Catfish Joe is a poor, black, street preacher who has opinions about everything from women's hair to Machiavelli. He is always helping people if with unorthodox methods and he audits courses at University of Pennsylvania. He is a chunk of life and southern wisdom, a florid, engaging and tough character. Double, Double, Toil & Trouble is about three fat, rambunctious married socialites who are wild as March Hares. They pick up gigolos, have affairs and drink to every occasion. Myrtle and Gladys are the nicer ones: Lavinia is like a tigress. They even visit a Baptist church to get in touch with their spiritual side. They are described as being more bitchy than Macbeth's three witches.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"The world is a surreal pageant," writes Stephen Kuusisto. "Ahead of me the shapes and colors suggest the sails of Tristan's ship or an elephant's ear floating in air, though in reality it is a middle-aged man in a London Fog rain coat which billows behind him in the April wind." So begins Kuusisto's memoir, Planet of the Blind, a journey through the kaleidoscope geography of the partially-sighted, where everyday encounters become revelations, struggles, or simple triumphs. Not fully blind, not fully sighted, the author lives in what he describes as "the customs-house of the blind", a midway point between vision and blindness that makes possible his unique perception of the world. In this singular memoir, Kuusisto charts the years of a childhood spent behind bottle-lens glasses trying to pass as a normal boy, the depression that brought him from obesity to anorexia, the struggle through high school, college, first love, and sex. Ridiculed by his classmates, his parents in denial, here is the story of a man caught in a perilous world with no one to trust--until a devastating accident forces him to accept his own disability and place his confidence in the one relationship that can reconnect him to the world--the relationship with his guide dog, a golden Labrador retriever named Corky. With Corky at his side, Kuusisto is again awakened to his abilities, his voice as a writer and his own particular place in the world around him. Written with all the emotional precision of poetry, Kuusisto's evocative memoir explores the painful irony of a visually sensitive individual--in love with reading, painting, and the everyday images of the natural world--faced with his gradual descent into blindness. Folded into his own experience is the rich folklore the phenomenon of blindness has inspired throughout history and legend.

"Who is John Macnab? Three prominent Scottish landowners receive a challenging note which tells them that he intends to poach from their estates without being caught, though if he is caught, he will donate money to a good cause. The reactions of the landowners provide conflicting evidence as to his identity, prompting speculation as to whether he is a gentleman or a tramp ...

Little River is a coming of age story about a young boy called Bean and his little brother Jack. It takes place in the sixties in a small rural community, set among the gleaming white cotton fields of northeast Arkansas. The story begins with the two young lads’ obvious isolation from the world outside, as they learn to create their own adventures in the only place they really know, their farm. The boys’ desire to have a close relationship with their dad is hindered by his demanding job of overseeing the sharecroppers. The patient Mom is a comforting force, taking care of the family, while being trapped in her own isolated world. When family tensions mount as the surrounding farms begin to fail, the father takes a downward spiral path of turning to alcohol. Losing his job and with the family to the breaking point, they move close by to Little River with hope of a new start in town. There, Bean discovers a whole new world with new friends. Forming an adventurous band of misfits, they build a magnificent treehouse, while the family's struggles worsen. As a bright future begins to fade, the dusty trail of failure slowly catches up. Doubts, rumors and unbearable tragedy ensues, but the strong bonds of family, love and friendship give them the means to survive. They become a shining example of overcoming life’s most arduous hardships.

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey--a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam--made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. "What I looked for here," James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, "was a flicker of light 'from another direction,' and when I caught it – or thought I did – I followed where it went, for better or worse." In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his previous books and gives instead more primacy to the language in which he writes. His poetry gains flexibility, and his poetic power becomes even surer and more clearly expressed. "I have experimented," Dickey writes, "and look forward to experimenting more."

Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz focuses on policies that truly work and offers fresh, new thinking about the questions that shape the globalization debate.

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