Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry is a pretty amiable guy. But lately, he’s been getting a little worked up. What could make a mild-mannered man of words so hot under the collar? Well, a lot of things–like bad public art, Internet millionaires, SUVs, Regis Philbin . . . and even bigger problems, like • The slower-than-deceased-livestock left-lane drivers who apparently believe that the right lane is sacred and must never come in direct contact with tires • The parent-misery quotient of last-minute school science fair projects • Day trading and other careers that never require you to take off your bathrobe • The plague of the low-flow toilets, which is so bad that even in Miami, where you can buy drugs just by opening your front door and yelling “Hey! I want some crack,” you can’t even sell your first born to get a normal-flushing toilet Dave Barry is not taking any of this sitting down. He’s going to stand up for the rights of all Americans against ridiculously named specialty “–chino” coffees and the IRS. Just as soon as he gets the darn toilet flushed.
Billy Dent is the world's most notorious serial killer, but even killers need to go on vacation sometimes. When a mysterious death occurs in the hotel where Billy is staying, his "job" seems to call. Will his vacation truly be down time for him after all? In this prequel novella to the I Hunt Killers trilogy, bestselling author Barry Lyga crafts a creepy, intricately plotted mystery.
A novel of violence, of love, and introspection, The Up-Down follows a man who leaves home and all that’s familiar, finds true love, loses it, and finds it again. Pace’s voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that is the up-down, in a sweeping, voracious human tale that takes no prisoners, witnesses extreme brutalities and expresses a childlike amazement. Here the route goes from New Orleans, to Chicago to Wyoming to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, but the geography he is charting is always first and foremost unchartable.
Everyone's had a bad day, some of us have had a lot worse. But as Barry Minkow shows in this inspirational and empowering book, you can come back from anything. He started from jail-and millions in debt. You might be starting from a wrecked marriage. Or a business gone belly up. Whatever your failure, you can overcome and get beyond it starting today. In Down, But Not Out, Barry explains the 10 all-important steps you need to succeed in the process. You may not end up helping the FBI bust investment fraud like Barry does today, but you can turn your life around and get back on the road to success. Barry shows you how.
The ten-story Nellis office building is condemned, evacuated, and court-ordered for implosion. Before the city of Tacoma can hire a demolition firm, the homeless take it over. They create their own rules and governance in this thriving alternative community. With the streets suddenly cleaner, but the court order looming, the mayor and the citizens are torn. The politicians, philanthropists, homeless, media, and polarized citizens of Tacoma square off as they race toward an emotionally charged conclusion. Written with humor and hope, Down is about the reincarnation of a building and its residents, tough love and late love, conflict, and unexpected resolution.
“A shorthand epic of extraordinary power . . . A novel of brilliant particulars and dizzying juxtapositions” from the acclaimed southern author of Geronimo Rex (Newsweek). Nominated for the American Book Award, Ray is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray—a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband—is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love. “This novel hangs in the memory like a fishhook. It will haunt you long after you have finally put it down. Barry Hannah is a talent to reckon with, and I can only hope that Ray finds an audience it deserves.” —Harry Crews, The Washington Post Book World
We All Fall Down is a vivid and compelling narrative of middle class friends and families, relationships and the contemporary workplace. Kate and Hugh Drysdale like many couples buy a house that stretches them to the limits financially. Hugh looks at the soaring property market, the fact he’s earning a good salary, and all the signs of a booming economy and believes everything will be fine. And it is, until the advertising company he works for hits a rough patch: two major pieces of business walk out of the door, and a new creative director from the UK is brought in. Set in Sydney when world economic instability is beginning to bite, this is very much a book of our time. Peopled with unforgettable characters it is a disturbing, but affecting portrait of family, the workplace, and the costs of playing, or not playing the game. In We All Fall Down Peter Barry brings his witty, razor-sharp vision to human nature, life in suburbia and the moral dilemmas that face us all.
Dave Barry makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel of love and mayhem in south Florida. In the city of Coconut Grove, Florida, these things happen: A struggling adman named Eliot Arnold drives home from a meeting with the Client From Hell. His teenage son, Matt, fills a Squirtmaster 9000 for his turn at a high school game called Killer. Matt's intended victim, Jenny Herk, sits down in front of the TV with her mom for what she hopes will be a peaceful evening for once. Jenny's alcoholic and secretly embezzling stepfather, Arthur, emerges from the maid's room, angry at being rebuffed. Henry and Leonard, two hit men from New Jersey, pull up to the Herks' house for a real game of Killer, Arthur's embezzlement apparently not having been quite so secret to his employers after all. And a homeless man named Puggy settles down for the night in a treehouse just inside the Herks' yard. In a few minutes, a chain of events that will change the lives of each and every one of them will begin, and will leave some of them wiser, some of them deader, and some of them definitely looking for a new line of work. With a wicked wit, razor-sharp observations, rich characters, and a plot with more twists than the Inland Waterway, Dave Barry makes his debut a complete and utter triumph.
This book draws on the stories of thirty-two young Australians to identify the barriers and obstacles they face in ‘getting a job’ in precarious times and from their vantage point. It maps the kinds of educational policies and practices that need to be created and more widely sustained to assist their career aspirations and life chances. It is timely in terms of contributing to an alternative set of possibilities based on a commitment to the principles and values of social justice, respect, trust, care, democracy and citizenship. In constructing an alternative vision and practice for education and training it advocates the right of all young people to have a say in these broader public debates. In pursuing this agenda, it deliberately sets out to listen to what young people themselves have to say with a view to interrupting the way things are. In other words, the book seeks to identify and explain the dreams, desires and aspirations of young people with a view to creating a new imaginary and socially just future.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel to a far-off and distant place to share with an unreached people group the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ? The Region Beyond is a journey with two young cousins to the remotest mission station in the world in 1972. Travel with Barry and Bob Blackstone from northern Maine to the Gibson Desert of western Australia to experience another culture and climate far beyond their imagination or expectation. Experience with them their first overseas flight across the width of the great Pacific; journey with them into the barren wilderness that is central Australia on a day-and-a-half railroad ride; fly with them through the interior of western Australia were mile after mile is nothing but flat, open wasteland; work with them on a million and a quarter acre sheep and cattle station and witness up close and personal the struggles of such a hostile land; drive with them deeper into the desert to an isolated community of Aboriginal natives and a few missionaries, three hundred miles--north, south, east, or west--from any other settlement; and share with them the ups and downs of living in a strange land for a summer. Their spiritual adventure will include a kangaroo hunt, dust storms that blotted out the sun, teaching aboriginal children the Story of Jesus, building a laundry and shower building in the heat of a hundred degree Australian winter, catching--by running after a caboose--a train heading east at a desert junction, watching a tribal fight with spears and knives, experiencing the hospitality of fellow believers unmatched until the author visited India. Learn what it takes to be a missionary to The Region Beyond, and discover your life's calling despite the desire to return. On the fortieth anniversary of this miraculous trip, Pastor Blackstone recalls the events that made this memorable summer of '72 possible, and the lasting effects of his journey into The Region Beyond!
The ever-optimistic Mr Micawber bids a fond farewell to David Copperfield and takes his family to Australia, confident their lives will change for the better. However, more than florid language and optimism is needed to survive in this brash new world that is Melbourne in 1855. Visits from the bailiffs, rent arrears and his daughter Emma's betrothal to his landlord's son already complicate poor Micawber's life, but when his own son Wilkins introduces a young man - Godfrey McNeil - with an ambiguous past who also has designs on Emma, it becomes even more tangled. Micawber turns detective, but will the mystery he uncovers threaten even his optimism and integrity?
No book can guarantee you a long and happy relationship, even if the author didn't know about your secret hygiene problem. But the cover of a book is no place to discuss that. In Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex, one of America's most beloved writers turns his keen, if somewhat rheumy, eye to the institution of marriage. Dating. "These are nonstereotypical times we live in, by which I mean that it is the responsibility of the woman to think up excuses that get progressively more obvious until the man figures out that the woman would rather chew on a rat pancreas." Sex. "I'm afraid that we must talk here about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding, and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys." Marriage. "Most squabbles start with money. For example, you want to buy food, while your spouse wants to buy a thoroughbred racehorse. It's important, in these situations, for both of you to be willing to sit down and try to achieve a workable compromise. In this case, you could buy a thoroughbred racehorse and eat it.
It is 1987, two years after Live Aid and PR expert Adrian Burles, working with charity Africa Assist has a Big Idea that he thinks will keep Ethiopian hunger in the headlines and touch heartstrings (and purse strings) of people in the West. Aided by Anne Chaffey, an experienced nurse who has worked at the famine frontline for many years, he locates a young, malnourished Afar man called Mujtabaa wandering alone in the desert and flies him back to London. The world's media are then invited to witness a skeletal Mujtabaa making a week-long walk from Heathrow to a rally in Trafalgar Square. In fundraising terms, this us a great success—but the ethics of the exercise, the human impact on all concerned and the ultimate result are all profoundly to be questioned. The Walk is a provocative and unsettling novel about the morality of charity, the media and public relations. Situated in one single week it explores how far you can go to prick the public conscience. Peter Barry was born in England, brought up in Scotland and now lives in Australia. He is the author of two other novels, I Hate Martin Amis Et Al and We All Fall Down and has had many short stories published in literary journals. He was shortlisted for Australia Book Review's Calibre essay prize. He has been a copywriter in both the UK and Australia and has also written three corporate books.
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