Being the only woman working for a professional baseball team isn’t easy. As the San Diego Shock’s newest athletic trainer, Allie knows all about long hours, endless travel, and warding off players’ advances. Given she’s already the subject of a handful of rumors about how “lucky” she was to have earned such a coveted position, she can’t so much as flutter an eyelash a player’s way if she wants to be taken seriously.
But number eleven is doing more than fluttering eyelashes Allie’s way. Far more. Luke Archer is at the top of his game and doesn’t let the fear of striking out keep him from swinging. This is a motto he applies both on and off the field, but Allie appears immune, seeming to view Luke as nothing more than caution tape on legs.
He’s a player, and in Allie’s experience, they’re all the same. She won’t risk her job or her heart to another one, no matter how different this one claims to be. But as Allie gets to know him, she discovers the number eleven the public thinks they know is very different from the real Luke Archer. He seems too good to be true.
And maybe he is.
Allie will have to confront the stories attached to a player of Luke Archer’s stature and decide who she’ll put her faith in—The man she’s falling for? Or the rumors? Views: 228
All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity. Views: 228
An unforgettable American story, Dances With Wolves was an international bestseller that has become a modern classic. The 1990 film adaptation won seven Academy Awards. In The Holy Road, master storyteller Michael Blake at long last continues the saga. Eleven years have passed since Lieutenant John Dunbar became the Comanche warrior Dances With Wolves and married Stands With A Fist, a white-born woman raised as a Comanche from early childhood. With their three children, they live peacefully in the village of Ten Bears. But there is unease in the air, caused by increased reports of violent confrontations with white soldiers, who want to drive the Comanche onto reservations. Disquiet turns to horror, and then to rage, when a band of white rangers descend on Ten Bears' village, slaughtering half its inhabitants and abducting Stands With A Fist and her infant daughter. The three surviving great warriors--Wind In His Hair, Kicking Bird, and Dances With Wolves--decide they must go to war with the white invaders. At the same time, Dances With Wolves realizes that only he can rescue his wife and child. Told with the same sweep, insight, and majesty that have made Dances With Wolves a worldwide phenomenon, The Holy Road is an epic story of courage and honor. These new, hardcover editions published by Hrymfaxe LLC are signed individually by the author Views: 228
Mr. Hilton's classic story of an English schoolmaster.
Mr. Chipping, the classics master at Brookfield School since 1870, takes readers on a beguiling journey through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes Chips, as he is affectionately known, is an old man who dreams by the fire; then he's a difficult young taskmaster schooling his students, or a middle-aged man encountering the lovely Katherine, whose "new woman" opinions work far-reaching changes in him. As succeeding generations of boys march onward through Chips' mind, Hilton's narrative remains masterful. He seamlessly interweaves a poignant love story with the jokes and eccentricities of English public school life, while also chronicling a new, uncertain world full of conflict and upheaval that extends far beyond the turrets of Brookfield. Views: 228
**A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic *Catch-22*.**
In *Closing Time,* Joseph Heller returns to the characters of *Catch-22,* now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. *Closing Time* deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as *Catch-22.*
*Closing Time* is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as *Catch-22* itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves. Views: 228
Everyone who's anyone in New York City is suffering from post-college-application cabin fever and it's time to run a little wild Could it be that Serena is smitten with Blair's stepbrother or will the Fashion Week parties pull her away from any attempt at true love? Dan and Vanessa are mad about each other and pursuing their creative dreams -- but be careful of what you wish for. Nate hits an all-time low as Blair's Yale interview with a tall, handsome alum takes an unexpected turn and Jenny makes a new friend who gets a little too close for comfort. And just who is going to get into college early acceptance? Wintertime has never been hotter in NYC as things steam up all over Fifth Avenue. Views: 228
From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai—also known as Li PoIn his own time (701–762), Li Bai's poems—shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life—were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language.With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his... Views: 228
Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Perez Mason, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Oriacute;genes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with Joseacute; Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pintilde;era, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina and the USA. Views: 228
Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo.
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles’ soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything” includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace Views: 228
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Views: 227
A compendium of the author’s Indian stage and
radio plays:"Slighted Souls" is a poignant love story set in rural
Telangana, beset with feudal exploitation of the downtrodden dalits. Besides forcing
the dalits to toil in the fields as bonded labor without
impunity, the land owning doras had no qualms in reducing the
womenfolk of this ilk as sex slaves in the gadis, which results in an armed rebellion engulfing two young lovers."Men at work on Women at work" is a tragic-comic episode
depicting the fallout of sexual harassment at the workplace in the Indian urban
setting with its traditional cultural underpinnings."Castle of Despair", built on the slippery ground of
man's innate urge for one-upmanship, portrays its facade of falsity on the
grand stage of human tragedy.
The radio play, "Love on Hold", lends voice to the felt
anxieties of a man and a woman as their old flame gets rekindled and the
dilemmas of possession faced by the couple in a conservative cultural
background.Book excerpt from Slighted souls - A political stage play' for a feel of its stage:Scene – 1Voice
Over: Under the British
Raj in India,
the self-indulging Nizams of Hyderabad abdicated the administration of their
vast principality to doralu, the
village heads, letting them turn the areas under their domain
into their personal fiefdoms. While the successive Nizams were obsessed with
building palaces and acquiring jewelry, the village heads succeeded in ushering
in an oppressive era of tyrannical order. Acting as loose cannon from their
palatial houses called gadis, the doralu succeeded in foisting an inimical
feudal order upon the downtrodden dalits.
Besides making these dalits toil for
them as cheap labor without impunity, the doralu
had no qualms in making vassals out of the hapless women folk. What with the
police patels and the revenue patwaris in nexus with the landed gentry
and the moneyed shaukars making a
common cause with the doralu in their
unabated exploitation, their sub-human condition ensured that the dalits were distressed economically, degraded socially and debased
morally. Ironically, lending the
privileged few the muscle power to perpetrate the inimical social order were
their henchmen from the other backward classes. Moreover, given the British
political pragmatism of an indifference to the Indian caste conundrum the
downtrodden dalits had nowhere to run
for cover. Though the merger of their province with
the Union of India brought the curtains down on the Nizams’ two-hundred year
misrule, the exploitation of the rural dalits
by the dora-patel-patwari nexus
continued unabated. And that led to the formation of 'communes' as part of a
peasant movement in July 1948 under the Telangana
Struggle that didn’t take off any way.
On the other hand as the seeds of egalitarianism began to take roots in the
urban Indian soil, in time, these “slighted souls” too began to envision the
dawn of an equitable era for them. However, the nascent upward mobility of the
downtrodden was at odds with the vested interests of the feudal order, and to
nip the dalit moral assertiveness in
the bud, the ‘axis of evil’ saw to it that such were brutalized to make an
example of them.“Slighted Souls” scripts the life of the
downtrodden of Rampur
nearly a decade after the famous but failed peasant struggle of Telangana.
Making cohorts with Muthyal Rao the dora
in oppressing its dalits are Papa Rao
the Police Patel, Rami Reddy the Patwari, Papi Reddy the landlord and
Shaukar Suryam the moneylender. Beginning with the life and times of Yellaiah
and his wife Mallamma this play unfolds the urge of the deprived to unyoke
themselves, and the desperation of the privileged to rein in them.[Curtains up: Mallamma sits in front of
her thatched hut in the dalit mohalla
weaving a bamboo basket. Enter: Yellaiah, and seeing him, she goes into the hut
to fetch some water for him, and he takes over the work.]Mallamma [Back with a glass of water]: Why make
a mess of it maava.Yellaiah [Taking over the glass]: Take it I’m
giving them their due.Mallamma: I wonder how they’re harming you.Yellaiah [Having empted the glass]: Aren’t they
harsh on my darling’s delicate hands? Mallamma [Taking back the glass]: I’m glad
you’re still fond of your old woman.Yellaiah: Who said you’re old dear. I’m ever
scared that some dora or a patel might grab my Malli.Mallamma
[Taking the bamboo
work]: You know it would never be the case.Yellaiah: Well but still.Mallamma:
Leave alone the patels and the patwaris, would the dora ever forget that incident in a hurry? Besides, I’m behind the
bamboo curtain, am I not? Yellaiah: Well who can forget that potential
tragedy turned farce? [He laughs heartily]. But still it hurts to let you toil
day and night.Mallamma: So be it, till our Narsimma becomes a
big officer. Till then, the fact that you care keeps it going. Yellaiah: Where is Sarakka?Mallamma: Wonder why she hasn’t turned up yet.Yellaiah
[Making a move to get up]:
Why not I better check up at her school. Mallamma
[Holding him back]:
Isn’t it enough that you’ve been toiling like a mule all day long. Yellaiah: Why their lot is any day better dear.
They are well-fed by peddollu and
attended by doctors. See, they’ve doctors to look after them but we’ve to put
with the quacks. I hear even their lives are insured these days.Mallamma: Well, mules have a price tag on them,
but what about us. Don’t dalits come
cheaper by the dozen?[Enter: Maisaiah on his way in a hurry.]Yellaiah:
O Maisaiah, where are you running to now?Maisaiah: Running around on Shaukar’s errands,
oh, how I’ve forgot about memsaab. She said she has some work for me before he
returned from Warangal.[Exit: Maisaiah.]Yellaiah: Why, their women too boss over our
men, don’t they? How I wish our Narsimma won’t have to put up with all
that. Mallamma: Why should he as Pantulayya says he’s bright. He feels the same way about our
Sarakka, and Renuka. But I think Renuka
is better than both.Yellaiah: Don’t I know you’re always partial
towards your brother’s daughter.Mallamma: It’s as if I’m a stepmother to your
kids. Yellaiah: Why get hurt dear, I was just joking.
But still our kids are hot heads while she carries a clear head? If not for
you, wouldn’t they have become rebels by now?Mallamma: Whatever, once he sets his mind;
Narsimma is not the one to waver. And Sarakka too is developing the same
traits, isn’t she?Yellaiah: Well, how you’ve been drumming him not
to get distracted from his studies.Mallamma: Why not? You know how we’re undone by
being unpad. I want all three of them
to be well educated. I’ve been hoping that an educated Renuka makes an ideal
wife for our Narsimma. But sadly vadina
seems to have developed second thoughts about giving her to him.Yellaiah: Don’t I see Anasuya is rooting for
Saailu, her good for nothing brother. Well, we can only hope that your brother
Yadagiri puts his foot down for once.Mallamma: But can he do that? Any way, there is
still a long way to go. Let’s see what the future has in store for them.Yellaiah: What a wretched life ours is Malli? We
don’t even have a say in our own affairs. It’s Papi Reddy Patel who’s behind all this. And don’t I see his game plan? Mallamma: Don’t they say woman is woman’s enemy.
Let’s hope Renuka’s fate prevails over vadina’s
whims.Yellaiah: How I wish that happens.Mallamma: I’m quite hopeful, more so as times
are changing.Yellaiah: Wish I’ve your strength of belief
Malli.Mallamma: Maava,
if you want change, you’ve got to dream about it. Yellaiah: How’re we to dream Malli, when life
itself is a nightmare? Oh, how the peddollu
have reduced us.[Enter Sarakka with a slate and a few
school books, and collapses in front of them.]Yellaiah: Malli quick, fetch some water for
Sarakka.[Even as Mallamma brings in some water,
Yellaiah takes Sarakka in his lap. After the mother sprinkles some water on
her, the girl gets up and greedily drinks from the tumbler.]Mallamma: What happened to you my child?Sarakka: I felt thirsty on the way amma. But they didn’t allow me to drink
from their well.Yellaiah: They refuse water to a thirsty child!
Oh, how lowly are these peddollu.Mallamma: Well, their well is full of frogs, yet
they think it gets polluted if we drink from it. What an irony?Yellaiah: Why, being a frog in the well is
better than the bane of being a dalit. Mallamma: Oh, why did God make it so inhuman for
us?Yellaiah: And see their gall; they say its God’s
own will. Isn’t it like rubbing salt on our wounds?Mallamma: He must be a cruel God to say that.
But did He say that?Sarakka: We’re dearer to God, that’s why
Gandhiji said we’re harijan. We’ve
that lesson in our class.Yellaiah: If only Gandhiji lived long enough to
make it true for us.Sarakka: Maastaaru
says God helps only those who help themselves.Mallamma: Who knows another mahatma might be waiting in the wings to pick up the threads?Yellaiah: Having made us anguthachaps all along, mercifully, they’re letting our children
study these days.Mallamma: Well, grudgingly. Whatever, it’s going
to be the turning point for us.[Enter a tired Narsimma with his
schoolbag] Yellaiah: How our poor Narsimma has to walk all
those miles. If only we’ve a high school here.Mallamma: Why’re you so dull my boy? Narsimma: I couldn’t go to school amma.Yellaiah: Why what’s the matter?Narsimma: I was crossing the gadi and the dorasani held me. As their Maali
fell ill, she made me work all day in the garden.Mallamma: Why, when it’s julum on us, the dorasanlu score
no less.Narsimma: And all the while she was yelling,
Narsiga, Narsiga, Narsiga. It’s as if she can’t get my name right.Yellaiah: Well, they think we’re not entitled to
our name even.Mallamma
to Narsimma: Bear all
that for now my boy. Once you’re a B.A., all will call you Narsimma. Yellaiah
to Mallamma: I’ll sell
my shirt to make him a B.A., and it’s my word to you. [There is a commotion outside, and
Sarakka exits.] Sarakka
[Reenters]: Maisaiah mama is being carried on a cart. Shaukar Saab is also there. Yellaiah: Let me find out what’s the
matter. Mallamma: I’ll also come. Lachamma might need me.[Exit: Yellaiah and Mallamma leaving
Narsimma and Sarakka. Curtains down.] Views: 227
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 1. is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Mark Twain is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Mark Twain then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. Views: 227
If You Could Change Your Life by Reversing Your Biggest Regrets, Sorrows and Mistakes...Would You?
1 New York Times bestselling author and renowned radio and television host Glenn Beck delivers an instant holiday classic about boyhood memories, wrenching life lessons, and the true meaning of the gifts we give to one another in love.
We weren't wealthy, we weren't poor -- we just were. We never wanted for anything, except maybe more time together....
When Eddie was twelve years old, all he wanted for Christmas was a bike. Although his life had gotten harder -- and money tighter -- since his father died and the family bakery closed...Eddie dreamed that somehow his mother would find a way to have his dream bike gleaming beside their modest Christmas tree that magical morning.
What he got from her instead was a sweater. "A stupid, handmade, ugly sweater" that young Eddie left in a crumpled ball in the corner of his room.
Scarred deeply by the realization that kids don't always get what they want, and too young to understand that he already owned life's most valuable treasures, that Christmas morning was the beginning of Eddie's dark and painful journey on the road to manhood. It will take wrestling with himself, his faith, and his family -- and the guidance of a mysterious neighbor named Russell -- to help Eddie find his path through the storm clouds of life and finally see the real significance of that simple gift his mother had crafted by hand with love in her heart.
Based on a deeply personal true story, The Christmas Sweater is a warm and poignant tale of family, faith and forgiveness that offers us a glimpse of our own lives -- while also making us question if we really know what's most important in them. Views: 227
Tom Perrotta's thirtyish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child.
And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at nine P.M.
They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen - until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined. Views: 227
Guy Holland has returned to London from South Africa after the death of his uncle. Guy would inherit everything if, and only if, he could recover a certain ruby ring that a certain actress had obtained from his uncle by trickery, within three months of his uncle’s death. If he failed Horace, Guy’s cousin, would inherit everything. Captivating twists and turns ensue in this fast paced action story that will make your heart race from beginning to end… Views: 227
