“The Collected Works of Leonard Wannabe” tells of the professional trials and tribulations experienced by one of today’s most-talented, least-published author/songwriters, Leonard Greenberg. The first section, Remembrances of Encounters Past, recounts the author’s dealings with three icons of modern American culture: Isaac Asimov, Stephen Sondheim, and Beverly Sills. The second section, Short Stories, describes three episodes of a strictly fictional nature, each with a memorable, somewhat shocking ending. The third and last section, Poems and Songs, contains the lyrics to some forty of the over 200 musical compositions that Mr. Wannabe (oops, Greenberg) has produced in the past number of years.
"The Collected Works of Leonard Wannabe" tells of the professional trials and tribulations experienced by one of today's most-talented, least-published author/songwriters, Leonard Greenberg. The first section, Remembrances of Encounters Past, recounts the author's dealings with three icons of modern American culture: Isaac Asimov, Stephen Sondheim, and Beverly Sills. The second section, Short Stories, describes three episodes of a strictly fictional nature, each with a memorable, somewhat shocking ending. The third and last section, Poems and Songs, contains the lyrics to some forty of the over 200 musical compositions that Mr. Wannabe (oops, Greenberg) has produced in the past number of years.
Two Stories Well Worth Climbing consists of two stories, both well worth remembering. The first, Twilight Colloquy, tells of two old-timers discussing the nations recent rapid growth in population and the consequences of that growth upon the nations (and the universes) future. The second, The Gift of the Magpie, tells of an Internet exchange between an ordinary person and a computer icon with a very special offer almost certain to make this a better world. Each of these stories has a very special ending that will come as a surprise.
Everett Weinberger has an Ivy League education and an MBA, but what he really wants to do is produce. He's willing to start at the bottom-even if it means being Alec Baldwin's personal assistant-but after tapping all his L.A. connections, he still can't land a job. He even blows one interview by forgetting to compliment a studio exec on his car. When Everett gets work as a "power temp," life gets even weirder. He becomes second assistant to everyone from Frank Wells to Leonard Nimoy, trying to cope with the incessant phone calls and invisible protocols that keep getting him fired. Wannabe is a scathing and laugh-out-loud funny portrait of a world where even the assistants are political barracudas, by a guy with no bridges left to burn. A real-life Swimming With Sharks, it should be required reading on the Hollywood syllabus.
In the 1970s in the United States, many medical professionals held psychiatry in contempt. An innovative study designed by psychologist David Rosenhan, and published in Science in 1973, provided strong evidence that psychiatrists could not reliably distinguish between normality and mental illness. In early 1974, the American Psychiatric Association “settled” a notable scientific issue by popular vote of its members. As soon as the votes were counted, homosexuality was no longer a psychiatric diagnosis. Critics of psychiatry were asking the APA questions about the profession’s core concepts. What is the difference between a mental disorder and distress that is a normal occurrence in our lives? What are the causes of mental disorders? The APA’s answers were evasive. The APA decided the best way to improve psychiatry’s medical image was to extensively revise its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The first two editions of the DSM were little used by psychiatrists and were almost unknown to the public. But DSM-III would be vastly different. To this day, DSM-III significantly affects millions of Americans, often in harmful ways. The Wannabe Doctor tells how the career of a fictional psychiatrist was affected by psychiatry’s desperate claim to be a branch of medicine. Our story also tells how the APA’s diagnostic criteria jeopardized the life of one of Dr. Grant Hauser’s patients, eighteen-year-old Quentin Holt.
Pagan Babies is classic crime fiction from the master of suspense, New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard. Father Terry Dunn thought he'd seen everything on the mean streets of Detroit, but that was before he went on a little retreat to Rwanda to evade a tax-fraud indictment. Now the whiskey-drinking, Nine Inch Nails T-shirt-wearing padre is back trying to hustle up a score to help the little orphans of Rwanda. But the fund-raising gets complicated when a former tattletale cohort pops up on Terry's tail. And then there's the lovely Debbie Dewey. A freshly sprung ex-con turned stand-up comic, Debbie needs some fast cash, too, to settle an old score. Now they're in together for a bigger payoff than either could finagle alone. After all, it makes sense...unless Father Terry is working a con of his own.
The Great Gatsby meets The Godfather in this #1 New York Times bestselling story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal. "[Demille is] a true master." - Dan Brown, #1 bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter's sardonic and often hilarious point of view, The Gold Coast is Nelson DeMille's captivating story laced with sexual passion and suspense.
Get Shorty’s Chili Palmer is back in Be Cool, a classic novel of suspense from New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard. But this time it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. After a smash hit and a flop, B-movie-producer Chili Palmer is looking for another score. Lunching with a record company executive, Chili's exploring a hot new idea—until the exec, a former "associate" from Chili's Brooklyn days, gets whacked. Segue from real life to reel life. Chili's found his plot. It's a slam-bang opener: the rubout of a record company mogul. Cut to an ambitious wannabe singer named Linda Moon. She has attitude and a band. She's perfect. Zoom in to reality. Linda's manager thinks Chili's poaching and he's out to get even, with the help of his switch-hitting Samoan bodyguard. But somebody else beat them to the punch, as Chili discovers when he gets home and finds a corpse at his desk. Somebody made a mistake...
Perhaps the most unconventional and literally breathtaking father-son story you'll ever read, My Friend Leonard pulls you immediately and deeply into a relationship as unusual as it is inspiring. The father figure is Leonard, the high-living, recovering coke addict "West Coast Director of a large Italian-American finance firm" (read: mobster) who helped to keep James Frey clean in A Million Little Pieces. The son is, of course, James, damaged perhaps beyond repair by years of crack and alcohol addiction-and by more than a few cruel tricks of fate. James embarks on his post-rehab existence in Chicago emotionally devastated, broke, and afraid to get close to other people. But then Leonard comes back into his life, and everything changes. Leonard offers his "son" lucrative—if illegal and slightly dangerous—employment. He teaches James to enjoy life, sober, for the first time. He instructs him in the art of "living boldly," pushes him to pursue his passion for writing, and provides a watchful and supportive veil of protection under which James can get his life together. Both Leonard's and James's careers flourish…but then Leonard vanishes. When the reasons behind his mysterious absence are revealed, the book opens up in unexpected emotional ways. My Friend Leonard showcases a brilliant and energetic young writer rising to important new challenges—displaying surprising warmth, humor, and maturity—without losing his intensity. This book proves that one of the most provocative literary voices of his generation is also one of the most emphatically human.
“Elmore Leonard can write circles around almost anybody active in the crime novel today.” —New York Times Book Review The revered New York Times bestselling author, recognized as “America’s greatest crime writer” (Newsweek), brings back U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the mesmerizing hero of Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the hit FX series Justified. With the closing of the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mines, marijuana has become the biggest cash crop in the state. A hundred pounds of it can gross $300,000, but that’s chump change compared to the quarter million a human body can get you—especially when it’s sold off piece by piece. So when Dickie and Coover Crowe, dope-dealing brothers known for sampling their own supply, decide to branch out into the body business, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to stop them. But Raylan isn’t your average marshal; he’s the laconic, Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing lawman who juggles dozens of cases at a time and always shoots to kill. But by the time Raylan finds out who’s making the cuts, he’s lying naked in a bathtub, with Layla, the cool transplant nurse, about to go for his kidneys. The bad guys are mostly gals this time around: Layla, the nurse who collects kidneys and sells them for ten grand a piece; Carol Conlan, a hard-charging coal-mine executive not above ordering a cohort to shoot point-blank a man who’s standing in her way; and Jackie Nevada, a beautiful sometime college student who can outplay anyone at the poker table and who suddenly finds herself being tracked by a handsome U.S. marshal. Dark and droll, Raylan is pure Elmore Leonard—a page-turner filled with the sparkling dialogue and sly suspense that are the hallmarks of this modern master.
