A short, fictional book about how we love places to death... in spite of our best intentions.

First published in 1998, Anthony McMahon details the accounts of public agency child welfare dealing abused and neglected children and their families and the pressures on child welfare workers. Opening up the discussion on the ambiguities whilst dealing with balancing child welfare work whilst dealing with the societal pressure of the non-intrusion into family life.

Would you rather… Be rich and stupid or smart and poor? Have the CIA after you or have the Mafia after you? Be on vacation with your 60-year-old parents and have your mom insist on wearing a thong bikini or have your dad insist on wearing a tiny, Euro-style bathing suit? Warning! This book contains shocking content meant to inspire hilarious discussion. These field-tested conversation starters are guaranteed to provoke ridiculous fun, break the ice, and—if played correctly—open a unique window into the twisted imaginations of friends and family. It’s an addictive game in a book that challenges readers to ask—and answer—more than 100 questions that rank from the heinous to the outrageously funny.

You can and you can't; You will and you won't. You'll be damn'd if you do; You'll be damn'd if you don't. --LORENZO DOW; "Definition of Calvinism" We've all heard of the wonderful invention that the Big Corporation or the Utilities suppressed...? Usually, that Wonderful Invention won't work, actually. But there's another possibility, too.... The workshop-laboratory was a mess. Sam Bending looked it over silently; his jaw muscles were hard and tense, and his eyes were the same. To repeat what Sam Bending thought when he saw the junk that had been made of thousands of dollars worth of equipment would not be inadmissible in a family magazine, because Bending was not particularly addicted to four-letter vulgarities. But he was a religious man--in a lax sort of way--so repeating what ran through his mind that gray Monday in February of 1981 would be unfair to the memory of Samson Francis Bending. Sam Bending folded his hands over his chest. It was not an attitude of prayer; it was an attempt to keep those big, gorillalike hands from smashing something. The fingers intertwined, and the hands tried to crush each other, which was a good way to keep them from actually crushing anything else. He stood there at the door for a full minute--just looking.

When Hannah volunteers at a domestic abuse hotline and tries to help the women and children whose lives become entwined with her own, she's caught in the town’s secrets, lies, and double dealing. Raised in the Sixties on picket lines and peace marches, activist Hannah Fox can't turn her back when a friend's land is targeted by an eminent domain scam that threatens her small town in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. When the developer behind the fraudulent scheme is murdered and her young friend becomes a suspect, Hannah probes the dead man's shameful past. She faces hard choices, convinced the murder was a heroic act even when it's clear she may be the killer's next victim. Trouble invades Hannah's private life as she tries to curb the mounting attraction between herself and Jack Grundy, Senior Investigator for the New York State Police, while watching her own marriage crumble. Damned If You Don’t, which skillfully exposes the entrenched corruption in a rough-edged mountain town, is moving and disturbing, atmospheric and authentic. This dark traditional mystery with its strong protagonist keeps readers guessing until the very end.

Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated film. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem. Everett skewers race, class, identity, surrealism and much more in this masterful short story collection from one of America's most inventive living writers. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

You can and you can't; You will and you won't. You'll be damn'd if you do; You'll be damn'd if you don't.--LORENZO DOW; "Definition of Calvinism"We've all heard of the wonderful invention that the Big Corporation or the Utilities suppressed...? Usually, that Wonderful Invention won't work, actually.

Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.

Bang! I just cut the corner and ran right into this six foot blond guy. I was just about to say Watch where you are going! when I looked up and into the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. I got a tingle in my body. My cheeks flushed red and all I managed to say was a shy Hi. Those same eyes that held so much promise now filled me with nothing but fear and terror. For the first time I could see clearly that I had to leave him. He will never change. If I stay, I will end up dead! I was now ready to leave him but that option wouldn't be easy. When I leave, I need to leave the country and my family in order to stay alive. I will have to find a way to escape from him because he will never let me go. I take that back, he would let me go, if I left in a casket or if I were dead. Deep down, I already had the answer. I knew what I needed to do, but I took my time to ponder my moves and to plan, and let it sink in. I was planning my escape from him and this nightmare. A plan to save my life!