Her boss is getting married in less than three weeks to someone with the initials S.E.C.! Then Sam Reed reveals the identity of his mystery bride, and Barbara knows she's really in trouble. Not only does S.E.C. stand for secretary, that secretary is her! But Barbara has never wanted a husband for Christmas—or any other time of the year. And just because her boss wants a wife, it doesn't mean she has to step in. After all, marriage was never in her job description. Now, if she can just forget how irresistible he can be….
A gripping saga of one woman’s ill-fated romance, resiliency, and redemption from the Sunday Times–bestselling author of The Letter. When a train accident leaves Rosie’s mother dead and her father left crippled and unable to earn a living, it is up to Rosie to keep the wolf from the door. With her mother gone and her sweetheart Adam away in the army, Rosie eagerly awaits his letters, but they never come. As she grows more disillusioned, Adam’s best friend, Doug, goes out of his way to be charming and attentive. Alone and confused, Rosie blossoms under his evil influence and soon finds herself carrying Doug’s baby and thrown out of her family home. Realizing she has no choice, she agrees to marry Doug. But then a warm and wonderful letter arrives from Adam . . . telling her he’s on his way home. More Than Riches is a heartbreaking, yet uplifting, saga of a young woman and her second chance at happiness. Perfect for fans of Nadine Dorries and Cathy Sharp.
