Apathy and Other Small Victories

Apathy and Other Small Victories PDF Author: Paul Neilan
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312352196
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A scathingly funny debut novel about disillusionment, indifference, and one man's desperate fight to assign absolutely no meaning to modern life. The only thing Shane cares about is leaving. Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own. “The malaise of cubicle culture may be well-trodden comedic territory by now, but Neilan's debut skewers office life with a flourish for the grotesque.” —The Village Voice

Apathy and Other Small Victories

Apathy and Other Small Victories PDF Author: Paul Neilan
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429907347
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
A scathingly funny debut novel about disillusionment, indifference, and one man's desperate fight to assign absolutely no meaning to modern life. The only thing Shane cares about is leaving. Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own. “The malaise of cubicle culture may be well-trodden comedic territory by now, but Neilan's debut skewers office life with a flourish for the grotesque.” —The Village Voice

The Hollywood Spiral

The Hollywood Spiral PDF Author: Paul Neilan
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1538736667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of Apathy and Other Small Victories, this darkly comic novel set in the near future about the race to find a missing cyber program with the power to bend reality—all before a fast-approaching comet destroys the earth. In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid. Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he's desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan's new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program's user. Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac's mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror—if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn't kill them all first.

Fight Club: A Novel

Fight Club: A Novel PDF Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.

Traveling Mercies

Traveling Mercies PDF Author: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0375409173
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life. "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco Chronicle Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother." Despite—or because of—her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers."

The Eyes of Darkness

The Eyes of Darkness PDF Author: Dean Koontz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101525363
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
A mother’s greatest wish—or worst nightmare—comes true in this chilling novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz. Tina Evans has spent a year suffering from incredible heartache since her son Danny's tragic death. But now, with her Vegas show about to premiere, Tina can think of no better time for a fresh start. Maybe she can finally move on and put her grief behind her. Only there is a message for Tina, scrawled on the chalkboard in Danny's room: NOT DEAD. Two words that send her on a terrifying journey from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the cold shadows of the High Sierras, where she uncovers a terrible secret...

Malice in Blunderland

Malice in Blunderland PDF Author: Jonny Gibbings
Publisher: Cutting Edge Press
ISBN: 1908122137
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description


Apathy and Other Small Victories

Apathy and Other Small Victories PDF Author: Paul Neilan
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312352196
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A scathingly funny debut novel about disillusionment, indifference, and one man's desperate fight to assign absolutely no meaning to modern life. The only thing Shane cares about is leaving. Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own. “The malaise of cubicle culture may be well-trodden comedic territory by now, but Neilan's debut skewers office life with a flourish for the grotesque.” —The Village Voice

Indecision

Indecision PDF Author: Benjamin Kunkel
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812973755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dwight B. Wilmerding is only twenty-eight, but he’s having a midlife crisis. He lives a dissolute existence in a tiny apartment with three (sometimes four) slacker roommates, holds a mind-numbing job at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and has a chronic inability to make up his mind. Encouraged by one of his roommates to try an experimental drug meant to banish indecision, Dwight jumps at the chance (not without some vacillation about the hazards of jumping) and swallows the first fateful pill. And when all at once he is “pfired” by Pfizer and invited to a rendezvous in exotic Ecuador with the girl of his long-ago prep-school dreams, he finds himself on the brink of a new life. The trouble–well, one of the troubles–is that Dwight can’t decide if the pills are working. Deep in the jungles of the Amazon, in the foreign country of a changed outlook, his would-be romantic escape becomes a hilarious journey into unbidden responsibility and unwelcome knowledge–and an unexpected raison d’être.

Special Interest

Special Interest PDF Author: Terry M. Moe
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815721307
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 529

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why are America's public schools falling so short of the mark in educating the nation's children? Why are they organized in ineffective ways that fly in the face of common sense, to the point that it is virtually impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom? And why, after more than a quarter century of costly education reform, have the schools proven so resistant to change and so difficult to improve? In this path-breaking book, Terry M. Moe demonstrates that the answers to these questions have a great deal to do with teachers unions—which are by far the most powerful forces in American education and use their power to promote their own special interests at the expense of what is best for kids. Despite their importance, the teachers unions have barely been studied. Special Interest fills that gap with an extraordinary analysis that is at once brilliant and kaleidoscopic—shedding new light on their historical rise to power, the organizational foundations of that power, the ways it is exercised in collective bargaining and politics, and its vast consequences for American education. The bottom line is simple but devastating: as long as the teachers unions remain powerful, the nation's schools will never be organized to provide kids with the most effective education possible. Moe sees light at the end of the tunnel, however, due to two major transformations. One is political, the other technological, and the combination is destined to weaken the unions considerably in the coming years—loosening their special-interest grip and opening up a new era in which America's schools can finally be organized in the best interests of children.

The Football Girl

The Football Girl PDF Author: Thatcher Heldring
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 0375987142
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
For every athlete or sports fanatic who knows she's just as good as the guys. This is for fans of The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen, Grace, Gold, and Glory by Gabrielle Douglass and Breakaway: Beyond the Goal by Alex Morgan. The summer before Caleb and Tessa enter high school, friendship has blossomed into a relationship . . . and their playful sports days are coming to an end. Caleb is getting ready to try out for the football team, and Tessa is training for cross-country. But all their structured plans derail in the final flag game when they lose. Tessa doesn’t want to end her career as a loser. She really enjoys playing, and if she’s being honest, she likes it even more than running cross-country. So what if she decided to play football instead? What would happen between her and Caleb? Or between her two best friends, who are counting on her to try out for cross-country with them? And will her parents be upset that she’s decided to take her hobby to the next level? This summer Caleb and Tessa figure out just what it means to be a boyfriend, girlfriend, teammate, best friend, and someone worth cheering for. “A great next choice for readers who have enjoyed Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen and Miranda Kenneally’s Catching Jordan.”—SLJ “Fast-paced football action, realistic family drama, and sweet romance…[will have] readers looking for girl-powered sports stories…find[ing] plenty to like.”—Booklist “Tessa's ferocious competitiveness is appealing.”—Kirkus Reviews “[The Football Girl] serve[s] to illuminate the appropriately complicated emotions both of a young romance and of pursuing a dream. Heldring writes with insight and restraint.”—The Horn Book