"A story of growing up in turmoil, Rough House recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and a mother struggling with poverty in The Dalles. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women - a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen, and frequently raised alone. Tracing her childhood through the working class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood"--

A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past "[A] lucidly written memoir . . . Coffin’s triumph lies in ridding the language of his father, a language that compelled him to dwell in a house he did not recognize." —Matthew Janney, The Los Angeles Review of Books While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in. Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north. Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage,” invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of. Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.

"In this book, Sarah Watts probes this dark side of the Rough Rider, presenting a fascinating psychological portrait of a man whose personal obsession with masculinity profoundly influenced the fate of a nation. Drawing on his own writings and on media representations of him, Watts attributes the wide appeal of Roosevelt's style of manhood to the way it addressed the hopes and anxieties of men of his time. Like many of his contemporaries, Roosevelt struggled with what it meant to be a man in the modern era. He saw two foes within himself: a fragile weakling and a primitive beast. The weakling he punished and toughened with rigorous, manly pursuits such as hunting, horseback riding, and war. The beast he unleashed through brutal criticisms of homosexuals, immigrants, pacifists, and sissies - anyone who might tarnish the nation's veneer of strength and vigor. With his unabashed paeans to violence and aggressive politics, Roosevelt ultimately offered American men a chance to project their longings and fears onto the nation and its policies. In this way he harnessed the primitive energy of men's desires to propel the march of American civilization - over the bodies of anyone who might stand in its way."--BOOK JACKET.

Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there's the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one's head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement. Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Caf 's Poetry Slam. " Rutkowski's] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity."-- Publishers Weekly "Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with." -- Molly Peacock

Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, condensed by Readers Digest in English and Spanish, this story of survival and stubborn faith in the future is back in its entirety to delight a whole new generation of readers. “A triumph of courage illuminated by love” —Lee Pennock Huntingon. Best of all, it’s all true. It really happened.

Lucas Delgado Guerrero’s skin is too brown and his accent too foreign for him to feel truly at home in England. Returning to Mexico, which he scarcely remembers, however, is hardly a choice. So he remains in London, publishing an illegal newspaper devoted to reformist and revolutionary causes. One of his most popular writers is the intriguing and mysterious Polly Dicax, who delivers sharp, witty screeds by messenger every week. At twenty-five, Lady Honora Pearce is too busy writing seditious treatises to pay much attention to men. Especially when marrying would mean giving up the very rights she argues for in her fierce diatribes. She is, however, intrigued by the editorials written by one of her publishers. Here, at least, is a man with worthy ideas and ideals. Not that she ever expects to meet him, since both their identities must remain secret. But everything changes when circumstances force her to deliver her weekly column herself and, on the heels of her arrival at the printer’s shop, the police raid the premises. To protect the shopkeeper and themselves, Honora and Lucas must hide together in a small chamber. They shouldn’t have to kiss, but somehow, they do. And when Honora finds she can’t stay away, Lucas discovers he can’t refuse her, even if he can never be more than her bit of rough.

Families with boys often find the world reacts to them in mock horror. Even though parents love their sons, privately they admit that boys can be a handful to raise--they are boisterous, competitive, reckless, distractable. The challenge of wills between parent and son starts early, and the quest to civilize young bulls may seem hopeless some days. Yet believers know that God has given them children as a gift of heaven, specially chosen for their particular families and marked as a blessing. If that's so, why does it seem so hard? How can we prepare these boys to serve God when it's all we can do to make it through another day? Isn't there a better way? Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys shows the answer is emphatically yes. Written by the parents of six boys, Raising Real Men provides hope and encouragement to families with sons. Starting from the premise that God made boys to become men, Hal and Melanie Young offer Biblical principles and tested, practical ideas for training the manly virtues that can drive parents and teachers up the wall. This is a practical guide to equipping the hearts and minds of boys without breaking or losing your own. "...earthy, realistic, humorous, and scriptural ..." -- Douglas Wilson, author, Future Men "This is just what the doctor ordered for parents who want to raise capable Christian men of character." -- John Rosemond, author, Parenting By The Book

The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer—New York Post Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living 46 Great Books to Read This Summer—Nylon Dazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader" Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29 8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.com What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside “Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!* Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.

Rander Belmorn is far from home. He searches tirelessly for the one man who might be able to cure his dying son, but time is running out. The road has led to a frozen waste at the very edge of the world. But what this simple river man never learned on that long, lonely road was the answer to the last question. The only question. How do you kill a witch?

Everywhere you look, physical play—what some might call “roughhousing”—is being marginalized. Gym classes are getting shorter. Recess periods are being eliminated. Some new schools don’t even have playgrounds. Is it any wonder children retreat to “virtual horseplay” via video games? But Drs. Anthony T. DeBenedet and Lawrence J. Cohen are here to shake things up—literally! With The Art of Roughhousing, they show how rough-and-tumble play can nurture close connections, solve behavior problems, boost confidence, and more. Drawing inspiration from gymnastics, martial arts, ballet, traditional sports, and even animal behavior, the authors present dozens of illustrated activities for children and parents to enjoy together—everything from the “Sumo Dead Lift” to the “Rogue Dumbo.” These delightful games are fun, free, and contain many surprising health benefits for parents. So put down those electronic games and get ready to rumble!