Read Fast, Cry Hard... Vignettes (with a Vengeance) PDF Download

Author: Vj Esguerra
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781980708957
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
From the author of "For the Feint of Art: 1997 to 2014" comes a small collection of previously unreleased short stories. Misleadingly named, each story poignantly explores themes of love/friendship, loss, and acceptance in a brief anthology meant to bring one or more tears to the reader's eyes.

Author: . Nasdijj
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547904827
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS transports readers to the majestic landscapes and hard Native American lives of the desert Southwest and into the embrace of a way of looking at the world that seems almost like revelation. Born to a storytelling Native mother and a roughneck, song-singing cowboy father, Nasdijj has lived on the jagged-edged margins of American society, yet hardship and isolation have only brought him greater clarity--and a gift for language that is nothing short of breathtaking. Nasdijj tells of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, of the young boy's struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome, and of their last fishing trip together. It is a heartbreaking story, written with great power and a diamondlike poetry. But whether Nasdijj is telling us about his son, about the chaotic, alternately harrowing and comical life he led with his own parents, or about the vitality and beauty of Native American culture, his voice is always one of searching honesty, wry humor, and a nearly cosmic compassion. While Nasdijj struggles with his impossible status as someone of two separate cultures, he also remains a contradiction in a larger sense: he cares for those who often shun him, he teaches hope though he often has none for himself, and he comes home to the land he then must leave. THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS is the memoir of a man who has survived a hard life with grace, who has taken the past experience of pain and transformed it into a determination to care for the most vulnerable among us, and who has found an almost unspeakable beauty where others would find only sadness. This is a book that will touch your soul.

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429955198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author: Cyril E. Vetter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080714228X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Immensely talented and devastatingly self-destructive, singer/songwriter Charles "Butch" Hornsby lived hard and fast. One of the most versatile artists ever to emerge from South Louisiana, Hornsby touched and frustrated his friends in equal measure. Dirtdobber Blues, a fictionalized account of Hornsby's life written by his close friend Cyril Vetter, provides the gritty but engrossing story of this man, his demons, and his art. Much like Hornsby's life, Dirtdobber Blues consists of short, fast-paced segments. These vignettes juxtapose musical accomplishments and personal misadventures to paint the portrait of a truly complex individual. His all-too-familiar vices -- sex, alcohol, and rock and roll -- and his capricious temperament affected his ability to find success in the music business. Vetter celebrates all that is Hornsby including his off-beat humor, frustrating narcissism, and profound creativity. In addition to Vetter's lively and captivating account of Butch's life, the book includes Hornsby's sheet music and a CD with fourteen of his songs. Photos of Butch and images of his found-object artwork by photographer Philip Gould are also included. Through the music, images, and text, Hornsby moves from the strawberry fields of Amite, Louisiana, to the bars of Baton Rouge and into the unforgiving arena of the recording industry. Along the way, Vetter provides glimpses into the musician's inspiration -- a tumultuous young love, a stint in Hollywood, his family's return to Louisiana -- and pieces together the arc of Hornsby's life, littered with poor decisions, crowned by artistic success, and concluding with the redemptive power of love.

Author: John Rechy
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 178283785X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Bold and inventive in style, City of Night is the groundbreaking 1960s novel about male prostitution. Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling 'youngman' and his search for self-knowledge among the other denizens of his neon-lit world. As the narrator moves from Texas to Times Square and then on to the French Quarter of New Orleans, Rechy delivers a portrait of the edges of America that has lost none of its power. On his travels, the nameless narrator meets a collection of unforgettable characters, from vice cops to guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire, to Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with candour and understanding in a prose that is highly personal and vividly descriptive.

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Author: Nigel Bennett
Publisher: Baen Books
ISBN: 0671319817
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Lord Richard--once known as Lancelot and now a vampire--is called on to rescue a woman whom he had loved and lost as he struggles to save fragile human lives in the face of the Dark Fates that seek to steal his very soul.

Author: Jo Knowles
Publisher: Candlewick
ISBN: 0763663875
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Does anyone ever see us for who we really are? Jo Knowles’s revelatory novel of interlocking stories peers behind the scrim as it follows nine teens and one teacher through a seemingly ordinary day. Thanks to a bully in gym class, unpopular Nate suffers a broken finger—the middle one, splinted to flip off the world. It won’t be the last time a middle finger is raised on this day. Dreamer Claire envisions herself sitting in an artsy café, filling a journal, but fate has other plans. One cheerleader dates a closeted basketball star; another questions just how, as a “big girl,” she fits in. A group of boys scam drivers for beer money without remorse—or so it seems. Over the course of a single day, these voices and others speak loud and clear about the complex dance that is life in a small town. They resonate in a gritty and unflinching portrayal of a day like any other, with ordinary traumas, heartbreak, and revenge. But on any given day, the line where presentation and perception meet is a tenuous one, so hard to discern. Unless, of course, one looks a little closer—and reads between the lines.

Author: Donovan Campbell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588367789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
After graduating from Princeton, Donovan Campbell wanted to give back to his country, engage in the world, and learn to lead. So he joined the service, becoming a commander of a forty-man infantry platoon called Joker One. Campbell had just months to train and transform a ragtag group of brand-new Marines into a first-rate cohesive fighting unit, men who would become his family. They were assigned to Ramadi, the capital of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province that was an explosion just waiting to happen. And when it did happen—with the chilling cries of "Jihad, Jihad, Jihad!" echoing from minaret to minaret—Campbell and company were there to protect the innocent, battle the insurgents, and pick up the pieces. Thrillingly told by the man who led the unit of hard-pressed Marines, Joker One is a gripping tale of a leadership and loyalty.

Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547420293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.