"Emmet Honeycut, a sniper during the Civil War, shoots a girl about to burn to death in a hotel fire. Although acquitted of murder, he becomes a pariah in town, but is reprieved by a telegram from Major Kingston, his former commander. Kingston's niece, Faith, has been abducted and he offers Emmet money to join his rescue party, which includes six other skilled men, and a beautiful woman whom Emmet comes to love. Enrique Salazar and Yago Garza are merciless cousins who control Santa Sabino and who plan to auction off young girls, including Faith, to wealthy landowners as sex slaves. When Kingston is betrayed and captured, Emmet leads the attack, kills the cousins, and frees the girls. The locals embrace him as their hero"--

From the Laws of Mount Misery: There are no laws in psychiatry. Now, from the author of the riotous, moving, bestselling classic, The House of God, comes a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there *only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients. On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Psychiatrists specialize in their defects. For Basch the practice of psychiatry soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things *managed care insurance money, drug company research grants and kickbacks, and their own professional advancement. From the Laws of Mount Misery: In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis. What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem brings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.

On a frozen January night, a young man hangs himself in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay. Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won't even hear about the suicide until two months later, when the last person Alex would ever expect comes to him for help. What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge, and a race against time to catch a ruthless and methodical killer. McKnight knows all about evil. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men—he's seen them all, and they've taken away almost everything he's ever loved. But none of them could have ever prepared him for the darkness he's about to face. A New York Times bestseller, Michigan Notable Book, and Boston Globe Best Crime Book of the Year, Steve Hamilton's Misery Bay marks the return of one of crime fiction's most critically acclaimed series.

After an almost fatal car crash, novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself being nursed by a deranged fan who holds him captive.

David Ritz presents his uniquely candid and and intimate account of the tumultuous life of the Prince of Soul music, Marvin Gaye. Author Ritz has assembled years of conversations and interviews from his life as a close friend and lyricist to the gifted Soul sensation, and tells the Marvin Gaye story with fly-on-the-wall accuracy and detail. From his early years as an abused child in the slums of Washington DC, through his rise to the very peaks of the Motown phenomenon, his fall from grace and subsequent comeback, to his untimely death at the hands of his father, Marvin's story is the stuff of legends. The cast of characters includes the Jacksons, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and countless other icons of the world of soul music.The definitive biography of an enormously gifted and sensitive musician.

Oprah Winfrey is an unprecedented and important cultural phenomenon. This book aims to understand the reasons for her spectacular success and visibility. Based on nearly one hundred show transcripts; a year and a half of watching the show regularly; and analysis of magazine articles, several biographies, O Magazine, Oprah Book Club novels, self-help manuals promoted on the show, and hundreds of messages on the Oprah Winfrey Web site, it takes the Oprah industry seriously in order to ask fundamental questions about how culture works today.

A psychiatric case study masquerading a fancy-pants graphic novel, Misery Loves Comedy collects Ivan Brunetti's early issues (no pun intended) wait, let's rephrase that. Misery Loves Comedy collects the first three issues of the legendary comic book series Schizo in their entirety, as well as a host of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam from various anthologies, c. 1992-2005. Readers will find the author's unwitting self-caricature as a paranoid, deluded young man intriguingly repugnant and often chuckle-inducing. Besides Brunetti's trademark nihilism, self-loathing, relentless depression, and inchoate, spittle-soaked misanthropy, these earlier comics offer a dollop of scatology and blasphemy for that extra puerile, lowbrow tang. These are comics for those who enjoy witnessing one man's sanity in its final death rattle, swinging its tail from anhedonia to schadenfreude and back again. Also: lots and lots of filthy jokes. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}

Describes the natural habitat, physical characteristics, diet, and behavior of the Portuguese man-of-war.

Fiction. At a prestigious university in Michigan circa 1980, the perplexing poems by Roger Ackroyd have won him a cult following. But who is Roger Ackroyd? Just about the only person on campus not asking that question is Edward Moses, Ackroyd's secret creator. Instead, Edward is flunking his girlfriend's psych class, fighting with his family, and suffering from writer's block. Enter a rival artist pretending to be Roger Ackroyd. In his last week of college, Edward's obsession with exposing the poser threatens to reveal his own true identity. A hilarious campus novel in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, this debut novel skewers the nature of youth, friendship, and ambition, while making us feel for the lovable but hapless Edward. "Walking a tightrope between the abject and the comic, MISERY BOY offers the hapless misadventures of Edward Moses, a committed secret writer, a committed and not-so-secret drunk, as everything falls to shambles around him. Vibrant and repellent and very funny, MISERY BOY is a razor-sharp debut."--Brian Evenson "'If you were smart you ignored compliments...Somebody complimented your cooking...and you never boiled another potato in your life. With every compliment came a wish for a different, more optimal you.' So writes Rose Servis in MISERY BOY, making me hesitate to compliment her at all. I don't want to change her or influence what she will write next--certain to be as astute and poignant and funny as this. (That is not a compliment, just a fact!)"--Diana Wagman "MISERY BOY is that timeliest of anachronisms; a picaresque novel of the recent past that speaks to our own time with the sort of delirious candor only misfits can muster. Comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh will be inevitable, but Servis forges a defiantly original path, creating in Eddie Moses a protagonist whose masochistic pursuit of personal artistic purity is both maddening and hilarious--part Henry Fool, part Holden Caulfield, with a dash of Josef K for that enigmatic, existential thrill. Imagine a mumblecore movie written by Thomas Bernhard and you'll be getting close to the finely tuned misanthropic glee of this delightful book. An incredible debut from an emerging writer of immense talent."--Seth Blake "With a prose style that is graceful, innovative and comic, Rose Servis pays homage to, and satirizes Agatha Christie and T.S. Eliot through her brilliant but often befuddled and self-destructive college student protagonist, Edward Moses aka Roger Ackroyd. Servis' Edward is a worthy descendent of J.P. Donleavy's Sebastian Dangerfield from the classic novel The Ginger Man."--Bruce Bauman "Blistering satire from a bold new voice!"--Susan Henderson

When Poppy's sister falls to her death from a railway bridge, she begins her own investigation, with devastating results ... A startlingly twisty debut thriller. 'Uncovering the truth propels her into a world of deception. An unsettling whirlwind of a novel with a startlingly dark core. 5 Stars' The Sun 'Sharp, confident writing, as dark and twisty as the Brighton Lanes' Peter James 'Superb up-to-the-minute thriller. Prepare to be seriously disturbed' Paul Finch ____________________ When India falls to her death from a bridge over a railway, her sister Poppy returns home to Brighton for the first time in years. Unconvinced by official explanations, Poppy begins her own investigation into India's death. But the deeper she digs, the closer she comes to uncovering deeply buried secrets. Could Matthew Temple, the boyfriend she abandoned, be involved? And what of his powerful and wealthy parents, and his twin sister, Ana? Enter the mysterious and ethereal Jenny: the girl Poppy discovers after hacking into India's laptop. What is exactly is she hiding, and what did India discover...? A twisty, dark and sexy debut thriller set in the winding lanes and underbelly of Brighton, centring around the social media world, where resentments and accusations are played out, identities made and remade, and there is no such thing as the truth. ____________________ 'Well written, engrossing and brilliantly unique, this is a fab debut' Heat 'With twists and turns in every corner, prepare to be surprised by this psychological mystery' Closer 'Lucy V Hay's fiction debut is a twisted and chilling tale that takes place on the streets of Brighton ... Like Peter James before her, Hay utilises the Brighton setting to create a claustrophobic and complex read that will have you questioning and guessing from start to finish. The Other Twin is a killer crime-thriller that you won't be able to put down' CultureFly 'Crackles with tension' Karen Dionne 'A fresh and raw thrill-ride through Brighton ́s underbelly. What an enjoyable read!' Lilja Sigurðardóttir 'Slick and compulsive' Random Things through My Letterbox 'A propulsive, inventive and purely addictive psychological thriller for the social media age' Crime by the Book 'Intense, pacy, psychological debut. The author's background in scriptwriting shines through' Mari Hannah 'The book merges form and content so seamlessly ... a remarkable debut from an author with a fresh, intriguing voice and a rare mastery of the art of storytelling' Joel Hames 'This chilling, claustrophobic tale set in Brighton introduces an original, fresh new voice in crime fiction' Cal Moriarty 'The writing shines from every page of this twisted tale ... debuts don't come sharper than this' Ruth Dugdall 'Wrong-foots you in ALL the best ways' Caz Frear 'Original, daring and emotionally truthful' Paul Burston 'A cracker of a debut! I couldn't put it down' Paula Daly