A dark journey into a serial killer's twisted mind. Out of nowhere, a retired 60-year old handyman goes on a murder-spree, abducting healthy young people and torturing them with hand-tools. After he's caught, a media fascination in The Handyman swells. People want to know why he snapped. They want to hear ALL the grisly details.But he'll only tell his gruesome story to one person-- His estranged son.From the author of Intercepts and The Venue comes this must-read for anyone who is fascinated by serial killers. Not for the faint-of-heart.

A memoir in which "writer Chris Offutt struggles to understand his recently deceased father based on his reading of the 400-plus novels [Andrew Offutt]--a well-known writer of pornography in the 1970s and 80s--left him in his will"--Publisher marketing.

A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

For the boy narrator of this tale, to be a man one must kill one's father. He plays out the fantasy as he watches a war movie with him on TV. "My father was a German pontoon bridge ... he had to be taken out."

Young Elmer voyages to Wild Island to rescue a captive dragon by outwitting hungry tigers, cranky crocodiles, and other fierce animals. This charmingly illustrated Newbery Honor Book has delighted generations of readers.

Reeling from the loss of her mother, plagued with a bad case of writer's block (and don't even talk about those extra twenty pounds), Renata DeChavannes feels as though everything is just plain wrong. And that was before the tabloids caught her sweetheart, filmmaker Ferg Lauderdale, sharing an intimate squeeze with Hollywood's hottest young tamale. But the granddaughter of the formidable Honora DeChavannes possesses more hell than belle in her backbone—and she's about to reclaim it. Heading south to Honora's home on the Gulf Coast, Renata is determined to stop feeling like a wilted gardenia and emerge as the unstoppable kudzu her beloved grandmother proudly proclaimed she would be. But for that to happen Renata's got to face some not-so-genteel ghosts from her past, discover the truth about the mother she desperately misses, and make peace with the first man who abandoned her and broke her heart: her handsome and distant father.

This beloved modern classic documents the lives and hardships of an African American family living in Depression-era Harlem. While 12-year-old Francie Coffin's world and family threaten to fall apart, this remarkable young heroine must call upon her own wit and endurance to survive amidst the treacheries of racism and sexism, poverty and violence.

“Between fish, my father and I, two men who are as comfortable with each other’s voice as we are with each other’s silences, talk about the purpose of things, and how everything fits into the overall design.” This book is like no memoir you’ve ever read. Paul Rath writes with the soul of a poet, his prose alive with vibrant images and metaphors that capture the raw beauty and challenges of fishing for white fish in the frigid November air – “when the wind takes us into her cold mouth, and crunches us between her teeth. Her cold makes our eyes freeze – until they feel like stones, frozen in their sockets of mud ...” Yet this no mere fish story. As much as this book is about fishing, it is even more about relationships. Fishing with My Fathers explores the deep bonds that form between men of the earth, between men and the land and the water and the creatures that feed their spirits. Rath, the eldest son of a Lutheran pastor, pays homage to his father and tribute to the men who shaped and challenged him, even as he claimed his own space and place in their lineage. With wonderful humour and genuine sensitivity, he regales the reader with tales of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, as well as of his mentors – of the men who taught him how to grow up, how to control his emotions, how to work, how to grow his spirit, how to love, as well as how to fish.

Who was your father? Was he your best friend, a stranger, or not in your life at all? In this book, you will read heartfelt letters from sons and daughters to their Fathers, whether deceased or still living. The thread that runs through this book is beautiful honesty. Vivid glances into people's lives appear in this book. All with a message: How we have been shaped has been largely the doing of Life; who we are and how we have responded is our decision. I invite you to journey with our many contributing writers from around the world.

A moving portrait of a father and daughter relationship and a case for late-stage creativity from Emily Urquhart, the bestselling author of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. “The fundamental misunderstanding of our time is that we belong to one age group or another. We all grow old. There is no us and them. There was only ever an us.” — from The Age of Creativity It has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong? After all, many well-known visual artists completed their best work in the last decade of their lives, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne among them. With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we’ve done anything for the last time? The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood.