In this collection of stories, Tim Gautreaux chronicles the lives of "ordinary" people who face extraordinary circumstances and decisions: a farmer faced with the prospect of raising his infant granddaughter; a young man who falls in love with a voice on the radio; a train engineer who causes a colossal disaster. In stories filled with heart and humor, event and consequence, the customs and culture of Louisiana come to life in the hands of a writer who blends rare talent with an even more unusual humanity.

Tony Ardizzone writes of the moments in our lives that shine, that burn in the dim expanse of memory with the intensity and vivid light of the evening news. The men and women in these stories tend to arrange their days, order their pasts, plan their futures in the light of such moments, finding epiphanies in the glowing memory of a father’s laugh or a mother’s repeated story, in a broken date or a rained-out ball game. Set mostly in Chicago’s blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus on subjects that concern us all: disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape and infidelity, lost love. The husband and wife in the title story look at their pasts—his as an activist in the sixties and hers as a believer in reincarnation and the tarot—in light of the news stories they watch on television each evening and question whether they should bring a child into the world. And in “The Walk-On,” a bartender and former varsity pitcher for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini finds the actual events of the most cataclysmic day in his past unequal to their impact on his life and so rewrites them in his mind, adding an ill-placed banana peel, a falling meteor, and a careening truck in order to create a more fitting climax and finally to leave those memories behind him. Searching their pasts for clues to the present, searching the horizons of their days for love, the characters in The Evening News seek, and sometimes find, redemption in a world of uncertainty and brightly burning emotions.

A petty thief is bested by a widow and her card-playing friends; a farmer must cope with raising his baby granddaughter; a train engineer inadvertently causes a major disaster and finds himself amidst a media frenzy. Ordinary people are confronted with extraordinary situations, with results that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but always life changing.

Scholars and musicians from many different backgrounds will find this book helpful as it deals with psychic problems in both professions. This book might help scholars and musicians to find a way out of their psychic dilemmas. From classical musicians to rock stars, from curriculum theorists to music teachers, from anthropologists to philosophers, this book takes the reader through a rocky intellectual terrain to explore what happens when one can no longer play or work. The driving question of the book is this: What do you do when you cannot do what you were called to do? This is what the author calls The Crisis of Psyche. The theoretical framework for this book combines curriculum theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Here, the author looks at issues of emotion and the working through of crisis points in the lives of both scholars and musicians. Psychoanalytic theory helps to flesh out and untangle what it means to suffer from a damaged musical psyche and a damaged scholarly psyche. How to work through psychic inertia as a scholar? How to work through through psychic inertia as a musician? From Pink Floyd to Laurie Anderson, from Marion Milner to William F. Pinar, this book draws on the work of a wide range of musicians and scholars to find a way out of psychic blocks. From Philip Glass to Pablo Casals, from Michael Eigen to Mary Aswell Doll, this book draws on the work of composers, cellists, psychoanalysts and educationists to find a way out of psychic meltdowns.

What if you could save a life, even in death? What if a part of you could live on and give a new lifea new heartbeatto another person in need? Organ donation is this ultimate gift of life, and for one man and his family, waiting for this miracle gift would be a lesson in life, faith, and hope. In Wait until Tuesday, author John M. Garrett shares his compelling story of waiting for a heart transplant while trying not to die. After a series of close calls, John is finally told he needs a heart transplant, but he is made aware of the fate of many awaiting transplantationthat there is a serious shortage of organs, and many die before their gift can arrive. But also a story of never giving up, Wait until Tuesday offers a window into the mind of a man fighting to stay present and strong for both himself and his family. His perseverance and his eventual gift of life would not only give him a second chance, but it would also give the world an advocate for the miracle of organ donation and transplantation. Even though a great majority of adults are in favor of organ donation and transplantation, only 2 percent of those who die become organ donors due to a fear, health factors, age, and other unknowns. Explore this personal chronicle of one mans gift of life and all the courage, faith, and support it takes to make the miracle of transplantation possible.

Eve Martins is a woman who knows the streets all too well and runs them with an iron fist. Love never exists in her world but when she meets Steve all that she stands and believes in feels irrelevant. This proves to be a great distraction because she has a new enemy in town who is threatening to set her empire up in flames. Giving up everything she has always believed in for love feels foolhardy but at the same time nothing makes sense to her any more. Will she choose love? Or riches?

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

Aaron Stiles is dead. He’s been dead for four years but doesn’t seem to know it. He’s waiting for his partner Bill to come home, and until that happens, he’s not going anywhere. The trouble is, Bill Somers won’t be coming home—ever—because he’s dead, too. The official verdict was suicide, but… The last thing Elliott Smith needs in his latest renovation project is a ghost, especially one who won’t let him sell the place until he solves the mystery of who killed Bill. Elliott has John to help with the spectral side of things, but that leaves Elliott with the quandary of how to get information on the case. After all, he can hardly explain he’s investigating on behalf of one dead man with the assistance of another.

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another. An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20th century, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture is an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.