Places I Can't Return To is a collection of true stories by comedian Sean Bair-Flannery. Each chapter is a place he cannot return to, usually because the people who live or work there warned him to never return. Or sometimes because those places are now in the bottom of a lake. The book intertwines Sean's own outrageous stories with funny asides on the history of these places. Like a travel book, if the author only stayed at places that have since been demolished. Or perhaps it's more like a memoir if the author was so drunk, he accidentally wrote a travel book.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cécile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

She is the girl who has been hurt and is healing. She is the girl with new scars. She is trying to scale the mountain to get to the other side in one piece. She trudged through the dark night and seeks the light of the dawn of a new day. She is moving forward with the scars of the past. She is learning to give herself grace when she stumbles back.

I'd like to share a story about sorrow, survival, strength, and success - the miracle of my life. This story is told as it was experienced by me, not someone else's version of what they thought was happening, but what I felt about what was happening with me and my siblings as we not only survived but flourished in spite of horrendous circumstances. This is a true story of one little girl's journey from sorrow to success. This is my story.

"Seventeen-year-old Cullen's summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin's death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother's sudden disappearance."--Title page verso.

The present volume contains general essays on: the relevance of 'Commonwealth' literature; the treatment of Dalits in literature and culture; the teaching of African literature in the UK; 'sharing places' and Drum magazine in South Africa; black British book covers as primers for cultural contact; Christianity, imperialism, and conversion; Orang Pendek and Papuans in colonial Indonesia; Carnival and drama in the anglophone Caribbean; issues of choice between the Maltese language and Its Others; and patterns of interaction between married couples in Malta. As well as these, there are essays providing close readings of works by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, André Aciman, Diran Adebayo, Monica Ali, Edward Atiyah, Margaret Atwood, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Amit Chaudhuri, Austin Clarke, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Antjie Krog, Hanif Kureishi, Naguib Mahfouz, David Malouf, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Tayeb Salih, Zadie Smith, Ahdaf Soueif, Yvonne Vera. Contributors: Jogamaya Bayer, Katrin Berndt, Sabrina Brancato, Monica Bungaro, Judith Lütge Coulli, Robert Cribb, Natasha Distiller, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Marie Herbillon, Tuomas Huttunen, Gen'ichiro Itakura, Jacqueline Jondot, Karen King-Aribisala, Ursula Kluwick, Dorothy Lane, Ben Lebdai, Lourdes López-Ropero, Amin Malak, Daniel Massa, Concepción Mengibar-Rico, Susanne Reichl, Brigitte Scheer-Schaezler, Lydia Sciriha, Jamie S. Scott, Andrea Strolz, Peter O. Stummer, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Clare Thake Vassallo.

Surviving the Peace is a monumental feat of ground-level reporting describing two decades of postwar life in Bosnia, specifically among those fighting for refugee rights of return. Unique in its breadth and profoundly humanitarian in its focus, Surviving the Peace situates digestible explanations of the region's bewilderingly complex recent history among interviews, conversations, and tableaus from the lives of everyday Bosnians attempting to make sense of what passes for normal in a postwar society. Essential reading for students of the former Yugoslavia and anyone interested in postwar or post-genocide studies, Surviving the Peace is an instant classic of long-form reporting, an impossible accomplishment without a lifetime of dedication to a place and people. Peter Lippman's website is http://survivingthepeace.org/.

For some time now, I’ve wanted to write a book which would answer the sort of questions that you don’t even find asked elsewhere – let alone answered. Obviously, in the interests of eclecticism, I’ve also included some of the more mundane, workaday questions – what you might call the curriculum for a book of this type – but even here, I have at least tried to bring a fresher less reverent approach to bear. Still, there’s no disguising the fact that it’s the more esoteric questions that really grabbed my interest and these are, inevitably, the ones to which I have devoted the most energy. That’s because I really do need to know why the word 'bastard' is only ever used as a term of abuse to men, whether it’s dangerous to suppress a fart, you can actually lose weight by eating celery, whether it’s possible to knock yourself out using just your own fist, why men don't use electrolysis to remove their beards, what would happen to aeroplane passengers if someone opened the emergency exit while it was in the air and why, of course, girls can’t throw.