It's been called one of B.C.'s most bizarre drug cases in recent memory. A story with a cast of characters including an oddball hippy, a pot-bellied pig, an overly friendly raccoon and twenty-four black bears. Oh, and a thousand pot plants, apparently guarded by the bears. The bust took place in August of 2010 near the Village of Christina Lake, British Columbia and the story travelled to all parts of the world, including the United States, Denmark, England, India and Russia, where a news anchor lady could not stop laughing as she read the story. The New York Post declared, "Don't Smokey near this bear." Today, Allen Piche, aka 'The Beardude', announced the release of his book, The Beardude Story, which chronicles his side of this strange tale.
Shammoo is a carefree young polar bear who, one day, encounters an old and dying Inuit out on the tundra. After sharing the latter's excellent provisions and remaining few hours of life, Shammoo rounds off the acquaintance by feasting on his late friend's remains. In retribution, the Inuit's relatives demand a vendetta against the bear. Thus, Shammoo is driven out of his ancestral lands, and embarks on a giant iceberg in a desperate attempt to gain the shores of the fabled lucky iceberg, aka Australia, where he plans to begin a new life as a refugee. Unfortunately, a small but critical error in navigation lands him on the adjacent continental landmass of B'gandia, aka the lucky paddock. After passing the country's stringent immigration requirements, Shammoo makes the acquaintance of a succession of individuals that lead him to question whether the lucky paddock is indeed deserving of its cheerful sobriquet. This tale of innocence corrupted, of obsession and unnatural appetites, Shammoo of the North is a riveting drama, exploring rage, hope, destiny, and the deepest questions of moral truth, as well as issues of vital importance to the environment. This is truly a book with a message, suitable for reading on the porcelain throne. Please recycle.
After I Told: Story of Unwavering Strength By: Omaira Zemira is starting over in a new city with new people. But just as she begins to trust again and is enjoying her new life, she returns home to find a strange bag, hears sounds coming from her mother's room, and goes to investigate. When her mother Ava opens the door, standing behind her is Nelson-the abusive boyfriend they left behind. The man she told her mother about and was not believed. The man who hurt them both. The man who disappeared, allowing them to have peace... How could he be back? Now, Zemira finds herself fighting for her life once more, only this time she is not a helpless little girl. She is tough; a survivor. But when the friends and family she learned to trust betray her, who will come to her aid? A familiar face comes to mind-Minka, the woman who believed her and rescued her when nobody else could. But is she real? Years of gaslighting by her mother has tainted Zemira's mind, so perhaps only time will tell. After I Told: Story of Unwavering Strength is a fast-paced story full of twists that are not anticipated. The third installment in the TOLD series, it brings everything together-the past and present; the truth and the lies. And it is going to take all of Zemira's unwavering strength to make it.
Campfire Stories is a collection of short stories as told by a group of friends while they sit around a campfire. These friends, The Chosen Family, have turned story time into a game. They must decide if each story is true, fiction, or embellished. Can a killer get right with his God before going to prison? Can true love survive a pandemic lock-down? Will a book found in the floor boards reveal a traumatic past? Will a family's dog lead a detective to a town's secret? Can a missing camper, a broken leg, or a pretty redhead bring an end to life-long friendships? Throughout the camping trip and story hours, there is something stalking them in the woods just outside of camp. At first the campers brush it off as other campers "fooling around." But one of them believes it is something far more dangerous and unbelievable. By day the campers and their families play in the water, eat, drink, and relax. Each night, however, is creepier than the one before. By the end of the weekend, they cannot wait to get out of those woods and never go back.
In Fat Time and Other Stories , Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen's two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preacher visits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa imported to America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict. The two strands in this brilliant story collection speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. Allen's work has been said to extend the tradition of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Ishmael Reed, but he is blazing his own path through American literature. Fat Time and Other Stories brilliantly shows the range and depth of his imagination.
With a new introduction on Werner Herzog’s film entitled The Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell, self-styled “bear whisperer” dared to live among the grizzlies, seeking to overturn the perception of them as dangerously aggressive animals. When he and his girlfriend were mauled, it created a media sensation. In The Grizzly Maze, Nick Jans, a seasoned outdoor writer with a quarter century of experience writing about Alaska and bears, traces Treadwell’s rise from unknown waiter in California to celebrity, providing a moving portrait of the man whose controversial ideas and behavior earned him the scorn of hunters, the adoration of animal lovers and the skepticism of naturalists. “Intensely imagistic, artfully controlled prose . . . behind the building tension of Treadwell’s path to oblivion, a stunning landscape looms.”—Newsday
Then, to round off the story and bring it up to date, the tale takes the most romantic turn of all. As his respect for the great brown bears of Admiralty Island increases, the hero loses his interest in killing them. His love for the singular place that is southeastern Alaska grows, and with it comes a singular acceptance of the mighty animals that rule its craggy shores and misty forests. The hunter hunts no longer and becomes an inspiration to conservationists who would preserve the bears' realm forever.
These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait “hot takes” stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world’s information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom. A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life’s hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century: Receiving knowledge. Practicing detachment. Experiencing tranquility. Cultivating transcendence. These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them. In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.
If animals could walk like us and talk like us, they'd have lots of funny stories to share. Con Fluff 3 is Eduardo Soliz's third collection of super-short furry stories inspired by furry conventions and the furry fandom.
Acclaimed author and critic Hal Duncan turns his analytic eye towards the development and current state of speculative fiction in American and English writing in the pages of Rhapsody. Duncan's trademark wry humor and suffer-no-fools approach to critiquing the genre will make this book more than a resource for students of the field--anyone who enjoys reading tales of the fantastical and strange can find Duncan's insight worthwhile to read again and again.
