Meet M. Dylan Raskin -- "MDR" to friends. At 22, he's the opposite of hip: a working-class college dropout who lives with his mother in Queens -- "Flushing-Stinking-Queens," to be precise. It's not that he doesn't like New York, exactly, it's just that lately he's felt more and more at odds with everything -- his family, his generation, his hometown, even himself. One day he gets fed up and decides to take his freedom on the road, setting off for Chicago in a quixotic attempt to turn his life around. Little New York Bastard is the story of an outsider for the ages, a mixed-up kid who knows what he wants in life but has no idea how to get it. Raskin's anger is palpable and his wounds are unabashedly raw, and readers will appreciate the immediacy and honesty of his story. Equal parts road story, coming-of-age memoir, and existential manifesto -- this debut is in the tradition of cult classics like Youth in Revolt and The Fuck Up.

As the Middle East peace process disintegrates and the second Palestinian Intifada begins, Wendy Pearlman, a young Jewish woman from the American Midwest travels to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a quest to talk to ordinary Palestinians. A remarkable narrative emerges from her conversations with doctors, artists, school kids, and families who have lost loved ones or watched their homes destroyed. Their stories, ranging from the humorous to the tragic, paint a profile of the Palestinians that is as honest as it is uncommon in the Western media: that of ordinary people who simply want to live ordinary lives. As Pearlman writes, "the personal stories and heartfelt reflections that I encountered did not expose a hatred of Jews or a yearning to push Israelis into the sea. Rather, they painted a portrait of a people who longed for precisely that which had inspired the first Israelis: the chance to be citizens in a country of their own."

Gleeful and noisy celebrations greeted several dozen nervous young women when, after 99 tumultuous days at sea aboard the Tynemouth, they stepped ashore in Victoria in September 1862. Immediately they were faced with an ordeal of a different kind -- walking in single file up the ceremonial pathway through a jostling crowd of boisterous, eager men. One astonished young woman, proposed to on the spot, accepted her suitor to the delighted cheers of the throng and married him the next day. However, it took most of the bride-ship women longer to find their new destinies. Why did these women leave everything behind in England and come to the west coast of Canada? The answers lie in the atrocious disruptions of industrial Britain, the conflicting aims of earnest Christians and early feminists, and the lusty turmoil of a gold-rush frontier. All three elements shaped this complex and intriguing true story. The hardships and happiness of Louisa and Charlotte Townsend, Isabel Curtis, Jane Saunders, Emma Tammadge, Minnie Gillan and others who left no records are brought to life in this book.

Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma's most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In "Oklahoma Tough," poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood "King of the Bootleggers."

"Oklahoma Tough" is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett's life story possible. Ron Padgett brings this vanished world to life with candid and sometimes comic descriptions of criminal life. Particularly insightful and entertaining are interviews in which former bootleggers, family members, friends, and enemies speak openly about their lives.

Daniel A. Kelin II preserves the qualities of oral storytelling in fifty stories recorded from eighteen storytellers on eight islands and atolls. This lively collection includes something for everyone: origin stories, tales of mejenkwaad and other demons, tricksters, disobedient children, wronged husbands, foolish suitors, and reunited families - all relaying the importance of traditional Marshallese values and customs. Profiles of the storytellers, a glossary, and a pronunciation guide enrich the collection.

More stories from Chrystal Sharp about her life in a coastal town in the Eastern Cape and the many creatures who share it. We meet up again with the Sharp menagerie – cats and dogs and, of course, penguins. An increasing number of other marine birds are moving in too – some have been rehabilitated and 'released' but simply find life with Chrystal too comfortable and return home in the evenings hoping for a bit of supper.

This book is about a man who was falsely accused of a sex crime. This book is based on a true story.

Whether it's the joy-filled decision to welcome a child into your arms or the difficult decision to give your child another home-adoption is making the choice to love unselfishly and unconditionally. Loved by Choice offers a clear and uplifting look at adoption through true stories told from virtually every perspective. Birth parents, adoptive parents, grandparents, adopted children, families working out an overseas adoption, and those creating interracial families are among those who share their joys and difficulties. The collection is a tender celebration of adoption, led by those who understand it best. "Heartwarming and inspirational. By translating true stories from different perspectives, Horner and Martindale intensely convey to the reader the emotions that these people have felt-emotions ranging from desperation to elation, from abandonment to fulfillment. Loved by Choice is not only educational, it's an emotional read that, for maybe the first time, discusses in-depth the impact that adoption has on families and communities." Bill Owens, Governor of Colorado "Loved by Choice is a perfect example of God's adoption of us as his children and how the choice of love is extended to women in unplanned pregnancies. It is a powerful review of how God uses lives to save lives."Carol Everett, president of The Heidi Group "The reader, at the end of this book, has learned a great deal about the process of adoption, but that pales in comparison with the impact of the stories on the heart itself. And that's the real reason we should all read the book: to understand for the very first time what it really means to be Loved by Choice." Joe Wheeler, Ph. D., editor/compiler of the Heart to Heartseries of anthologies

As journalist Sam Quinones convincingly demonstrates, much of Mexico was already changing before the July 2000 presidential elections which ousted the PRI and presented the world with President-elect Vincente Fox. Fox's victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico tracked by Quinones for over six years.

"This side of Mexico gets very little press. . . . yet it is the best of the country. . . . people who have the spunk to imagine something else and instinctively flee the enfeebling embrace of PRI paternalism. . . . newly realistic telenovellas show the gray government censor that the country is too lively to abide his boss's dictates. . . . Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States. . . . [so] the United States is now part of the Mexican reality and is where this other side of Mexico is often found, reinventing itself."--from the introduction.

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border--about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino SAAA1/2nchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido--Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indianmigrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.

"This book expands our knowledge of modern Mexico many times over. Quinones unearths a wealth of material that has in fact gone unnoticed or been hidden."--Professor Francisco Lomeli, University of California, Santa Barbara

A Doctor, A Lawyer, and an Accountant tell You Everything You Need To Know About What Men Want.

If you're like most women, you're in the dark about what men really think about love. This enormously helpful book takes you into the heart and mind of the single professional male to show you not only what but how he thinks about dating and being in love, about what turns him on, and what sends him running in the other direction.

Strung together like a handful of Mardi Gras beads thrown from a passing float, Labordeis tales reveal the bright and beautiful as well as the dim and gaudy sides of the city. Southern Living.Offering innovative insights into such New Orleans mainstays as Carnival, Sports, and The Quarter, Laborde provides a look at aspects of Crescent City living usually reserved for residents. These essays include an Orleanian ode entitled, In Praise of the Potato Poor Boy and several explorations and explanations of Mr. Bingle, the only symbol of Christmas that is unique to New Orleans. These eighty-one vignettes originally appeared in Labordeis Streetcar column, which currently runs in New Orleans Magazine, a publication that the author also edits.

True stories of exciting escapes and rescues have always been popular. This encyclopaedia presents escapes and rescues from the earliest times to the late-1990s in an A-Z format. Roger Howard describes the events themselves, the reasons why they were successful, and what motivated the escapees. Some of the escapes described are simple but ingenious, such as that of Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and political philosopher. In 1619 Grotius had been condemned to life imprisonment, but he escaped in 1621 concealed in a small chest less than four feet in length. The entries relate to topics as varied as Colditz, John McVicar, the Russian Revolution, Stalin, and the Titanic. Also covered are instances of people who evaded capture altogether and escapees who, like Lord Lucan, have "disappeared".

In this landmark guide to the spiritual journey, respected Zen teacher and psychotherapist John Tarrant brings together ancient Eastern traditions and the Western passion for the soul. Using real-life stories, Zen tales, and Greek myths, The Light Inside the Dark shows how our darkest experiences can be the gates to wisdom and joy. Tarrant leads us through the inevitable descents of our journey--from the everyday world of work and family into the treasure cave of the interior life--from which we return with greater love of life's vivid, common gifts. Written with empathy and a poet's skill, The Light Inside the Dark is the freshest and most challenging work on the soul to he published in years.

Lyddy: A Tale of the Old South is a fictional reconstruction of antebellum life in the historic Midway community of Liberty County, Georgia, home of some of the Old South's wealthiest planters. Originally published in 1898, this blend of fiction and memoir looks through the eyes of a white plantation mistress at her family plantation, her marriage, slave life, and the destruction of the plantation economy that took place when Sherman's army arrived in December 1864. Writing in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eugenia J. Bacon sought to represent plantation life as she had experienced it. Bacon's story provides a window on slave marriages, the retention of African folklore among coastal Georgia slaves, and the change in relations between masters and slaves after the Civil War. Lucinda H. MacKethan's extensive introduction explores the interwoven contexts of race, class, and gender that make this novel an interesting lens through which to view the complex human relationships that constituted plantation society in the Old South.

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul is your handbook for surviving and succeeding during the exciting teen years with both your sanity and sense of humour intact. It contains invaluable lessons on the nature of friendship and love, the importance of belief in the future and the value of respect for yourself and others. It also deals with tough issues like death, suicide and the loss of love. You'll relate to and learn from the inspirational stories, without feeling criticised or judged. Like a good friend, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul will be there for you when you need someone and cheer you up when you're down.

As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the world?s most dangerous war zones. As a child, she lived in a war zone of a different kind. Her mother, Dolores, suffered from what is now called manic depression; but when Jacki was growing up in a small Midwestern town, Dolores was simply called crazy. In her manic phases, Dolores became Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba, exotically delusional and frightening, yet to young Jacki also transcendent, even inspiring. In time, Jacki grew to accept, even relish, Dolores?s bizarre episodes, marveling at her mother?s creative energy and using it to fuel her own. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and lyrical, this memoir of a mother-daughter relationship is a testimony to obstinate devotion in the face of bewildering illness.

We all know HOW TO SHIT IN THE WOODS--but do we dare? After reading this uproarious collection of "fecal misadventures" from a veteran river-rafting guide and yarn spinner extraordinaire, you may think twice before venturing out into the great beyond...or even down the hall to your nice safe water closet.

Janice and Bill were the perfect couple. They met during college, got married and began promising careers. But in 1987 their storybook life was shattered forever when they were diagnosed with HIV. Janice explains how they coped.

The names, we sometimes say, have been changed "to protect the innocent". As regards those agents in KGB networks in the U.S. during and following World War II, their presence and their deeds (or misdeeds) were known, but their names were not. The FBI-KGB War is the exciting, true (which often really is stranger than fiction), and authentic story of how those names became known and how the not-so-innocent persons to whom those names belonged were finally called to account. Following World War II, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere set out to uncover the extensive American networks of the KGB. Lamphere used a large file of secret Russian messages intercepted during the war. The FBI-KGB War is the detailed (but never boring) story of how those messages were finally decoded and made to reveal their secrets, secrets that led to persons with such now-infamous names as Judith Coplon, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience--that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone.

Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world.

In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.

On 30 July 1945 the USS Indianapolis was steaming through the South Pacific, on her way home having delivered the bomb that was to decimate Hiroshima seven days later, when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Of a crew of 1196 men an estimated 300 were killed upon impact; the remaining 900 sailors went into the sea. Undetected for five days, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia and madness. By the time rescue arrived, only 317 men were left alive. Interweaving the stories of some of these survivors (including the ship's Captain Butler McVay, who would be unjustly court-martialled for the loss of his ship and, twenty years later and tormented by the experience, take his own life), Doug Stanton brings this incredible human drama to life in a narrative that is at once immediate and timeless. The definitive account of a near-forgotten chapter in the history of the last war, In Harm's Way has become a classic. And, some 72 years later, in August 2017, the USS Indianapolis was once again making international headlines - with the news that a marine archaeology team had located the ship's shattered remains: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/asia/uss-indianapolis-paul-allen.html?mcubz=1

Adventurers cross deserts and row oceans, appearing to live the dream. Yet they also must pay the bills and carve out time to get away. Are you trying to make a career doing what you love, daring to go freelance in a creative industry, growing a tribe or curious about an unconventional career? What is it like to build a life from living adventurously? Whether you are adventurous, creative, or just curious, Ask An Adventurer answers your questions from behind the scenes, rather than the usual questions adventurers hear: there are no kit lists, practical expedition planning advice or daring deeds in these pages. Instead, Alastair tackles questions asked by readers on social media such as: How do you make a living? How do you make time for adventure? How do you stay motivated and focused? How do you deal with post-adventure blues? How do you deal with the dilemma of flying and travel? How has social media changed the way you tell stories? How do you become an adventurer? How much does an adventurer earn? How do you decide what you will or won't do for money? How do you find sponsors? How do you get your work done? How can we make the world of adventure better? How do you get a book published? How do you get paid to give talks? How do you become a better speaker? How do you deal with emails? How do you start a podcast? How do you launch an email newsletter? And more...

Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2018 If you had told Helen two years ago that she would be getting up at 6 a.m. on Sundays to swim in a freezing reservoir and spending her Saturday nights unshowered and covered in mud in a pub, she would have spat out her champagne. But when everyone around you starts settling down, what else is a glamorous party girl to do but to launch herself into the world of endurance sport? For someone who didn't even own a pair of flat shoes (and definitely no waterproofs), Helen would soon find she had a lot to learn. Join Helen on her hilarious and soul-searching journey as she swaps a life of cocktail bars and dating for the challenges and exhilaration of triathlons, trail runs, obstacle races, long-distance cycles and ocean swims... and sets herself the seemingly impossible goal of qualifying as a Team GB triathlete.