"This book will make you rich. Filthy stinking rich. You will never need to work again. You will spend the rest of your life on the Riviera sipping piña coladas and listening to Sinatra. And even if this doesn't happen, Andrew Tobias will provide you with such a wealth of wit that you will retire with a vast fortune of laughter. " --Christopher Buckley, author of Wry Martinis As Newsweek put it, "Andrew Tobias remains the funniest of the financial writers." Forbes identified him as "one of the financial community's most pithily perceptive observers." In My Vast Fortune, the bestselling author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need tells the amusing and illuminating story of how he amassed dizzying (well, to him) wealth. Then, he describes the unusual ways he's put it to work. Among his more famous money adventures are: His personal campaign against smoking in Russia, which began when he spotted an opportunity to buy cheap TV airtime for commercials. "Excuse my pronunciation, " he told ninety million Russians night after night, "but I have something important to tell you." His decision to buy real estate in Miami over the phone, without ever seeing it. For the price of a swank two-bedroom apartment in New York, Tobias realized he could buy most of a neighborhood--so he did. Oops. The tragicomic story of liberal as slumlord. His crusade to fix the auto insurance mess, which pitted him against--of all people--his onetime hero Ralph Nader. After spending $250,000 of his vast fortune on a referendum in California (where he has never lived), Tobias came to two conclusions: 1) "Each of us has a calling and--though appallingly boring--auto insurance seemed more and more to be mine" ; and 2) "Ralph Nader is a big fat idiot." Finally, Tobias addresses your vast fortune and offers his wisest tips on how to make it and how to spend it. Witty and compassionate, Andrew Tobias is a plutocrat for the nineties, a capitalist with a heart. If you enjoyed The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, you'll love My Vast Fortune.

These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

What is nature worth? The answer to this question -- which traditionally has been framed in environmental terms -- is revolutionizing the way we do business. In Nature's Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make. The forests, floodplains, and oyster reefs often seen simply as raw materials or as obstacles to be cleared in the name of progress are, in fact as important to our future prosperity as technology or law or business innovation. Who invests in nature, and why? What rates of return can it produce? When is protecting nature a good investment? With stories from the South Pacific to the California coast, from the Andes to the Gulf of Mexico and even to New York City, Nature's Fortune shows how viewing nature as green infrastructure allows for breakthroughs not only in conservation -- protecting water supplies; enhancing the health of fisheries; making cities more sustainable, livable and safe; and dealing with unavoidable climate change -- but in economic progress, as well. Organizations obviously depend on the environment for key resources -- water, trees, and land. But they can also reap substantial commercial benefits in the form of risk mitigation, cost reduction, new investment opportunities, and the protection of assets. Once leaders learn how to account for nature in financial terms, they can incorporate that value into the organization's decisions and activities, just as habitually as they consider cost, revenue, and ROI. A must-read for business leaders, CEOs, investors, and environmentalists alike, Nature's Fortune offers an essential guide to the world's economic -- and environmental -- well-being.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Fortune's My Foe" (A Romance) by John Bloundelle-Burton. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Fortunes obsession is the story of a young man who stumbles into a web of intrigue, danger and romance after innocently taking some snapshots on a sunny day in New York Citys Central Park. The novel follows him on a breathtaking journey to save Americas space program.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh."—The New Yorker A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance—financial, cultural, genetic—conspired in one person's self-destruction. Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the eight-hundred-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on—but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets. Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex. Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, one hundred years hence?

The storm of the night was over. The winds had subsided almost as quickly as they had risen on the previous evening--as is ever the case in the West Indies and the tropics generally. Against a large number of ships of war, now riding in the waters off Boca Chica, the waves slapped monotonously in their regularity, though each crash which they made on the bows seemed less in force than the preceding one had been; while the water looked less muddy and sand-coloured than it had done an hour or so before. Likewise the hot and burning tropical sun was forcing its way through the dense masses of clouds which were still banked up beneath it; there coming first upon the choppy waters a gleam--a weak, thin ray; a glisten like the smile on the face of a dying man who parts at peace with this world; then, next, a brighter and more cheery sparkle. Soon the waves were smoothed, nought but a little ripple supplying the place of their recent turbulence; the sun burst forth, the banks of clouds were dispersed, the bright glory of a West Indian day shone forth in all its brilliancy. The surroundings, which at dawn might well have been the surroundings of the Lower Thames in November, had evaporated, departed; they were now those of that portion of the globe which has been termed for centuries the "World's Paradise." The large gathering of ships mentioned above--they mustered one hundred and twenty-four--formed the fleet under the command of Admiral Vernon, and in that fleet were also numbers of soldiers and marines who constituted what, in those days, were termed the Land Forces. There were also a large contingent of volunteers from our American colonies, drawn principally from Virginia. The presence here both of sailors and soldiers was due to a determination arrived at by the authorities at home in the year 1739, to harass and attack the Spanish West Indian Islands and possessions in consequence of England being once again, as she had been so often in the past, at war with Spain. Now that fleet lay off Cartagena and the neighbourhood; some of the officers and men--both sailors and soldiers--were ashore destroying the forts near the sea; the grenadiers were also ashore; the bomb-ketches were at this very moment playing upon the castles of San Fernando and San Angelo; the siege of Cartagena had begun. Upon the quarter-deck of one of the vessels of war composing the great fleet, a vessel which may be called the Ariadne, the captain walked now as the storm passed away and the morning broke in all its fair tropical beauty, and while there came the balmy spice-laden breeze from the South American coast--a breeze soft as a maiden's first kiss to him she loves; one odorous and sweet, and luscious, too, with the scents of nutmeg and banana, guava and orange, begonia, bignonia, and poinsettia, all wafted from the flower-laden shore. But because, perhaps, such perfumes as these, such rippling blue waves, now crested with their feathery tips, such a bright warm sun, were not deemed by Nature to be the fitting accompaniments to the work which that fleet had to do and was about to do--she had provided others.

Leonie Conyngham’s family had lost their fortune and she was left with only her pride and her beauty. The Duke of Thornbury had designs on her, along with shrewd Edward Longhurst. Imogen Longhurst was determined to destroy Leonie for daring to rival her for handsome Sir Guy de Lacy. Leonie knew that one moment of weakness would undo her but she was so tempted… Regency Romance by Sandra Heath; originally published by Signet