A story for the future can be about the past, present, or reflect a timeless truth. It can be a fable, parable, or a tale that touches our souls in a magical way. These little stories carry big messages for you to decipher and integrate. I collect these stories with the title Oh My God as each one, in its own way, is intended to awaken your sense of amazement, and hope.
When Wilhelmina and April find themselves roommates at a fat camp, both with very different goals, they find they have very little in common until they are both humiliated by the same person.
Fourteen-year-old Gracie Taylor lives in a messy house, but it’s not her mess. Her mother has been a compulsive hoarder for the last six years, and it’s only getting worse. Their kitchen is covered with towers of Tupperware. The dining room table is buried under clutter. And in the living room, clothing fills every available space. Her back-at-home sister promises to help, but all she seems to do is argue with their mother. Her best friend Jilly is no help either. She’s too concerned about her new boyfriend at her new school to listen to Gracie’s problems. Meanwhile, her mother continues to fill the house with junk. If Gracie can’t get her mother’s hoarding under control, she can kiss her dreams of film school goodbye. Gracie is the one who takes out the trash. Gracie is the one who keeps the toilets functional. Gracie is the one who clears the clutter blocking the exits. If left to her own devices, her mother would become a level five hoarder in no time. Her only hope is to get her mother on Clean It Up!, a show that helps compulsive hoarders. But getting her on the show won’t be easy. Fortunately, with the help and support of her film club friends, Gracie forms a plan. It might just take filming the biggest documentary of her life to make it happen.
The biggest, the boldest, the most comprehensive collection of Pulp writing ever assembled. Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train—a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best. Including: • Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett. • Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel, one of the masters of the form. • A never before published Dashiell Hammett story. • Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many many more of whom you’ve probably never heard. • Three deadly sections–The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames–with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman Featuring: • Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good. • A kid so smart–he’ll die of it. • A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning–the hard way–never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger. • The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.
Given a last chance to salvage her career after being wrongly blamed for property damage, movie location scout Greer Hennessy confronts environmentally-minded mayor Eben Thinadeaux in a sleepy Florida Gulf Coast community.
The moving story of a New Orleans woman who fought for justice and her community even amidst one of the city's darkest moments. Mark Hertsgaard and Deborah Cotton were strangers to one another, united only by a love of jazz and New Orlean’s distinctive Second Line tradition. And then, during a Mother’s Day parade, they were thrown together when two gunmen fired into the crowd… Deborah Cotton—known to all as Big Red—was among the most grievously injured. She is the driving force of this deeply reported parable of two of America’s most deeply rooted issues. A racial justice activist in her forties who was born to a Black father and a white mother, Cotton was one of twenty people—including the author—shot in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans. Once one of the largest slave ports, the city has long been a vortex of violence and racism. From her apparent deathbed, Big Red shocked observers by urging mercy for two young Black men accused of the attack. “Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,” she tells Hertsgaard, who, she later said, is “called” to investigate what actually happened, and why. Charismatic, complicated, and struck down in her prime, Big Red and her heroic life will captivate readers. In the wake of the shooting, she never stopped fighting as she sought to get to the core of this uniquely American maelstrom. Big Red's Mercy is an illuminating narrative that provides a human and unflinching look at modern America.
In The Mane Event, Shelly Laurenston introduced a whole new breed of heroes--sexy, shape-shifting hunks who redefine the term Alpha male. Now, in The Beast In Him, one gorgeous lone wolf is about to meet his match. . . Some things are so worth waiting for. Like the moment when Jessica Ward "accidentally" bumps into Bobby Ray Smith and shows him just how far she's come since high school. Back then, Jess's gangly limbs and bruised heart turned to jelly any time Smitty's "all the better to ravish you with" body came near her. So, some things haven't changed. Except now Jess is a success on her own terms. And she can enjoy a romp--or twenty--with a big, bad wolf and walk away. Easy. Mace Llewellyn. Brendon Shaw. Two tall, gorgeous, sexy alpha heroes who are 100% male--with a little something extra. Lion-shifters, to be exact, who can unleash every woman's animal side and still look good--make that spectacular--in a suit. . .and even better out of it. . . NYPD cop Desiree "Dez" MacDermot knows she's changed a lot since she palled around with her childhood buddy, Mace. But it's fair to say that Mace has changed even more. It isn't just those too-sexy gold eyes, or the six-four, built-like-a-Navy Seal body. It's something in the way he sniffs her neck and purrs, making her entire body tingle. . . Meanwhile, for Tennessean Ronnie Lee Reed, New York City is the place where any girl--even one who runs with a Pack--can redefine herself. First order of business: find a mate, settle down, and stop using men for sex. Even big, gorgeous, lion shifter men like Brendon Shaw. But she needn't worry, because now that Brendon's set his sights on her, the predator in him is ready to pounce and never let go. . . Seeing is deceiving. And Ric Van Holtz, the wolfishly sexy hero of Shelly Laurenston’s sizzling, wildly entertaining new tale, is nothing you expect-and everything you want... When it comes to following her instincts, former Marine Dee-Ann Smith never holds back. And this deadly member of a shifter protection group will do anything to prove one of her own kind is having hybrids captured for dogfights. Trouble is, her too-cute rich-boy boss Ric Van Holtz insists on helping out. And his crazy-like-a-fox smarts and charming persistence are making it real hard for Dee to keep her heart safe.... He's big, burly, and way smarter than your average shapeshifting bear. He's also about to get trapped by own his game. . . Lou Crushek is a reasonable, mellow, easygoing kind of guy. But once someone starts killing the scumbags he works so hard to bust, that really gets under his fur. Especially when that someone is a curvy she-tiger with a skill set that's turning Crush's lone-bear world upside down--and bringing his passion out of hibernation. . .
From the author of "The Beast in Him" and "Beast Behaving Badly" comes an action-packed, blazingly sensuous novel featuring an irresistible shape-shifter hero.
Millions of years ago, the deadly Megalodon shark, three times larger than our modern Great White Shark, roamed our seas, killing everything and anything in its path. Convinced it was extinct, scientists agreed the seas were safe from such a massive predator, until one surfaced off the coast of California, and our safety in or on the water was no longer such a sure thing.
Stanford Wong is in big trouble--or as he would spell it, "trubble"--in this laugh-out-loud companion to the award-winning Millicent Min, Girl Genius. Stanford Wong is having a bad summer. If he flunks his summer-school English class, he won't pass sixth grade. If that happens, he won't start on the A-team. If that happens, his friends will abandon him and Emily Ebers won't like him anymore. And if THAT happens, his life will be over. Then his parents are fighting, his grandmother Yin-Yin hates her new nursing home, he's being "tutored" by the world's biggest nerdball, Millicent Min--and he's not sure his ballpoint "Emily" tattoo is ever going to wash off.But Stanford Wong has a few things going for him. He has Yin-Yin's fantastic dim sum. He has his magic jade pendant, source of all his basketball skill. He has this amazing new book called The Outsiders he's just discovered. He may even have Millicent. And Stanford realizes that that might just be enough to save his summer--if he can pull it all together in time.
