A Rhythm of Life

This is a poetic compilation which includes some prose and is somewhat autobiographical in nature. It spans from childhood to present day so has some mature themes, making it suitable from young teens up. It is a journey which I invite you to embark on. There is a definite spiritual context running through it. It is best read in HTML and PDF format for the foreseeable future. ThanksWell time has come again to let you know that Nick Klaus is still struggling to find his way out of the Grand Library of Books United. This new adventure takes him straight to the heart of the Incurable jumblelium. Now, I know what you are going to say, what on earth could an incurable jumblelium be? The answer is easy. An incurable jumblelium is basically a jumblelium that cannot be cured. Here to whet your appetite, and don't go thinking that you can eat a jumblelium, especially if it is incurable, he is willing to give you a couple of sample chapters. A little wink of sort, he sends your way. Have fun. Perhaps you can find the way out for him, and if you do, please write to me at once, because more than anyone in the universe, I cannot wait to meet him. Nick Klaus also asks me to warn you that he will not be held responsible if you feel confused during the reading of this new adventure. In order to prevent such a tragic fate, which would certainly happen if you got trapped in the jumblelium, he recommends that you read some of his previous attempts to escape, at least read “Nick Klaus and the Room of the Lost Footsteps.” This is only way, he tells me, to prevent such a dreadful and unwelcome state from seizing you (or so he gracefully confided in me) . . .
Views: 815

Wonderland

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture. Hailed by Library Journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels,” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library. J From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 814

Rosemary By Any Other Name

A romantic novel in which a girl alone with a baby in a foreign land meets a man and together they find a family, wealth and most importantly love.Rosemary finds herself alone, apart from her sisters baby in a foreign land on the run. What she needs is a knight on a white horse what she gets is an Italian in a rusty car. Together they gain wealth acquire two children and finally find love and happiness.
Views: 813

Duplicate Keys

Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on the companionship and camaraderie of tightly knit circle of friends. At the center of this circle is a rock band struggling to navigate New York’s erratic music scene, and an apartment/practice space with approximately fifty key-holders. One sunny day, Alice enters the apartment and finds two of the band members shot dead. As the double-murder sends waves of shock through their lives, this group of friends begins to unravel, and dangerous secrets are revealed one by one. When Alice begins to notice things amiss in her own apartment, the tension breaks out as it occurs to her that she is not the only person with a key, and she may not get a chance to change the locks. Jane Smiley applies her distinctive rendering of time, place, and the enigmatic intricacies of personal relationships to the twists and turns of suspense. The result is a brilliant literary thriller that will keep readers guessing up to its final, shocking conclusion. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 813

Half Way Home

Less than sixty kids awaken on a distant planet. The colony ship they arrived on is aflame. The rest of their contingent is dead. They've only received half their training, and they are being asked to conquer an entire planet. Before they can, however, they must first survive each other. In this gritty tale of youths struggling to survive, Hugh Howey fuses the best of young adult fantasy with the piercing social commentary of speculative fiction. The result is a book that begs to be read in a single sitting. An adventurous romp that will leave readers exhausted and begging for more.
Views: 812

The Street of Crocodiles

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars. Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.
Views: 811

Mi vida en rose

Mi vida en rose es el nuevo libro de relatos de David Sedaris, el maestro de la sátira, un brillante humorista estadounidense que sigue la tradición de Woody Allen o Groucho Marx. Delirantes y desternillantes, políticamente incorrectos, mordaces y en ocasiones impertinentes, estos relatos nos hablan, entre otras cosas, de cómo aprender francés a una edad adulta y los inconvenientes que conlleva esta valiente decisión, y nos presentan a un niño que hace terapia de pronunciación y a un profesor de escritura creativa que comete los más elementales fallos ortográficos y gramaticales. Sedaris vuelve a hacer una disección del absurdo de algunas conductas y de la vulgaridad de la vida cotidiana y familiar, esta vez desde el relativo anonimato de París, donde se ha refugiado tras haberse convertido en una estrella mediática en Estados Unidos
Views: 811

Writer's Block

A very precise, very orderly author has the worst case of writer's block. He is working on book five in his series and the submission date is fast approaching but the words are just not there when he needs them. He attempts to fix it using every possible method he knows.The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding, God has a new chosen race and set of entry qualifications. In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die. But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo while awaiting official ruling on their fate: return to the void of death or return outside to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year.They are an ill-assorted lot: randy 1900s marine Louis Forster; Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer; neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;modern-day foul-mouthed truck-driver, Max Pilsudski; Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of murder after her husband's disappearance in the Paris of the 1950s. And these desperate departed will stop at nothing to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.
Views: 811

Where We Are: A Short Story

A short story of friends, shoplifting, beer, and one very long night in a new town.Eddie Montez has just moved to the desert of southern California from the city. His only friend is a frequently-injured skateboarder named Beady, who forces Eddie into one uncomfortable situation after another. Arson, hitchhiking, and shoplifting all factor into a pivotal night during which Eddie must choose the person he wants to be.Previously published in "Storychord".
Views: 810

9 Days of Madness: Things Unsettled

The second volume of hair-raising tales of Madness from the pages of The Leaky Pencil. Read stories that question the unsettling borders of reality, and plumb the depths of depravity.Features new work by Amber Taitague, Richard Godwin, Jodi MacArthur, Benjamin Sobieck, Marissa Giambelluca, R.S. Bohn, S.K. Adams, Christopher Grant, Laurita Miller, and Erin Cole.The second volume of hair-raising tales of Madness from the pages of The Leaky Pencil. Read stories that question the unsettling borders of reality, and plumb the depths of depravity.In "Tap", a young girl left home alone in the house is hoping it's just the wind playing tricks. It's not."Schizo Numericus" introduces a man whose obsession with numbers threatens to crack his world wide open.The wife of a "Bookworm" gets a frightening lesson about respecting the written word.All these, and much more lie within the 9 Days of Madness. Features new work by Amber Taitague, Richard Godwin, Jodi MacArthur, Benjamin Sobieck, Marissa Giambelluca, R.S. Bohn, S.K. Adams, Laurita Miller, and Erin Cole.
Views: 809

Falconer

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 809

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories

The only annotated edition of M. R. James's writings currently available, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as "Count Magnus," set in the wilds of Sweden; "Number 13," a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; "Casting the Runes," a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including "A Night in King's College Chapel," James's first known ghost story.
Views: 808

Bond of Sisters

In this Blyssfully Abnormal Short Story, a group vacation takes a fatal turn when an afternoon boat trip claims the life of Ann's husband CharlesPart of the Blyssfully Abnormal Anthology; What happens when you take a group of writers, the most talented & twisted that you can find, and put them into one publishing house? They form into the strangest dysfunctional family we've ever seen. No one asked the question, but Charity found the answer. So she wondered, what would happen if she gave us a list of seemingly normal situations and asked us to give them our own unique twist? The answer is the Blyssfully Abnormal anthology, a collection of stories that gives the reader a peek into the somewhat abnormal minds that bring us together.In Bond of Sisters a group vacation takes a fatal turn when an afternoon boat trip claims the life of Ann's husband Charles
Views: 808

Right Before Her Eyes

Cindy Adams makes the same dish every year for the hometown picnic. This year it's the same only she's divorced and starting over. Can forever love be found over a time honored dish?Originally targeted for magazine publication at 1,000 words, this is a short story.Cindy Adams makes the same dish every year for the hometown picnic. This year it's the same only she's divorced and starting over. She finds strength in the stability of family and friends. Sometimes when you're not looking for love, it finds you.Can forever be found over a time honored dish?Originally targeted for magazine publication at 1,000 words, this is a short story.
Views: 807

The Dreamer

As a teenage orphan in 1920's Manhattan, Olivia knows how to dream big. Life on the streets is easy to gloss over with stars in her eyes and Charlie, the orphan gang's leader, by her side. But when Charlie leaves to pursue his own dreams, Olivia's strength of character will be put to the test as everything she's ever wished for is suddenly within grasp.Jazz music, night clubs, and slinky dresses—Olivia wants it all. As a teenage orphan in 1920's Manhattan, she knows how to dream big. Life on the streets is easy to gloss over with stars in her eyes and Charlie, the orphan gang's leader, by her side. But when Charlie leaves to pursue his own dreams, Olivia is in danger of losing herself forever in her fabricated fantasies. Pulled from her imaginary world by a locket, Olivia will soon come to realize big changes come in small packages. Her strength of character will be put to the test as everything she's ever wished for is suddenly within grasp.This book is also available in the LOST LOCKET OF LAHARI ANTHOLOGY. Save 50% versus buying the five books in the collection individually, plus receive an additional BONUS ORIGIN STORY!
Views: 807