Many authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn’t for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside. Farkas discovers that, just as the mannered and wonderfully (gloriously) artificial indoors influences us greatly, our lives are also controlled much more by fiction than by anything “real.” So come in out of the weather (it’s always terrible) and join the Great Indoorsman on his adventures, where he makes fun of pretty much everything, most of all himself.

Noted TV personality and columnist Reid Duffy showcases 30 Indiana restaurants that have stood the test of time in this updated and expanded edition of Indiana's Favorite Restaurants. These showcased restaurants have been in existence for 25 years or more, and in some cases for several generations. Recipes for favorite dishes from these restaurants are included so that you can recreate the foods you love at home. Approximately 60 recipes -- from Acapulco Joe's Taco Filling to Nashville House Fried Biscuits -- accompany Duffy's reviews. "Comfort food" abounds in Indiana -- 162 restaurants are included in this category, and 23 well-known steak houses are highlighted in "Where's the Beef?" No fewer than 137 ethnic restaurants around the state are profiled here. Duffy looks to the future as well: he reviews 80 new restaurants that are "destined to stand the test of time." All of the restaurants popularized by Indiana Cooks! (IUP, 2005) have been included in this mouthwatering guidebook. Double the size of the original guide, Reid Duffy's Guide to Indiana's Favorite Restaurants serves up 432 thorough and extensive reviews. Each establishment has been visited in person and the food taste-tested. The result is the best guide to great dining for Indiana residents as well as visitors to the Hoosier state.

WINNER OF THE SILVER MEDAL IN HUMOR FOR THE 2019 IPPY AWARDS Welcome to the Great Indoors Are your couch, TV, and smartphone among your most prized possessions? Are you looking for proven methods to avoid imminent Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster attacks? How sick and tired are you of hearing your friends and family say, “Let’s go out”? Then you might be an Avid Indoorsman. Embrace the lifestyle with this hilarious handbook full of tips and tricks to help you survive and thrive in your comfy-yet-still-surprisingly-wild climate-controlled world: Take a 20-question test to determine your level of Indoorsmanship. Learn to identify and overcome the dangers of both the indoors and outdoors. Establish a healthy indoor routine, including plenty of sleep, “exercise,” and coffee. Dress the part by thinking simple and sleek…and wearing sweatpants often. Explore the science of ergonomics behind setting up the perfect indoor space. And much more to help you succeed indoors! So, stay inside, read this book, and be grateful for four walls and a fast Internet connection.

WINNER OF THE SILVER MEDAL IN HUMOR FOR THE 2019 IPPY AWARDS Welcome to the Great Indoors Are your couch, TV, and smartphone among your most prized possessions? Are you looking for proven methods to avoid imminent Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster attacks? How sick and tired are you of hearing your friends and family say, “Let’s go out”? Then you might be an Avid Indoorsman. Embrace the lifestyle with this hilarious handbook full of tips and tricks to help you survive and thrive in your comfy-yet-still-surprisingly-wild climate-controlled world: Take a 20-question test to determine your level of Indoorsmanship. Learn to identify and overcome the dangers of both the indoors and outdoors. Establish a healthy indoor routine, including plenty of sleep, “exercise,” and coffee. Dress the part by thinking simple and sleek…and wearing sweatpants often. Explore the science of ergonomics behind setting up the perfect indoor space. And much more to help you succeed indoors! So, stay inside, read this book, and be grateful for four walls and a fast Internet connection.

The world needs real men, real bad. And there are all sorts of conflicting ideas and messages about what a "real man" is (and is not). Is a real man one who hunts, loves sports, grills meat, fixes cars, and climbs mountains? Sure, sometimes. But that's not really the point of being a man and it's not the purpose for which men were made. Into our cultural confusion, Brant Hansen paints a refreshingly specific, compelling picture of what men are made to be: "Keepers of the Garden." Protectors and defenders. He calls for men of all interests and backgrounds (including "avid indoorsmen" like himself) to be ambitious about the right things and to see themselves as defenders of the vulnerable, with whatever resources they have. Using short chapters loaded with must-have wisdom and Brant's signature humor, The Men We Need explains the essence of masculinity in a fresh, thoughtful, and entertaining way that will inspire any man who dares to read it.

Douglas Ashton is the cold and unfeeling owner of the gothic Victorian Mansion, Sommersgate House. Julia Fairfax is his stubborn American sister-in-law. After tragedy strikes, Douglas and Julia are forced to live together at Sommersgate and raise their newly orphaned nieces and nephew. Douglas has no desire to raise his dead sister’s children nor does he want the distraction of the tempting Julia living under his roof. Julia is struggling with grief and trying to make a go in a new country without much help from impossibly handsome but even more impossibly remote Douglas. Not to mention, she has to deal with the active hostility of Douglas’s frosty, Attila-the-Hun-in-a-skirt mother, Monique. Douglas decides the best way to give the children what they need, get his mother to behave and give himself what he wants is to marry Julia. When he tells her (yes, tells her) she will be his wife, Julia thinks Douglas is (probably) insane. And anyway, she’s decided if she ever has another husband (since the last one wasn’t so great), he was going to be short, balding, have a paunch and worship the ground she walks on (none of these characteristics define Douglas in the slightest). One more thing, Sommersgate House is haunted by the ghosts of the man who built the house and the woman who was the love of his life. They both died mysteriously at Sommersgate months after it was finished. When they did, a curse settled on the house making it seem strangely alive. And the only way for the beautiful but frightening house to rid itself of this curse is for its owner to find true love.

When a freelance man in need of money met a mysterious beauty, his plain life was bound to cause waves. She was sweet and mysterious. She was an intelligent planner during the day, a seductive seductress during the night, a web writer with black-rimmed glasses during the day, and a game master with black-rimmed glasses at night. She was a otaku when she met a beautiful woman, and an ordinary writer when she met a veteran planner.

Praise for One Mile Past Dangerous Curve: "This book aims to be about the best of us as it shows us at our least. Thank goodness for Darrell Spencer, the only writer in America to be trusted on the subjects of faith, love, weal and woe." ---Lee K. Abbott " . . . absolutely dire and dear, his best book, a novel about American life right now. . . . this book is accurate, acerbic, and heartfelt at once." ---Ron Carlson Praise for Darrell Spencer: "Mr. Spencer's writing crackles with freshness and lucidity, featuring characters who slide into one another in random encounters and relationships." ---New York Times Book Review "[Spencer] possesses a remarkable ear for the cadence of everyday speech." ---Michael Chabon From the acclaimed author of Caution: Men in Trees and A Woman Packing a Pistol comes a tale of kinship, love, and lawlessness. One Mile Past Dangerous Curve is the story of the Dancers---a family on the verge of collapse. Glen Dancer has come to Ohio to set up another in a series of Snapper franchises. But in the midst of construction, Glen finds himself fighting a painful and futile battle with cancer. His son Eddie, recently divorced, moves from Las Vegas to help. A sign painter by trade, Eddie finds only intermittent work in town until the day a mysterious and wealthy businessman commissions a series of twenty road signs, each different, all featuring odd, cryptic messages. It is on a back-country road, where Eddie has gone to assemble one of the signs, that some previously vague threats become concrete. Though Eddie doesn't know it, the neighboring woods hide a secret, a secret that a gun-toting rural gang wants to keep at any cost.

Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In "A Whole New Life," however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life. Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means "all)" doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." "A Whole New Life" offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honestinsight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.