What is life? By what traits and attributes is one thing defined as living, and another not? CCD-08, who prefers to think of herself as "Bo", muses on the subject as the civil war for robot independence rages on outside her bakery doors. She wages her own personal fight inside, trying to bring robots and humans together on either side of a table.What is life? By what traits and attributes is one thing defined as living, and another not? CCD-08, who prefers to think of herself as "Bo", muses on the subject as the civil war for robot independence rages on outside her bakery doors. Defeat could mean lobotomy at best, mass decomissioning at worst. Victory will likely only open the way for further battles. Bo, in turn, wages her own personal fight inside, trying to bring robots and humans together on either side of a table. Maybe she can't change the world on her own. But at least she can stop the fighting long enough, courtesy of a hot cup of motor oil on one side and some perfectly prepared cupcakes on the other, for robots and humans together to see that maybe they don't have much to fight about in the first place. Whatever happens next, both sides have to see that they can't coexist without the other anymore if they both want to escape the flames of war. Views: 758
'I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.'Stephen Maserov has problems. A onetime teacher, married to fellow teacher Eleanor, he has retrained and is now a second-year lawyer working at mega-firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche. Despite toiling around the clock to make budget, he's in imminent danger of being downsized. And to make things worse, Eleanor, sick of single-parenting their two young children thanks to Stephen's relentless work schedule, has asked him to move out. To keep the job he hates, pay the mortgage and salvage his marriage, he will have to do something strikingly daring, something he never thought himself capable of. But if he's not careful, it might be the last job he ever has... Warm, dramatic, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with the narrative pull of a thriller, Maybe the Horse Will Talk is a love story, a reflection on contemporary marriage, and on friendship. It is also an unflinching examination of sexual... Views: 687
A brief but haunting glimpse into a community of reclusive rabbit-folk keeping their doors barred against a land changing for the worse. Much as they try to hide their children from the world, the world and all its strangeness has a way of finding its way to their doorstep. A strange spirit takes hold one night, drawing all the children from their beds to show them that there's nothing to fear.A brief but haunting glimpse into a community of reclusive rabbit-folk keeping their doors barred against a land changing for the worse. Much as they try to hide their children from the world, the world and all its strangeness has a way of finding its way to their doorstep, and their children are not content to stay safe forever. One little Long Ear remembers their little hamlet as it used to be when dozens of different races came to trade, and can't help but wonder what happened.That one little girl has her eyes open wide enough to see the first stranger drift into town in a very long time. Her parents keep their heads down and rush right on by. That stranger and her even stranger influence takes hold of the village one night, drawing all the children from their beds to show them that while the night may be dark and full of secrets, not all of them are to be feared. For the first time in far too long, a community is brought together in celebration rather than dread, and it's a night that none of them will ever forget. Views: 685
He turned: the scapegoat was pointing a fleshy arm directly down at the water, and following it Roland saw a mass of pale, stringy lines suddenly seething up from the deeps to surface all about the ship.He froze in disbelief. It couldn't be—But then the cry went up from the main deck.'Ropes! White ropes!'And so the horror began.A ship and its crew held in thrall by an ancient sea creature, a young girl blinded by foresight, a scapegoat with a gift to foresee death - these haunting short stories set in the Four Isles, the setting of Andrew McGahan's highly acclaimed Ship Kings series, tell fascinating tales of tall ships, ancient grudges and the full significance of the meaning of indefinite survival in an ocean that holds as many mysteries as it does drops of water.'A fitting end to the epic Ship Kings series, Treasures of the Deep moves with mysterious grandeur through lost oceans and wild. Its captains and... Views: 602
Sam fell in love with Mac at first sight when she was still a child and he a teenage boy, almost but not quite a man. A special bond formed between them, fueled by their mutual love of animals—especially horses. As each matured, that bond threatened to move beyond the limits of friendship. By the time Sam reached her 17th birthday she was desperately in love with him, her shining hero.Sam fell in love with Mac at first sight when she was still a child and he a teenage boy, almost but not quite a man. A special bond formed between them, fueled by their mutual love of animals—especially horses. As each matured, that bond threatened to move beyond the limits of friendship. By the time Sam reached her 17th birthday she was desperately in love with him, her shining hero. But one awful night Mac betrayed that love and Sam was unable to find it in her heart to forgive him. By the time the truth was revealed they had both moved on with their lives, and Sam’s pride prevented her from forgiving Mac; threatened to ensure her a lonely future. Book 1 in Tricia McGill's Beneath Southern Skies series now Free.Reviews“I was supposed to take the book on vacation with me, but I made the mistake of starting it and couldn’t stop until I finished–but then Tricia McGill is one of my favorite authors. She grabbed me from the beginning…emotional sparks were so real I felt the tension. I encountered an amazing range of emotions reading this book as I recalled my own childhood crushes, my broken hearts, the agony of losing someone I loved, and the joy of knowing real love. I enjoyed the ‘sex’ scenes that left enough to the imagination that I could personalize them for myself.Tricia McGill has an astounding way with words. Once you read her books, you’ll become an avid fan.” Brett Scott, TRS“Ms. McGill has written very real characters. You can relate to them and the problems they are dealing with. She has created a world that is believable. I love the scene of Mac telling Sam how he feels and she finally realizes what she felt all those years ago was that she hadn't wanted to grow up. She had wanted everything to stay the same. Ms. McGill tells a story that touches your heart.” Donna Fallen, Angels Reviews“Tricia McGill’s description of Mac’s struggles with his feelings makes the reader want to believe that chivalry is not dead after all. This book should be required reading by some of the young men of today.” Donna L. Zeller, KIC reviews Views: 512
Roxanna Collins is a Vegas singer waiting for her big break. When a vampire from 1815 brings her back in time, she thinks she's lost her mind. But she manages to get something she didn't have in Vegas – a full-time singing gig. Granted, it's at a gentlemen's club, but at least she's standing on her own two feet and not in jail or shacked up with the first tall, dark, and brooding vampire who walks into her hallucination. So what if he's Darren Andrew Highmore, Earl of Richmond... Her request for a piano player lands her in the company of the very proper, very innocent, Phillip Branham, who can't decide whether he should be polite, disapproving, or...in love. Darren is dangerous, but Roxanna needs the special brand of pain he brings her. Phillip would offer her a future in the light, but she has secrets he doesn't understand. Must she choose or are their destinies intertwined? Views: 450
~Free short story from the PbRJV Gallery~ "My name is Dallas Lowe, and the life of a law enforcement officer is never easy, but it is rewarding. Then receiving our gold detective shields and working together fulfills a childhood dream for me and my best friend Brian. We live on top of the world – until the day comes all policemen dread – the day when things go wrong and someone has to die."The old cowboy sat in his chair on the porch of the new cabin. He watched the rim of the desert. How many more days would there be? He knew this was his last hurrah.The hired hand didn't understand, but it didn't matter anymore. It was almost over.Today...thought the old man, it has to be today, I feel it in my bones.He sat on the porch and looked at the sky: the hired hand told him there would be no ride today, bad weather coming.As he watched, the clouds were bizarre, all piled up, shouldering one another for the best place, the big ones black and lowering. The pink air thick but so clear, you could almost see tomorrow."My gawd!" the old man cried as he gazed at the sky, "it's the end of the world!"He wanted to sit on the porch and watch but the hired hand hustled him inside the cabin. The rain turned to hail the size of golf balls. So big they could kill a new born calf.The storm finally passed and the sun came out. The old man, the hired hand and the Indian housekeeper went out and sat on the porch and looked at the fresh new world.The edge of the desert grew hazy; the cloud of dust on the horizon grew bigger. "There they are," shouted the old cowboy, "here they come!"The water crazed herd of range cattle drove for the bloated arroyo, the smell of water making them mad. The bawling cattle elbowing and pushing their way passed the porch. They stamped and bellowed and the dust filled the old man's nostrils and he thought it the sweetest smell.Life coursed through his old bones and he stood and swung his old Stetson in the air and whooped and swore, pleasure flowed through him, and he was young again.But soon they were gone.The old man sat down heavily, age settled back on his shoulders, "I'll finish tomorrow, Ramona," he said to the old Indian housekeeper, "it'll be O.K.".The hired hand watched with foreboding, what will be finished tomorrow? Views: 435
Knowing what you want is hard. Accepting what is possible is harder still ...It is the mid-1980s. In Australia, stay-at-home wives jostle with want-it-all feminists, while AIDS threatens the sexual freedom of everyone. On the other side of the world, the Soviet bloc is in turmoil.Mikhail Gorbachev has been in power for a year when twenty-four-year-old book illustrator Galina Kogan leaves Leningrad — forbidden ever to return. As a Jew, she's inherited several generations worth of Russia's chronic anti-Semitism. As a Soviet citizen, she is unprepared for Australia and its easy-going ways.Once settled in Melbourne, Galina is befriended by Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, and their adult son, Andrew. The Morrow marriage of thirty years balances on secrets. Leonard is a man with conflicted desires and passions, while Sylvie chafes against the confines of domestic life. Their son, Andrew, a successful mosaicist, is a deeply shy man. He is content... Views: 373
Dot and the Kangaroo By Ethel C PedleyDot and the Kangaroo By Ethel C Pedley Views: 328
Review“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, *The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail*“The Street Sweeper is an impressive literary achievement, complex in its organization, meticulous in its plotting and deeply satisfying in its emotional payoffs.” —The Wall Street Journal “Humane, compelling and convincing . . . artfully structured and well written.” —The Sunday Times“Street Sweeper . . . demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.” —The Telegraph (UK)“Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.” —The Guardian (UK)“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America—and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement.... A moving and literate page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.” —Booklist (starred review)“In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside — subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned — and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next…. [The Street Sweeper is] a towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.” —Entertainment Weekly “A sprawling work, generous in its spirit and in breadth of imagination, unabashed in its liberal humanism.” —The Age“A rich, engaging story of New York. [Perlman is] an author of rare erudition and compassion. The Street Sweeper is his boldest work yet and, quite probably, the one that will win him a greater following.” —The Washington Post“[An] ambitious yet thoughtful novel.” —The Independent (UK) Product DescriptionFrom the civil rights struggle in the United States to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are momentous stories everywhere. But only some survive to become history.Lamont Williams is a black man from the Bronx trying to return to a normal life after serving a six-year prison term for a crime for which he was wrongly convicted. Historian Adam Zignelik is an untenured Columbia professor whose career and long-term relationship are falling apart. When Lamont Williams strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient at the hospital where he works as a janitor, he learns about the Sonderkommando--prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi extermination camps. Meanwhile, Adam pursues a promising research topic suggested by a World War II veteran, a topic that might just save him professionally and even personally. When the lives of these two men intersect, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen.The Street Sweeper is an astonishing feat of storytelling that addresses the personal and the political as it sweeps across the globe, through the seminal events of the twentieth century to the present. Honest, hypnotic and redemptive, this is a novel that explores the responsibility of the historian, the weight of history on all of us, and the crucial role that bearing witness plays in breaking the cycle of human cataclysm.From the Hardcover edition. Views: 144
Seven Types of Ambiguity is a psychological thriller and a literary adventure of breathtaking scope. Celebrated as a novelist in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, Elliot Perlman writes of impulse and paralysis, empty marriages, lovers, gambling, and the stock market; of adult children and their parents; of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Comic, poetic, and full of satiric insight, Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love.The story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators, whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways. Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated. Brimming with emotional, intellectual, and moral dilemmas, this novel-reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity-unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by one another and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live. Our times, now.From Publishers WeeklyBy copping the title of William Empson's classic of literary criticism, Australian writer Perlman (Three Dollars) sets a high bar for himself, but he justifies his theft with a relentlessly driven story, told from seven perspectives, about the effects of the brief abduction of six-year-old Sam Geraghty by Simon Heywood, his mother Anna's ex-boyfriend. Charismatic, unemployed Simon is still obsessed with Anna nine years after their breakup—to the dismay of his present lover, Angelique, a prostitute. Anna's stockbroker husband, Joe, is one of Angelique's regulars, which feeds Simon's flame. When Angelique turns Simon in to the cops, he claims he had permission to pick Sam up; his fate hinges on whether Anna will back up his lie. Most of the perspectives are linked to Simon's shrink, Alex Klima, who writes to Anna and counsels Simon, Angelique and Joe's co-worker, Dennis. The most successful voices belong to Joe, who's spent his career on the edge of panic, and Dennis, whose bitter rants provide a corrective to Klima's unctuous psychological omniscience. Perlman, a lawyer, aims for a literary legal novel—think Grisham by way of Franzen—and the ambition is admirable though the product somewhat uneven. Simon's obsessions, his self-righteousness and his psychological blackmail, give him a perhaps unintended creepiness, and the novel, as big and juicy as it is, may not offer sufficient closure. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New YorkerCheekily swiping the title of William Empson's seminal work of literary criticism, this second novel by Perlman, an Australian writer, presents seven first-person narrators—whose lives are all nudged off course by a man's abduction of his ex-girlfriend's young son—in a compulsively readable tangle. At the center is a psychiatrist who treats several of the characters, and whose narrative provides some basis for assessing the partial perspectives of the six others. The abductor's self-justifying rants about truth, literature, and poststructuralist theory win over his shrink and, it seems, everyone else. Still, if the individual stories of these characters are compelling, their attempts at Empsonian hermeneutics are less so. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Views: 140
Ambrose Goddard Hesketh Pratt (31 August 1874 – 13 April 1944) was an Australian writer born into a cultivated family in Forbes, New South Wales. Views: 115
