When Trace Malloy and Blaine Witherspoon collide on a desolate West Texas highway, their fender bender sets the tone for escalating clashes that will determine the future of the town of Conquistador. Malloy, a ranch manager and lifelong cowboy, knows that his occupation--and his community--are dying. He wants new- millennium opportunities for his son, even though he himself failed to summon the courage to leave familiar touchstones behind. Witherspoon, an ambitious, Lexus-driving techie, offers a solution. He moves to Conquistador to build and run a state-of-the-art semiconductor plant that will bring prestige and high-paying technology jobs to revive the town--and advance his own career. What neither man anticipates is the power the "Big Empty" will wield over their plans. The flat, endless expanse of dusty plain is as much a character in the conflict as are the locals struggling to subsist in this timeworn backwater and the high-tech transplants hell-bent on conquering it. While Malloy grapples with the flaws of his ancestors and his growing ambivalence toward the chip plant, Witherspoon falls prey to construction snafus, corporate backstabbing, and financial fraud. As they each confront personal fears, they find themselves united in the search for their own version of purpose in a uniquely untamable Texas landscape. The Big Empty, the debut novel from longtime journalist and nonfiction author Loren C. Steffy, combines a sweeping appreciation for history and the struggles of small-town America with an examination of technology and the social and economic changes that come over time.
Police Chief Nathan Active investigates a plane crash out in Alaska’s Big Empty—and what he finds there casts suspicion of murder on several locals in his small town of Chukchi. Evie Kavoonah, a young mother-to-be, and her fiancé, Dr. Todd Brenner, are on a flight over the Brooks Range when their bush plane runs out of gas and hits a ridge, instantly killing them both. Chukchi police chief Nathan Active doubts he’ll find anything amiss when his close friend, Cowboy Decker, asks him to look into the possibility of foul play. Evie was like a daughter to Cowboy, who trained her to fly, and he insists there’s no way his protégée made a fatal mistake that day. Nathan reluctantly plays along and discovers that Cowboy’s instincts are correct—the malfunction that led to the crash was carefully planned, and several people in the village have motives for targeting the pair. Meanwhile, Nathan’s wife, Gracie, is pregnant, but so scarred by memories of domestic abuse that she isn’t sure she should have the baby. Nathan must support her and their adopted daughter, Nita, while managing an increasingly complex and dangerous murder case.
After half of the world's population is killed by a plague, seven teenagers seek a better life in a nightmarish future by deciphering coded messages and trying to avoid the Slashers. Original.
An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still. “Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful.”—People NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret. When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents’ abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents’ breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from “peculiarity to pathology.” Susan entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success—she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse—she’d binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again—and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to “quit food.” Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.
“A must-read for anyone interested in moving from inspiration to action.” —Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You Most of us fill our days with frantic activity, bouncing from task to task, scrambling to make deadlines and chase the next promotion. But by the end of each day we’re often left wondering if any of it really mattered. We feel the ticking of the clock, but we’re unsure of the path forward. Die Empty is a tool for people who aren’t willing to put off their most important work for another day. Todd Henry explains the forces that lead to stagnation and introduces practices that will keep you on a true and steady course. The key is embracing the idea that time is finite, so you should focus on the unique contribution to the world that only you can make. Henry shows how to sustain your enthusiasm, push through mental barriers, and unleash your best work each day.
A people's history and the horror of war: Howard Zinn meets Apocalypse Now. Political autobiography. March 1972, about to graduate from NYU. A journey: two days and nights in the New York subway. Love it or leave it. A decision: become a Great Academic Marxist; blow up the Williamsburg Bridge; go into exile. Vietnam Veterans with placards, for and against the war. Seven placard-men at the seven gates of Thebes, brandishing their shields. A decision. Political or personal? Or pure Zen? Mind or no-mind? Kill for peace! Dylan, Hendrix, or the Fugs. The two Suzukis, or Dogen. Monk and Coltrane! The relation between Hegel's logic of thinking as such and his logic of practice, which does not exist. The screech of the subway stops. A fork where three roads cross, the realm of shadows, what is to be done? A Chinese menu? Stab it! Stab it with your fork! But what I, myself, decide is not the point. The point is the question of 'what a decision is and what making a decision means.' The answer is 'never stop asking.' Ask yourself. Ask FDR, JFK, LBJ, McNamara and his band, John Kerry, or a Vietnam War veteran of your choice. Ask Nixon, Kissinger-Trump! Ask Trump! Ye great decision-makers, have you ever asked yourselves what a decision is and what making a decision means! That is the question. The Empty Shield asks it. Repeatedly, repetitiously, abysally, and, possibly, once and for all.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money? Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world. Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic. Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms. Praise for Empty Mansions “An amazing story of profligate wealth . . . an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.”—The New York Times “An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast “Fascinating . . . [a] haunting true-life tale.”—People “One of those incredible stories that you didn’t even know existed. It filled a void.”—Jon Stewart, The Daily Show “Thrilling . . . deliciously scandalous.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." —ELLE When Hattie's moody boyfriend dumps her in Paris, she returns home to find that her sister Min is in the psych ward again. Freaked out by the prospect of becoming a surrogate mother to Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, Hattie decides to take them in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across America, as aunt and kids—through chaos as diverse as their personalities—discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.
