a novella by Josh Spilker:more information can be found at www.kuboapress.wordpress.com‘Kurungabaa’ is a Dharawal word for the Australian pelican, a handsome bird with a peculiar way of gliding low over the waves. We have chosen it to express respect for the Dharawal country where we love to surf, to celebrate the continuing culture of the Dharawal people, and to acknowledge the memory of the Dharawal people’s ancestors.Kurungabaa is a not-for-profit volunteer publication, and is published bi-annually (June and December) as a hard copy by the generosity of subscribers and donors. Digital versions of the earlier and current editions are available from 2011 onwards, check the better-known online stores.Kurungabaa publishes diverse genres including poetry, fiction, reflective and scholarly essays, memoirs, review essays, and interviews. Four pages each issue are made available for a photo essay or series of art reproductions by a single photographer or artist.Emerging writers from coastlines around the world are encouraged to submit their work. Several pages will be dedicated to emerging authors in each issue. Editorial and writing assistance can be arranged, if requested.Indigenous writers, surfers and artists are encouraged to join in kurungabaa’s production, both as members of the editorial collective and as contributors. Every issue aims to contain material on surfing-related Indigenous history, culture and politics.More info and submissions to kurungabaa.net

His talent made him popular with a certain kind of girl.

Amanda McCabe, writing as Laurel McKee, presents a short (2750 words) story set in Georgian Ireland of "The Daughters of Erin" series. Allison and Finn are intellectuals and Irish patriots in Dublin of 1802--and they certainly don't believe in enchanted leprechaun gold! Nor do they believe in romance--until a magical encounter shows them what can happen when they let true love into their livesA special treat for St. Patrick's Day! Amanda McCabe, writing as Laurel McKee, presents a short (2750 words) story set in Georgian Ireland of "The Daughters of Erin" series. Allison and Finn are intellectuals and Irish patriots in Dublin of 1802--and they certainly don't believe in enchanted leprechaun gold! Nor do they believe in romance--until a magical encounter shows them what can happen when they let true love into their lives...

Want a fun way to cool off during the summer? Hire me, Joey Michaels, the Water Fight Professional! #fun4hireHe’s got a water gun. And he knows how to use it! I, Joey Michaels, am the Water Fight Professional.Basically this means that customers pay me to soak other people. But my super-competitive best friend is sucking all the fun out of summer. All because I made a secret bet with him. Winning the bet wouldn’t be so hard if I didn’t have the following three problems: 1) My dramatic mother who feels the need to schedule every moment of summer 2) A surfer-dude mailman who can’t keep deliveries straight 3) The annoying neighbor girl who all my friends have a crush on And if I lose … ugh, I can’t even tell you what I’d have to do. I’d rather lick a slug! The Water Fight Professional is the hilarious first book in the Fun4Hire series. If your kids like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Kid Who Ran for President books, they’ll love the Fun4Hire series. They’ll laugh and cheer as Joey splashes, squirts, and soaks his way to victory. And if he doesn’t win? Oh, boy! Let’s just hope he does, because losing is not an option.Start laughing today and download your FREE copy of The Water Fight Professional.Then check out the rest of the series and keep the laughs coming: The Snowball Fight Professional, The Food Fight Professional, and The Pillow Fight Professional.2015 Finalist, Cascade Award for Published Young Adult/Middle Grade Fiction.

The Return of Lanny Budd is the eleventh and final book in the enormous epic Lanny Budd World's End series written by Pulitzer Prize Winner and legend, Upton Sinclair. Written in 1953 at the pinnacle of the Cold War, this story covers the period between 1946 and 1949. Post World War Two, Lanny comes out of retirement as a Presidential Agent to assist the United States as the Russian menace grows. For all readers who have reviled in Lanny's numerous adventures, travels and conversations with the leading politicians, industrialists, financial powers and military leaders you will surely enjoy this, the final book, in Upton's great historical narrative that began when Lanny was 13 years old and just prior to the beginning of World War One. As the story begins, Lanny is running his Radio Peace Program with his wife Laurel Creston, Rick, Nina, Lanny's daughter Frances and Rick and Nina's son Scrubbie with the help of thousands of volunteers, all from an old abandoned refurbished factory in New Jersey. Lanny is recruited into the Secret Service, which has responsibility for the Treasury Department, to help end Nazi gangs who are counterfeiting Allied currency in Germany. Remnants of the Nazi regime have stolen plates to print US and other Allied currency and have hidden millions of dollars in gold whisked away prior to the end of the War. Lanny's boyhood friend and the famous German Komponist, Kurt Meissner is one of the ring leaders in this conspiracy. He is eventually taken prisoner by the Allies controlling the Western Sector of Berlin. He promises to cooperate and end his participation in the conspiracy headed by Neo-Nazi's to protect his family and return to his music endeavors. The suspense builds as Lanny leads a group trying to capture the printing plates and discover where the gold is hidden. The ending will surprise even the most intuitive reader. While on this mission Lanny is shocked by what he sees in Russian controlled parts of Europe. He questions his own ideas as to the preaching of peace vis-a-vis arming against yet another tyranny already on the march towards world domination. In Stalin, Lanny sees a tyrant much like Hitler, Goring and the other Nazi's. Selling the socialism Lanny believes in, while building a military juggernaut and murdering and imprisoning all opposition. Lanny brings his Radio Peace effort to Germany and works with the forerunner to the Voice of America Radio program. His radio work is an effort to promote peace and understanding for the German people whom Lanny has loved since boyhood. He is finally recognized and then targeted by the Russian KGB and is kidnapped and taken to East Berlin. Lanny is subjected to torture for purporting conspiring to assassinate Marshall Stalin. The week of the torture is suspenseful and the efforts to find and liberate him are as exciting as any previous adventure. Lanny is horrified to learn that his half sister, Bess, a lifelong Communist, is being watched by the FBI, suspected of transmitting secret material to Russians agents. Hansi, agonized by this development, decides to finally break with Bess, but cooperates with the FBI by pretending to be a communist himself. This part of the story by itself would be worthy of a full book but the espionage and counterespionage in the Hansibess family is supplementary tot the larger story of events in Europe. In an extraordinary story, Lanny is able to foil his interrogators by suggesting that Bess is in fact a counterespionage agent for the United States. The reader will appreciate the ingenuity Lanny uses to persuade Bess of the evils of communism after his escape. Please visit our website coming soon at: www.uptonsinclair-lannybudd-completeh.... There you can order any or all of the Lanny Budd series books at 20%, 25% and 30% off with free shipping.

With his elegant prose, distinctive imagination, and deep empathy, the bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White once again dazzles us in three novellas. "The Courage Consort" tells of an a capella vocal ensemble sequestered in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a monstrously complicated new piece. But competing artistic temperaments and sexual needs create as much discordance as the avant garde music. In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," a lonely woman joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey and unearths a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. In "The Fahrenheit Twins," strange children, identical in all but gender and left alone at the icy zenith of the world by their anthropologist parents, create their own ritual civilization. In each of these novellas, Michel Faber creates a unique, self-contained world, where the perennial human drama plays out in all its passion and ambiguity.

An unsent letter in a first edition copy of Charlotte's Web leads to a hunt for treasure in this heartwarming middle grade mystery from the author of The Mother-Daughter Book Club. Now that Truly Lovejoy's father has been injured by an IED in Afghanistan and is having trouble finding work back home, the family moves from Texas to tiny Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, to take over Lovejoy's Books, a struggling bookstore that's been in the family for one hundred years. With two older brothers and two younger sisters clamoring for attention, her mother back in school, and everyone up to their eyebrows trying to keep Lovejoy's Books afloat, Truly feels more overlooked than usual. So she pours herself into uncovering the mystery of an undelivered letter she finds stuck in a valuable autographed first edition of Charlotte's Web, which subsequently goes missing from the bookshop. What's inside the envelope leads Truly and her new Pumpkin Falls friends on a madcap treasure hunt around town, chasing clues that could spell danger.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Final Target, Iris Johansen raises the stakes and the heart rate with this relentless new thriller that follows the harrowing trail of a ruthless killer on the hunt--and the woman who is determined to hunt him down. He is the most terrifying of killers: ruthless, cunning, charismatic. And he has the means to get whatever he wants. And what Rico Chavez wants most is Elena Kyler--and he wants her dead. Trained as an assassin, Elena didn’t need anyone to survive. But now she finds herself on the run from one dangerous man and turning for help to another. Sean Galen was a man without illusions. He knew it was only desperation that caused Elena to accept his help--a mother’s desperation to save her young son from a psychopath father who would raise their son in his own chilling image. And yet he was determined to get this woman who had never been able to trust anyone or anything in her whole life to accept him as her ally. But both Galen and Elena know that Chavez’s power and wealth mean there is no place they can be safe and no one they can trust--not even each other. Already Chavez’s assassins and connections to those in the highest positions of power have turned this into a war with no rules. With two shocking acts of brutal violence, Chavez shows he will stop at nothing and that nothing will stop him. Soon a trail of horrifying murders will follow Galen and Elena across country to a last stand and a shattering showdown. For Chavez is a master of control and he wants more than just to take Elena’s life. He wants her alive long enough to see him destroy every reason she has for living. He wants her to turn against everything and everyone she ever believed in. He wants her to commit the ultimate act of betrayal. And by the time he is through, he wants her to beg him to take the only thing she’ll have left to give: her life. From the Hardcover edition.

She's trapped. I was a game piece in Trace Gamble's fantasy world, where he was king and everyone else was a pawn. He made a promise. I will fight him for you, and I will win. What starts as one night of secret pleasure soon becomes so much more. When Jericho Walsh was handed the Bedlam MC president's patch, he decided to find more legitimate ways for the outlaw club to make money. A job providing security for Trace Gamble, a wealthy casino owner, takes Jericho and his two closest friends to Lake Tahoe. Jericho soon finds that Gamble can't be trusted. But Jericho finds a reason to stay. Roxie Palmer. A terrible secret has Roxie bound to Gamble but Jericho has decided he's not leaving Tahoe without her. Roxie Palmer has been stuck playing girlfriend to Trace Gamble for a year, and she hates him more each day. But if she leaves him, her family will suffer the consequences. Up until now, she'd accepted her fate of living in a loveless relationship with a man she despises. But Jericho Walsh, Trace's newest employee, has swept into her life with his amazing looks and dangerous charm, and now all she can think of is breaking free. New adult, MC motorcycle romance, coming of age, anthology, contemporary

It is the 6th century of the common era. The vampire Saint-Germain, known in this time as Sangi-Ragozh, is peacefully doing business in Asia when, unknown to him-or anyone else in most of the world-Krakatoa explodes in a massive volcanic eruption. The island is nearly completely destroyed; tidal waves swamp harbors hundreds of miles away, ravaging trade ships and their cargoes; tons of ash and dirt are flung into the air. In the months to come, the world grows colder and darker as the massive cloud of dust and ash spreads across the globe, blocking sunlight. Sea trade is ravaged. Crops fail. Livestock, and then people, begin to starve. Disease spreads. Panic rises. What has caused the sun to go dark? With his scientific bent, Sangi-Ragozh suspects a natural cause, but most people assume a supernatural explanation-and begin to seek supernatural remedies. As always in times of trouble, foreigners-and the vampire is always a foreigner, wherever he travels-become targets. Fleeing toward the West, where he hopes to find safety and sanity, the vampire travels with a nomadic tribe led by Dukkai, a female shaman who soon becomes Sangi-Ragozh's lover-and main source of sustenance. But Sangi-Ragozh's problems are far from over. His vampire nature is discovered by an enemy; he is separated from Dukkai and begins to starve; he has lost everything, including his last sack of his native soil. With death no longer a distant possibility, Sangi-Ragozh desperately tries to reach sanctuary in the one place he truly belongs-his homeland, the country he first left centuries earlier. A land we now call Transylvania.

Noah has a fierce crush on a hot jock on the high school football team whose locker is fifteen down from Noah's in the hall. When Melissa Bradshaw, only the most popular girl in school, suddenly shows an interest in Noah, he suspects he's being set up for a cruel joke.Noah Lipinski has a fierce crush on Doug Hathaway, a hot jock on the high school football team whose locker is fifteen down from Noah's in the hall. When Melissa Bradshaw, only the most popular girl in school, suddenly shows an interest in Noah, he suspects he's being set up for a cruel joke. She asks him to Homecoming and he refuses to go.After school, the doorbell rings and Noah's sure she's back to pester him about the dance. But when he opens the door, he finds Doug there instead, with an explanation and a much better offer than Melissa's.

These poems were written to express some thoughts, some emotions, and some stories.The time was 1969, the place Vietnam. 2nd Lt. Frank Desio and his men were involved in a massacre in a small village near Bon Son and a subsequent cover up. Twenty five years later the remaining members of the platoon, known by their secret club name “The Magnificent Seven,” are being mysteriously and systematically murdered. Detectives John Carson and Chuck Brown follow the trail of a murderer that leads them through numerous twists and turns ending in a bizarre conclusion.