Meet Bob Clayborn, a man whose dreams have long been trampled beneath the feet of his elephant-sized wife. Now the long-suffering husband of Clarisse Clayborn has learned the worst: his mother-in-law will soon be moving in with them. But wait! What’s that glow up ahead? Why, it’s the old Zodiac. Abandoned years ago, it’s lit up like a neon lollipop, and Clarisse is eager to join the fun.Rid is not your average thief, he was once a proud and arrogant prince of a nation called Rogue. However, Rid lost everything he held dear when his step brother framed him for a heinous crime, causing him to get banished far away into the outside cruel world. Thanks to two new friends he makes on the way, he learns to become deceitful, lying, dirty minded, and cunning as a way to survive his new environment. On a fateful day, the three ambush a merchant caravan carrying three sacred and powerful weapons, only to fall into a dangerous trap. Rid’s friends get captured by an evil tyrant woman named Katarina Fox and he must venture into oblivion to rescue them. Legions among legions of terrible monsters, evil humans, and treacherous cities await him, threatening to engulf him completely. Despite his many flaws, destiny has chosen him to be the one to shed light into his dark and madness consumed world.

(Part 2 to Walt vs the Space Flunkies) They is back! And this time, defeating these ornery little aliens is gonna take more branes than ever!Bullying was something James Griffin had sadly become accustomed to, it was a daily occurrence either at school or at home. From nasty insults to bruising punches James had endured it all. Too ashamed to ask for help, he begged the universe for a way out and it answered. Hamlet, the secluded English village in the countryside where James resides, unknowingly played host to other worldly beings for whom a looming battle is fast approaching. When a heartbreaking tragedy sets in motion a chain of events that lead James away from his old life he is forced to find the courage to take control and embrace war, love and destiny.

Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another instalment in this popular series, now running in its ninth season in The Scotsman. Anything could happen to Bertie and the gang...

'Morning Tea Near Mitchelton' by Ken Blowers, is the third in a series of delightful collections of light-hearted short stories. Join Ken on another journey through eight short stories which are perfect in content and length to read when stopping for a break for Morning Tea. Guaranteed to leave you chuckling with your cuppa!Following the success of his first two collections of short stories 'Nightcap at Ningi Creek' and 'Breakfast on the Way to Brisbane', Ken continues the theme with a collection of eight more light-hearted short stories set in South East Queensland. Perfect in content and length to read when stopping for a break for Morning Tea, and guaranteed to leave a smile on your face!Brisbane suburbs serve as the perfect backdrop for Ken's character's to come to life in 'Morning Tea Near Mitchelton'. This volume of short stories has something to offer everyone. Ken's ability to draw the reader into the everyday lives of regular people is most unique.You too can be immediately transported to a time and era that possibly no longer exists, to either reminisce, or choose your own adventure - in any event, your reading needs are more than catered for, with this smorgasbord of saga's.Whatever your choice, you will not be disappointed as the unexpected unfolds with every word, slowly revealing the conclusion like a mini Agatha Christie mystery.Once you start reading these stories you'll be hungry for more. Look out for Ken's next exciting volume of short stories coming soon.

Reilly was a slug. He is no more, though. You see, he got his comeuppance. A short story by The Crazymad Writer.Reilly was a slug, and I emphasise WAS, because he is no more. You see, he got his comeuppance. My story begins long, long ago, a full three months previous. “Morning, mum,” Reilly sang out, one wonderfully damp, drizzly cold morning.“Good morning, Reilly,” his mother replied. “What has you so chirpy, apart from the fine day that is?”“I don’t know,” her son replied. Mulling it over, he added, “Perhaps it’s because...”“Because – what?” she asked, her head nudging a half-rotten cabbage leaf in his direction. “You will think me silly...” he mumbled, eying the dainty morsel with some considerable delight.“I will if you don’t eat your breakfast,” she chided, nudging the leaf closer to him.Taking a bite out of the decaying leaf, Reilly said, “When I awoke this morning...”“Yes?”“I thought, I somehow knew – and I have absolutely no idea why – this is the day I leave home. Taking another mouthful of cabbage, he chomped away quite happily on it, then said, “Does this make any sense to you, mum?”Smiling, tears of slime running freely down her slippery brown face, his mother said, “My child is all grown up!”

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny.

Margaret Mayo is a British writer of over 80 romance novels since 1976. 

A book for people who like TV. Thirteen 'episodes' of political situation comedy, starring Elliot Vance, handsome millennial slacker and great-nephew of the former Secretary of State. Each episode takes 20-30 minutes to read. This one is Episode 1.It’s Scandal meets Seinfeld. A political comedy set in Washington, D.C.It’s a book for people who like TV. A serial novel structured like a television show, with 13 individual episodes that each also contribute to the ongoing story.In 2011, the Obama Administration embarrassed itself by mistaking Colorado for Wyoming on the map of a speaking tour in western states. Voila, the Fifty States Program!--fifty new federal patronage jobs, one for each state, all housed in cubicles at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.The millennials in these jobs call each other by the name of their states, and none of them are exactly what you’d call on the ball. Wyoming--that’s our man Elliot Vance-- could qualify for the slacker Olympics. He’s the grand-nephew of former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, but prior to being given a States job by his wealthy father he got kicked out of an English lit Ph.D. program for insisting on doing his dissertation on 1950s pulp author F. Bob Goddard. Elliot dates a WASP-American princess who’s pushing for marriage, and his two best friends are Delaware and Nebraska. His nemesis is Tara Travis, the slinky blonde Republican aide to Wyoming congressman Bull Wheeler.In Episode 1 Elliot is blackmailed by Tara into flying to Laramie to do some actual work. It’s the first time he’s ever been to The State of Wyoming.

John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

This is the dramatic story of J. P. Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a twentieth-century masterpiece: The Ginger Man . It is literally history combined with Donleavy's autobiography -- from his childhood in the Bronx, education at Catholic schools, service in the U.S. Navy, and travels, to his current life as proprietor of a landed estate in the midlands of Ireland. Trinity College in Dublin after World War II was a mecca for adventurous Americans who used the G.I. Bill as a passport to higher education, . Among them were able-bodied seamen, second class J.P. 'Mike' Donleavy, fighter pilot George Roy Hill (now a celebrated Hollywood actor), and a naval yeoman Gainor Stephen Crist, a Midwestern rara avis and model for the Ginger Man. Student life included degrees in debauchery; drunken brawls in Dublin pubs; comic capers with the playwright Brendan Behan; eccentric Anglo-Irish aristocrats; living on miraculous credit and in constant debt with plenty of time for the seduction of nice Catholic girls. Donleavy, impecunious and newly married, began to write The Ginger Man in a primitive isolated cottage at Kilcoole. He completed the book over a period of four years on two continents. The Ginger Man was rejected by nearly thirty-five American and British publishers. The book was finally published in Paris in 1955 by Maurice Girondias of the Olympia Press as a work of pornography. Twenty-five years of biter litigation between Donleavy and Girodias followed, with Donleavy emerging triumphant as sole owner of Olympia and its copyrights, including that of The Ginger Man.

Using a play by Karl and Josef Capek as source, Flann O'Brien locates his insect drama in Dublin, his most familiar stalking- territory. His adaptation is a vehicle for ridicule and invective, targeting race, religion, greed, identity and purpose. With his extraordinary ear for dialogue, O'Brien creates his own fantastical world, and the outcome is a hilarious satire of Irish stereotypes - as Orangemen, Dubliners, Corkagians and culchies become warring ants, bees, crickets, dung-beetles, and other small-minded invertebrae. The lost text of this play, Hilton Edwards' prompt copy from the 1943 Gate Theatre performance, was discovered in the archives at Northwestern University, Illinois. 'A play by Ireland's most celebrated comic writer, Flann O'Brien, lost for fifty years, has been discovered in the archives of Northwestern University, Illinois, by an American academic. The O'Brien play, Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, was put on in Dublin by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company at the Gaiety Theatre during Lent in 1943 with a cast of 150 - representing millions, as is obligatory with an insect play. But, presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the aspersions it seemed to cast on married life and the superpatriotic Fianna Fail party, it only ran six days and was never again performed ... However it and the context in which it was born - and rapidly snuffed out - gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics.' Peter Lennon, The Guardian, 17th of November 1994

To Knit or Not to Knit is a unique Dear Abby/mini knitting essay collection, offering humorous tales of triumph and terror on the needles, with a witty nod to the famous and infamous throughout history. As Mrs. Wicks happily quotes everyone from William Shakespeare to Beatrix Potter, she adds her own wit and wisdom to answer a variety of questions on knitting ranging from “Is there a quick fix for dropped stitches?” to “My boyfriend says my passion for knitting is stronger than my passion for him—what should I do?” A number of Mrs. Wicks’s own patterns are sprinkled throughout, along with her sound advice for stitches dropped and love gone wrong. Ever the optimist, she advises her readers to pick up their needles, dust off their hearts, and cast on without looking back. To Knit or Not to Knit is a quirky, enjoyable read, making it the perfect gift for the passionate knitter and thoughtful reader alike.

Bedford Crane saw something strange in the woods when he was thirteen, and it ruined his life. Or was it his brother that did that? Years later, the two of them camp out together for a night of beer, aliens and redemption. What they both see and do is going to require a lot of explaining... and a couple of extraterrestrial tourists will be turning in their galactic passports.Bedford Crane saw something strange in the woods when he was thirteen, and it ruined his life. Or was it his brother that did that? Years later, the two of them camp out together for a night of beer, aliens and redemption. What they both see and do is going to require a lot of explaining... and a couple of extraterrestrial tourists will be turning in their galactic passports. Cooter is a story of friendship, obsession, cultural misunderstandings, and cow parts. Full of laughs, pop-culture and a few chills, this is a great read that will leave you wanting more. “The Extraterrestrial Anthology, Volume III: Reír,” contains short stories to make you think and laugh. For more information go to www.dangereye.com.

Ambrose Ork was born thick. By contrast Harvey Paulson, the new owner of the mansion, was ambitious, and as fast as they come.So when the body was found it was clear who would take the blame.Because there was nothing Ambrose could do to change things.Or was there?Thick and Fast deals with one of the last and least attended inequalities that still plague mankind - intellectual discrimination.What is addressed here is the inherent snobbery of intelligence in society as a whole. How the menial, underpaid tasks fall on those with a low I.Q. How they are duped and used, humiliated and abused, simply because they are unable to understand the mechanisms necessary for their emancipation. Here is Ambrose Ork, the live-in handyman at Haute House, who was born thick. By contrast Harvey Paulson, the new owner of the mansion, was ambitious, unscrupulous and as fast as they come.So when a tragic accident took place it was clear from the outset who would take the blame, and who would come out unscathed. Because there was nothing someone as slow as Ambrose could do to change things.Or was there?