Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe -- Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they're calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It's true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it's true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she's not a murderer at all -- she's a murderess.
'This is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn't really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen then.' Meet Flannery Culp, a world-weary high school senior. She is primed to taken on the few remaining obstacles that stand between her and the rest of her life: the SAT, college applications, the autumn term...Mercifully, there are a couple of distractions: 1) her friends: Kate (the Queen Bee), Natasha (less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV), Gabriel (the kindest boy in the world and in love with Flan), Lily, Douglas, V - (her name has been deleted to protect her prominent family), and Jennifer Rose - the Basic Eight. 2) Adam State, a well-groomed, polite young man and the object of Flan's affections. If only things hadn't gotten out of control. If only Flan had stayed away from the absinthe. Then she wouldn't be a topic on daytime talk shows, or on the cover of tabloids, or incarcerated, or have time to edit her journals...The supremely talented Daniel Handler has perfectly captured the absurdity of school life in this wickedly funny, dark-as-can-be novel.
Tolstoy wrote that happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in a different way.In Watch Your Mouth, Daniel Handler takes "different" to a whole new level....
I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up. Two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.
Can Joe help it if he falls in love with people who don't make him happy? And what about Helena—she's in love, but somehow this isn't enough. Shouldn't it be? And if it isn't enough, does this mean she's not really in love? It certainly seems to be spoiling the love she's in. And let's say there's a volcano underneath the city—doesn't that make things more urgent? Does urgency mean that you should keep the person you're with, or search for the best possible person? And what if the best possible person loves someone else—like the Snow Queen, for instance? This novel may not answer these questions, but nevertheless the author and publisher hope it will be of interest.
A razor-sharp tale of two couples, two marriages, a bar, and a San Francisco start-up from a best-selling, award-winning novelist. This is a story about two marriages. Or is it? It begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove--bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. Here is a cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revelers, and forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett--she's keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels--the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget. Set in San Francisco as the tech-boom is exploding, Bottle Grove is a sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms. Add one ominous shape-shifter to the mix, and you get a delightful and strange spectacle: a story of scheming and yearning and foibles and love and what we end up doing for it--and everyone has a secret. Looming over it all is the income disparity between San Francisco's tech community and . . . everyone else.
New York Times bestselling author Lemony Snicket sheds light on the way bad moods come and go. Once there was a bad mood and a stick. The stick appeared when a tree dropped it. Where did the bad mood come from? Who picked up the stick? And where is the bad mood off to now? You never know what is going to happen.
Lemony Snicket's work is filled with bitter truths, like: 'It is always cruel to laugh at people, of course, although sometimes if they are wearing an ugly hat it is hard to control yourself.' Or: 'It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.' For all of life's ups and downs, its celebrations and its sorrows, here is a book to commemorate it all - especially for those not fully soothed by chicken soup. Witty and irreverent, Horseradish is a book with universal appeal, a delightful vehicle to introduce Snicket's uproariously unhappy observations to a crowd not yet familiar with the Baudelaires' misadventures.
Today in one the richest countries in the world, 60% of households in poverty have people in jobs, inequality is the highest it has been for 100 years, climate change threatens our extinction and automation means millions are forced into a life of precarity. The solution? Basic Income. Here, Guy Standing, the leading expert on the concept, explains how to solve the new eight evils of modern life, and all for almost zero net cost. There is a better future, one that makes certain all citizens can share in the wealth of the modern economy. Far from being a new idea, Standing shows how the roots of basic income go back to the Charter of the Forest, one of two foundational documents of the state – the other, sealed on the same day, being the Magna Carta. All citizens have a right to the wealth created by capitalism, and all – left or right, rich or poor – can benefit from a dynamic and ecologically grounded economy created by the guarantee of subsistence to all.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s groundbreaking account of the crime that shocked New York City—and the world In the early hours of March 13, 1964, twenty-eight-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was stabbed to death in the middle-class neighborhood of Kew Gardens, Queens. The attack lasted for more than a half hour—enough time for Genovese’s assailant to move his car and change hats before returning to rape and kill her just a few steps from her front door. Yet it was not the brutality of the murder that made it international news. It was a chilling detail Police Commissioner Michael Joseph Murphy shared with A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times: Thirty-eight of Genovese’s neighbors witnessed the assault—and none called for help. To Rosenthal, who had recently returned to New York after spending a decade overseas and would become the Times’s longest-serving executive editor, that startling statistic spoke volumes about both the turbulence of the 1960s and the enduring mysteries of human nature. His impassioned coverage of the case sparked a firestorm of public indignation and led to the development of the psychological theory known as the “bystander effect.” Thirty-Eight Witnesses is indispensable reading for students of journalism and anyone seeking to learn about one of the most infamous crimes of the twentieth century.
