The twelve stories in Kate Blackwell’s debut collection illuminate the lives of men and women who appear as unremarkable as your next-door-neighbor until their lives explode quietly on the page. Her wry, often darkly funny voice describes the repressed underside of a range of middle-class characters living in the South. Blackwell’s focus is elemental—on marriage, birth, death, and the entanglements of love at all ages—but her gift is to shine a light on these universal situations with such lucidity, it is as if one has never seen them before. In “My First Wedding,” a twelve-year-old girl attends her cousin’s Deep South wedding, where she discovers both mystery and disillusionment and, in the end, finds she’s not immune to her family’s myth of romantic love. In “Heartbeatland,” when a young woman’s husband dies suddenly, she refuses to sell his Jeep to an importuning gay neighbor. The more she clings to the Jeep—and to the memory of her beloved David—the more he becomes someone she doesn’t recognize. In “Queen of the May,” a former belle looks for ways to assuage her loneliness in her large new house in the empty Carolina sandhills.

You Won't Remember This

Literature & Fiction

Blackwell, Kate

Literary

Bacon Press Books

Trochenbrod was a bustling commercial center of more than 5,000 people, all Jews, hidden deep in the forest in Northwest Ukraine. It thrived as a tiny Jewish kingdom unnoticed and unknown to most people, even though it was “the big city” for surrounding Ukrainian and Polish villages. The people of Trochenbrod vanished in the Holocaust, and soon nothing remained of this vibrant 130-year-old town but a mysterious double row of trees and bushes in a clearing in the forest. In this new book, Avrom Bendavid-Val makes Trochenbrod’s true story accessible, enjoyable, and memorable for young readers. The Lost Town follows his adventures while uncovering the lost history of the magical place where his father was born and raised. An imagined Trochenbrod was the setting for Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated, and the movie by the same name.

The Lost Town: Bringing Back Trochenbrod

Teen & Young Adult

Bendavid-Val, Avrom

Biographies

2014 Eric Hoffer Award for Business Books Winner 
Looking for work? Changing careers? Discover the smart way to search.
Ellis Chase, one of Manhattan’s top career management consultants and executive coaches, brings his 25-plus years of experience and expertise to this reexamination of how you can target and find a job that fits. You’ll find strategies you can use to: identify the career that’s right for you; build your networks; approach interviews; negotiate your salary; cope with the emotional roller coaster; make smarter decisions.In Search of the Fun-Forever Job takes a fresh look at an old problem and turns some of the commonly held beliefs about job search and career management inside out. <ul>
<li>Is the resume truly the key to a successful search? </li>
<li>Isn’t it easier to look for a job when you’re employed? </li>
<li>Won’t I improve my chances if I just put as many letters and resumes out there as possible, and hope some of them stick? </li>
<li>Isn't networking just calling everyone I know and asking for leads?</li>
</ul>
 "I'm recommending it to my executive and full-time students and to everyone I know who's doing a search. If you are an executive or experienced in your career, Ellis knows your world. If you are new in the working world or trying to get a job quickly, you need to understand what's in this book. He doesn't lie and say it's easy, but he makes a good case that we all need to do it right."
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In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies that Work

Business & Money

Chase, Ellis

Job Hunting & Careers

“Each story is a minor masterpiece of the writer's craft.” Midwest Book Review In these twelve stories, you’ll meet a remarkable cast of complex, quirky characters tangled up in the limits they’ve put on their lives. Driven by love or loneliness, like the man in the title, they’ve boxed themselves in. Frank Tavares tells their stories with humor and compassion. And while the themes may be familiar - crumbling marriages, feuding neighbors, sparring business partners, and the endless searching for what might have been - here they become fresh, unpredictable, and surprising. This exciting debut collection from a first-rate storyteller will haunt and fascinate you long after you finish reading. “Too often, life stuns us with nuances and a mix of emotions that need time and patience to digest. Frank Tavares’s greatest gift is in delivering all of these layers and textures in a single pass and doing so with a beautiful taste of humor to make it all palatable. The stories contained in The Man Who Built Boxes run the whole gamut from painful to absurd to pure joy and comedy. . . . This is a writer you’ll want to know, writing a life you’ll be happy you’ve lived in for a while.” Jack B. Bedell, author of Bone-Hollow, True: New &amp; Selected Poems and director of Louisiana Literature Press. “Each story is a minor masterpiece of the writer's craft. The totality of this outstanding collection, while thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end, is also thoughtful and thought-provoking and while works of fiction, resonate with real life experiences of us all. "The Man Who Built Boxes And Other Stories" is highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library collections.” Midwest Book Review

The Man Who Built Boxes and other stories

Tavares, Frank

“In this short but sweet novella, Wynn spins an enjoyable tale of lost souls colliding in the most unlikely of places.”---- Kirkus Reviews Would you risk your life for a stranger? For seventy-three-year-old Jaime, the answer takes him by surprise. Accustomed to a lonely life high up in the mountains on the western coast of Mallorca, his dull routine is suddenly shattered when a man parachutes from a plane and lands nearby. The plane crashes; the man lives.  It’s a drug smuggling operation gone bad. But Stefan, the man from the sky, has escaped with eight kilos of cocaine in a gym bag. Jaime brings Stefan home and is soon entangled in Stefan’s attempts to sell the cocaine and start a new life. As they dodge Parisian drug dealers and corrupt Mallorcan police, Jaime’s search for excitement and Stefan’s resolve to find stability lead them both down dangerous paths. “Conjuring shades of Steinbeck’s meditations on nature, this enjoyable, pleasant yarn passes like the cool summer breezes described within its pages.”-- Kirkus Reviews

Man from the Sky

Wynn, Danny

"Identity Thief is an audacious and cleverly plotted, intriguing mystery that opens up new layers of deceit at every turn, like an endless trove of Russian nesting boxes, with one surprising twist after another." Paul D. Marks, Shamus Award-winning author, White Heat 
Out of work, down on your luck, desperate for cash. What if you could get rich with a few strokes of the keyboard? All you have to do is become someone else. But nothing’s that simple in this fast-paced, psychological thriller. As the story dangerously snowballs downhill, the characters discover how losing themselves can lead to duplicity, blackmail, and sometimes murder. JP Bloch’s darkly comic, edgy exploration of the mystery of the self will keep you guessing until the last word. You’ll come away agreeing with the identity thief that “the biggest mistake you can make is thinking you know who you are.” “JP Bloch’s Identity Thief careens through a spiraling labyrinth of stolen identities reminding one of Churchill’s riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. After his identity is stolen, Dr. Jesse Falcon goes from the frying pan, into the fire, into the endless quicksand of identity theft, until you just want to ask, as they did on the old TV show, ‘Will the real Jesse Falcon please stand up?’ But like Bloch says, the real identity thief is life itself. Identity Thief is an audacious and cleverly plotted, intriguing mystery that opens up new layers of deceit at every turn, like an endless trove of Russian nesting boxes, with one surprising twist after another. Definitely looking forward to his next.” Paul D. Marks, Shamus Award-winning author, White Heat “This is a fun ride. Despite featuring deeply troubled characters, Bloch treats them with a sense of humor that softens some edges but dangerously sharpens others. There are times when you'll chuckle at a name or a seeming coincidence, then be blindsided with an unexpected—sometimes unsettling—turn. As the main players lose and find identities, you'll be pulled into their fragmenting worlds where truth is temporary and few are whom they seem—to others or to themselves.” Frank Tavares, author of The Man Who Built Boxes and other stories

Identity Thief

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Bloch, JP

Thrillers & Suspense

After 30 rough years of adventure on the seas, Jake Thomas makes landfall in a new and quiet life in Oregon – only to discover that the past dies hard. The secrets he’s kept, even from himself, won’t stay buried. Forty years earlier, a beautiful, young woman was murdered during Jake’s first voyage as a deck cadet on the American freighter, the SS James Wait. Her children want answers only Jake can give. What really happened that terrible night? Did the wrong man go to jail? In this riveting story-within-a-story, Jake’s peaceful routine in Portland, Oregon, stands in stark contrast to his days as a merchant seaman in Subic Bay, when he set off on a journey to discover his dark side. A journey that hasn’t yet ended. Written in a style that compares to Joseph Conrad, Joseph Jablonski drew upon his own years of sea experience to craft a book that is as much a careful observation of human nature and a powerful condemnation of war as it is a suspenseful sea story.

Landfall

Jablonski, Joseph

Genre Fiction

A fascinating collection of life stories told by 30 authors from eight countries. They write of their attempts to move beyond crippling grief, free themselves of haunting memories, get out from under abusive relationships. They tell of their struggles – often painful, sometimes funny - to let go of everything from a fear of horses, to old family homes, and piles of books and papers. “Does the inability to let go of ideas, people, places and things sometimes drag one down? Readers will find answers to that question in the many thoughtful essays in this collection, which show us that freeing oneself by letting go is not only possible but often necessary for enjoying the fullness of life. Via their stories, these fine writers give us valuable food for thought on letting go or, for those still not convinced, permission to stop forcing oneself to try.” From the Introduction by M. E. Hughes, editor

Letting Go: An Anthology of Attempts

Hughes, M. E.

Biographies & Memoirs

A war on vice In Washington, DC—a city constantly awash in scandals? Hard to believe, but it really happened. Only not exactly the way it’s told here. In an upscale residential neighborhood, in a perfectly respectable apartment building, one of the best-known, high-priced call houses on the East Coast operates quietly on the top floor. Everything goes along smoothly until the DC Police and the FBI try to outdo each other in waging a war on vice. This funny, fast-paced novel casts 1940s Washington, DC, as the main character, not just the setting. And as the adolescent world capital fills up with trainloads of hopefuls, you’ll get to know Mattie Simon, who wants some adventure, and Andrew Stevens, the newly elected congressman, who only wants to serve his country. But Washington has a way of changing people—even when they get what they want. C.P. Stiles’ crisp writing and sharp eye for detail keep you smiling as you take in a Washington that never dreamed of today’s scandals—but was on its way to them.

The Call House: A Washington Novel

Stiles, C.P.

After years of living in an abusive marriage, one day Cookie Wagner snaps. She stabs her drunken husband and leaves him dying on the kitchen floor. She flees to remote Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where she takes on a new name and starts a new life. For a moment, she seems to have gotten away with murder. But is her husband really dead or will he come looking for her and once again ruin her life? "A tension-filled yet ultimately humane story about hard-won second chances. Warm and wise, Maureen Brady's Getaway takes the reader on a suspenseful and memorable journey to the tenderest corners of the human heart." --Aaron Hamburger, author of The View from Stalin's Head and Faith for Beginners

Getaway

Brady, Maureen

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