An inquisitive teleport technician named Ralph Bowdrie discovers that families are winning trips to tropical islands, but returning with one fewer member—and always a troublesome child. Ralph suspects a government conspiracy to eliminate problem children, and begins planting stories about trouble with his own kid…and then they win a one-week all-inclusive trip to Barbados. What's it all about? Discover the truth in this twisty, thought-provoking science fiction tale.
A Baker's Dozen of Short Stories Why doesn't God do something to stop the evil and suffering in the world? Some people who call themselves the "Atheists Against God" think they know the answer. And they know what they're going to do about it, too. A hired gun-who doesn't use a gun and won't be hired by just anyone-realizes that his profession is killing him, but finds it hard to quit. Until he discovers that his talent has more uses than he ever dreamed possible. A young boy learns that his best friend is an alien. But does that mean they have to stop being friends? Meet interesting, complex characters; explore worlds both strange and all-too-familiar; and discover the answer to thought-provoking mysteries in this collection of 13 short stories by Karl El-Koura. Twelve of these short tales were previously published in magazines between 1998 and 2010, while the bonus story is exclusive to this collection. Organized in three sections-Fear, Faith, and Love-this anthology also contains an introduction by the author, as well as forewords to accompany each story (an afterword in the case of the bonus story). Spanning a wide range of genres (including science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective fiction, military fiction, and superhero fiction) and a wide range of lengths (from the shortest story at 250 words to the longest at 7500 words), Ooter's Place and Other Stories of Fear, Faith, and Love is an eclectic collection. Join the author as he introduces you to stories both light and dark, fun and serious, always entertaining. Praise for stories included in this collection: AT WAR-"A Bradbury-esque piece." (SFReader) HOW YOU DIE-"The tension builds steadily into the wonderful climax and I could easily see this making a leap into the verbal horror tradition that spawned it." (Tangent Online) THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIMSELF FOR A SUPERHERO-"After some very funny, sometimes poignant encounters . . . we discover why the protagonist] is able to do what he does. And what happens to guys who think they are superheroes-but aren't. A very appealing story." (Tangent Online) Contents Part I: Stories of Fear How You Die Phantom Spouse Syndrome Tom's Refrigerator Corpse Of My Life Part II: Stories of Faith The Man Who Mistook Himself for a Superhero Atheists Against God and the Devil of Destruction Blink The Talent Part III: Stories of Love They Came From Ooter's Place Making Simbta At War The Curious Case of the Book Baron Bonus: A Story of Fear, Faith, and Love Chasing Carrots
Years after his wife dies in a mafia hit gone wrong, Garrison Gage finally pieces together a life for himself in the Oregon coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs. Some days the cranky private investigator with the bum knee and the caustic wit could even call himself content. Maybe even happy. But marrying again? Never. Yet not long after quirky Rita Rodriguez enters the scene, Gage can't imagine life without her. Unfortunately, when dark secrets violently emerge—involving first loves, tragic loss, and, strangest of all, a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1642 loaded with treasure—their relationship enters turbulent waters. Worse, the same deadly undertow that drags Gage into the darkness also threatens everyone around him. His friends. His enemies. Even the town itself . . .
Two identical twin sisters and former child actors have grown apart—until one disappears, in this “cleverly crafted and psychologically nuanced” (Time) suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things. “An addictive thriller that will keep readers burning through pages . . . sneakily hypnotic.”—Los Angeles Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Public Library, PopSugar “You be me, and I’ll be you,” I whispered. As children, Sam and Elli were two halves of a perfect whole: gorgeous identical twins whose parents sometimes couldn’t even tell them apart. They fell asleep to the sound of each other’s breath at night, holding hands in the dark. And once Hollywood discovered them, they became B-list child TV stars, often inhabiting the same role. But as adults, their lives have splintered. After leaving acting, Elli reinvented herself as the perfect homemaker: married to a real estate lawyer, living in a house just blocks from the beach. Meanwhile, Sam has never recovered from her failed Hollywood career, or from her addiction to the pills and booze that have propped her up for the last fifteen years. Sam hasn't spoken to her sister since her destructive behavior finally drove a wedge between them. So when her father calls out of the blue, Sam is shocked to learn that Elli’s life has been in turmoil: her husband moved out, and Elli just adopted a two-year-old girl. Now she’s stopped answering her phone and checked in to a mysterious spa in Ojai. Is her sister just decompressing, or is she in trouble? Could she have possibly joined a cult? As Sam works to connect the dots left by Elli’s baffling disappearance, she realizes that the bond between her and her sister is more complicated than she ever knew. I’ll Be You shows Janelle Brown at the top of her game: a story packed with surprising revelations and sharp insights about the choices that define our families and our lives—and could just as easily destroy them.
Victor Gruen was one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects and is regarded as the father of the U.S. shopping mall. In spring 1979, less than a year before his death, he began reconstructing his life story. Now available in English for the first time, Shopping Town is the long overdue account of a man whose work fundamentally altered the course of city development. Shopping Town opens in Vienna in 1938 with the Anschluss—the turning point in Gruen’s life—as he narrowly escaped the Nazi regime. A few years later, in the suburbs of postwar America, the Jewish refugee sought to reproduce the vitality of Vienna’s city center and invented the commercial apparatus now known as the shopping mall. Gruen’s Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, was the first fully enclosed shopping center in America. He then translated the concept to economically neglected city centers, setting the path for pedestrian zones and fighting passionately for an urban ideal without compromise. Highlighting Gruen’s sense of humor as well as reflections on the complex forces that sustained the postwar transformation of American cities, Shopping Town embeds Gruen’s experiences and perspectives in a wider social and political context while helping us understand his problematic place in American architectural culture. With afterwords by his son and daughter, Shopping Town closes with Anette Baldauf’s richly insightful essay on the legacy of Victor Gruen.
Part memoir, part essay collection, Megan Dunn’s ingenious, moving, hilariously personal Things I Learned at Art School tells the story of her early life and coming-of-age in New Zealand in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. From her parents’ divorce to her Smurf collection, from the mean girls at school to the mermaid movie Splash!, from her work in strip clubs and massage parlours (and one steak restaurant) to the art school of the title, this is a dazzling, killer read from a contemporary voice of comic brilliance. Chapters include: The Ballad of Western Barbie; A Comprehensive List of All the Girls Who Teased Me at Western Heights High School, What They Looked Like and Why They Did It; On Being a Redhead; Life Begins at Forty: That Time My Uncle Killed Himself; Good Girls Write Memoirs, Bad Girls Don’t Have Time; Videos I Watched with My Father; Things I Learned at Art School; CV of a Fat Waitress; Nine Months in a Massage Parlour Called Belle de Jour; Various Uses for a Low Self-esteem; Art in the Waiting Room and Submerging Artist. Praise for Tinderbox: “Tinderbox is deadpan hilarious and Megan Dunn is a comic genius.” - Susanna Andrew, Metro “Megan Dunn's wry, whip-smart memoir about Fahrenheit 451, literary ambition & the last days of Borders Bookstores is funny & insightful as hell. Like Kathy Acker meets Sue Townsend. The read of the summer! ... already one of my favourite New Zealand books.” - Hera Lindsay Bird “Witty, highly entertaining.” - Philip Matthews, Stuff "Tinderbox is such a shape-shifter, such a sui generis work, that to call it a memoir does it a disservice ... [Dunn’s] voice is hard to resist – sardonic, brazen, sagacious – recalling, in places, Nora Ephron, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Maggie Nelson.” - James Cook, Review 31
When I host book signings and give lectures on lottery prediction, people always ask, If lotteries are random draws, how can they be predicted? I always answer the same way. Lotteries are predictable because we have the ability to redirect subtle energy. With about 20 to 30 people present, I always ask how many are familiar with subtle energies. No one has ever raised their hand. And, why should they! It's only been within the last 30 to 40 years that Science discovered subtle energies and their role in manifesting human desire. It's only been within the last 10 years that this research and experimentation has been available to the general public in books like Lynne McTaggart's The Intention Experiment or Dr. Tiller's Conscious Acts of Creation. As a matter of fact, it has only been this year (2013) that Dr. Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize for his work on the God Particle. The first subtle energy particle ever found at the new CERN accelerator. With these discoveries and experiments on the redirection of subtle energy, Scientists believe that a new technology has been born. Significantly more powerful than electromagnetic energy, significantly more powerful than nuclear energy, subtle energy technology will bring about new ways for human populations to interact, and new ways to communicate. It will significantly change our health care industry and influence the movement towards world peace. Most interesting, are the time and space attributes of subtle energy that allow the human mind to predict the future and consequently win lotteries. In the science of Quantum Mechanics, experimenting at the level of subtle energy, scientists found that their observations were affecting the outcome of the experiments. Somehow, the experimenter's consciousness was having an effect on our everyday reality of atoms and elements. This led to other experiments many concerning time displacement. As it turns out, subtle energy does not conform to the way you and I experience sequential time. Subtle energy is unbound by time and space - giving it predictive potential. A few daring researchers now understand subtle energy to be a vast field of potential energy supporting our everyday reality and somehow this energy is intimately interconnected with our minds. Consequently, at this stage of subtle energy technology research, researchers are studying ways that the mind can amplify subtle energies to manifest human desires for better health, wealth and abundance, world peace, lasting vitality, and prophetic vision. Dream a Lottery Win Tonight, specializes in the application of subtle energy and its prophetic vision attributes. We accomplish this by activating an energized intention near the mind's source of subtle energy. In this way, we amplify the intention to win a lottery. Of course, we could amplify any intention including those for better health or world peace. We decided on lottery prediction not because it was easy but because it was difficult and because the results are quantitative not subjective. In developing the skill of prophetic vision to win a lottery, we use an energized intention activated as close to the mind's Source of subtle energy as possible. To get close to the Source, we use mantras. These mantras resonate frequencies that are specific to the results we seek. In this case, we use the Lakshmi Mantra, used since antiquity to enhance ones abilities at games of chance. Once close to the source, we activate an energized intention. The intention is energized with emotion and bright sense visualizations. We perform this meditation just before retiring enhancing our dreams allowing us to predict a winning number. In this way, we use subtle energies to win the lottery. Larry Vingelman Author
Arranged in sixteen musical categories, provides entries for twenty thousand releases from four thousand artists, and includes a history of each musical genre.
A search and rescue team known as Vulture Squad is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing Green Beret platoon. As they hunt through the primordial depths of the valley, they discover ancient horrors that not only threaten to unravel their minds, but to end their lives as well. When the casualties mount, the men of Vulture Squad must abandon their human nature and give in to their savage instincts in order to survive...the Primitive War.DISCLAIMER - This novel is set in the Vietnam War, and as such, it isn't suitable for children. There is graphic violence, adult language, drug use, and many references to war-borne tragedy.
