Poetry. In WASTOID'S dystopian landscape of desire, lovers love trampolines, lamp-makers, the sound of cars driving in the rain, anonymous tips that send innocent men to the electric chair, toil, silence, etc. Tender & nonsensical, foolish & profound, Svalina explores love's endless variety & illogical boundaries. Merging renaissance sonnet traditions with the serial explorations of Cortazar & Calvino, WASTOID speaks of love & pain & ecstatic failure, searching for some new way to never be able to learn anything new.

Based on a rich range of sources, this pioneering book provides a comprehensive description of informal borrowings in American English.

When a scandalous small-town crime goes viral, a teen girl takes center stage in Rosecrans Baldwin's story of a 21st century Puritan witch-hunt The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the internet, his 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis—a sheltered teen who’s been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cellphone—is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not. Emily and Nick are not the only ones whose lives come unmoored. A retired police officer latches onto the case. Nick’s alcoholic mother is thrust into an unfamiliar role. A young journalist who left her hometown behind is pulled into the fray. And Emily’s father, the town Sheriff, is finally forced to confront a monstrous secret. The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly-portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it’s the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that’s more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it’s the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them.

Vice Principal Steve Lukather is desperate. Just like last year, an internet bully is terrorizing one of his students at Lakeland Middle School. Last time it ended badly when the victim was found with two slashed wrists after an attempted suicide. This year, after a series of nasty computer messages and an indiscreet photograph of Carly Gillette spread through the student body Lukather knows it's happening again. This time he's determined to stop the bully in his tracks before Gillette ends up reaching for a razor blade. Thirteen-year-old Scott Halifax has a juvy rap sheet that could peel wallpaper but he's just what Lukather needs -- a street-smart, tech-savvy kid with no roots. Lukather makes a deal with Halifax: go undercover as a student at Lakeland and nail the bully in return for a ticket out of the County Detention Center and a clean slate. Once he's in at Lakeland Halifax teams up with Tom Seidel, the nerdy kid that everyone loves to hate. It isn't long before Scott, Tom and Carly’s best friend Lisa are working together. It takes a lot of hard work, some sly computer sleuthing and a little dumb luck before they expose the bully. And it’s the last person that anybody would have suspected. eBully draws on recent headlines about cyber-bullying, including the need to update harassment and stalking laws to reflect new technologies. "I wish I could give this book more than five stars. This book was a page turner from page 1. I think it should be required reading for middle and high school aged children both. Things are so different now for our children than they were for us. I've allowed both my 17 and 13 year old children to read this story. It's opened up some great dialogue between us. Highly recommend, especially to parents of teenage children." -- Amazon review "The author does a wonderful job handling such a difficult subject. He handles it in such a way that I would encourage those with teenagers to talk to your kids about the book and let them read it. There's nothing too graphic in here and it's a great young adult (middle school level) book. The only way to combat situations like this is to talk about them and talk loudly. Kids need to know that it's okay to 'tell' their parents and it's NOT okay to let a bully get away with it." -- Smashwords review.

Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time.

David Foster Wallace's last finished work--"the most unusual conversion experience in confessional narrative" (Judith Shulevitz, Slate) When David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a vast unfinished novel--some 1,100 pages of loose chapters, sketches, notes, and fragments--published in 2011 as The Pale King. But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described "wastoid," adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law. It is, as Sarah McNally writes in her preface, "not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace's late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works."

Conor grabbed the heavy boxing bag between his hands, squeezing it to keep it from moving. He set his feet and rammed his head into the bag so hard that you could hear it right across the weight room. He leaned back and rammed his head back into the bag, even harder than the first time. Then he did a rapid-fire series in quick succession, his head smashing into the bag with awesome power. His face went even redder, and he stopped and let go of the bag, his arms hanging by his side. He lifted his head and gasped for air. The Irish Kiss. He gasped again. If hes shorter than you, you aim for here. He reached over with his finger and poked the top of Looeys head. Same height as you, you go for the nose. The same finger gave Looey a sharp rap on the bridge of his nose. Conor knew he was going to need this move and everything else he knew to win this battle. The fact that hed become the leader of the Hands Gang pretty much by accident, to impress Stacey, the wild child, the beautiful rich girl, didnt matter now. What mattered was the Boulton Blood Crew was coming after him with everything they had. They didnt know that the Hands Gang only had three guys. They didnt need to know. All they needed to know was that they were in for the fight of their lives!

This daring and dazzling debut shines a light on the unsung heroes of our communities: the carers. Jay is devoted to the care of her teenage twins who view the world as differently as it views them. Frank is sweet, sensitive and bullied, while whip-smart Teddy needs an iPad to speak. With an absent husband and battling a nightmare bureaucracy, Jay leans heavily on Keep, her lifelong half-real friend. But in the corner of her eye lurks her mother, and a childhood Jay knows she can't ever outrun. Jay believes she is managing quite well, with a half-grip on this half-life of hers. That is, until Teddy starts to get sick, refusing to eat, while doctors refuse to listen, confounding everything Jay thought she knew about what lies ahead. The Keepers is an incredible and fiercely honest novel about the damage done by parents who can't love, the failures of a community that only claims to care, and the resilience of those whose stories mostly go untold.

When an announcement is made for a special scholarship, four best friends begin a special club that is designed to demonstrate the "purity" required by the scholarship committee.

A New York Times bestselling, riotously funny collection of boozy misadventures from the creator of the YouTube series, “You Deserve a Drink.” Mamrie Hart is a drinking star with a Youtube problem. With over a million subscribers to her cult-hit video series “You Deserve a Drink,” Hart has been entertaining viewers with a combination of tasty libations and raunchy puns since 2011. Hart also co-wrote/co-starred in Dirty Thirty and Camp Takota with Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart. Finally, Hart has compiled her best drinking stories—and worst hangovers—into one hilarious volume. From the spring break where she and her girlfriends avoided tan lines by staying at an all-male gay nudist resort, to the bachelorette party where she accidentally hired a sixty-year-old meth head to teach the group pole dancing (not to mention the time she lit herself on fire during a Flaming Lips concert), Hart accompanies each story with an original cocktail recipe, ensuring that You Deserve a Drink is as educational as it is entertaining. With cameos from familiar friends from the YouTube scene and a foreword by Grace Helbig, this glimpse into Hart’s life brings warmth and humor to the woman fans know and love. And for readers who haven’t met Mamrie yet—take a warm-up shot and break out the cocktail shaker: you’re going to need a drink. “Hart is a pull-no-punches comedian with a talent for self-deprecation in the guise of self-aggrandizement, a winning formula.”—The New York Times