The Ice-Cream Headache: And Other Stories

The Ice-Cream Headache: And Other Stories

James Jones

Literature & Fiction / Biographies & Memoirs

A collection of short stories by one of America’s great twentieth-century writers In his introduction to this collection of sharply crafted short stories, James Jones compares novel writing to a long-term, chronic illness. Writing short stories, he says, is like a brief, intense fever: the kind that can kill or disappear in a matter of days. Although best known for epic war novels such as From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, Jones also wrote short stories, and the ones in this volume burn with deadly intensity. Besides the expected stories of the soldier’s life, Jones gives us something surprising: five stories of childhood, tender and horrifying at the same time, inspired by his early life in the Depression-stricken Midwest. They and the other shorts in this volume are accompanied by author’s notes, which supplement Jones’s introduction, and a preface by his daughter, Kaylie Jones.  This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
Read online
  • 638
The Annunciation

The Annunciation

Ellen Gilchrist

Ellen Gilchrist

At the heart of Ellen Gilchrist's novel is the incorrigible Amanda McCamey. Leaving a troubled past behind, she marries into New Orleans' high society but finds the privileged world stifling and unsatisfying. Seeking a quieter, more meaningful life, she divorces and moves to the Ozarks where she translates poetry and surrounds herself with artists and intellectuals. Her friend Katie, a brilliant sculptor, brings out the wild child in Amanda, but it is Will, an intense young musician, who captivates her. What begins as a sexual tryst quickly becomes a grand and impossible passion that mirrors the life of the eighteenth-century French poet whose work Amanda is translating. But her new life is interrupted when her past comes back to haunt her. With beauty, humor, and luminescent prose, Gilchrist paints an evocative portrait of a woman finally coming into her own.Praise:"Gilchrist's accomplished first novel is absorbing, rich, and evocative as she explores the heart and mind...
Read online
  • 635
Big Secrets

Big Secrets

William Poundstone

William Poundstone

The Book That Gives the Inside Story on Hundreds of Secrets of American Life --Big Secrets.Are there really secret backward messages in rock music, or is somebody nuts? We tested suspect tunes at a recording studio to find out.What goes on at Freemason initiations? Here's the whole story, including -- yes! -- the electric carpet.Colonel Sanders boasted that Kentucky Fried Chicken's eleven secret herbs and spices "stand on everybody's shelf." We got a sample of the seasoning mix and sent it to a food chemist for analysis.Feverish rumor has it that Walt Disney's body was frozen and now lies in a secret cryonic vault somewhere beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit at Disneyland. Read the certified stranger-than-fiction truth.Don't bother trying to figure out how Doug Henning, David Copperfield, and Harry Blackstone, Jr., perform their illusions. Big Secrets has complete explanations and diagrams,...
Read online
  • 635
The Bones of Zora

The Bones of Zora

L. Sprague

L. Sprague

On the planet Krishna, Fergus Reith, his former wife, the lovely and sexy Dr. Alicia Dyckman, and famed paleontologist Dr. Aristide Marot search for the elusive Ozymandias and find themselves in the middle of a civil war
Read online
  • 631
Perfect Happiness

Perfect Happiness

Penelope Lively

Literature & Fiction

Perfect Happiness is the fifth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively Frances, happily married for many years, and suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steve has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonizingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth-century - death and grief. 'A triumph' Spectator
Read online
  • 629
Leila: Further in the Life and Destinies of Darcy Dancer Gentleman

Leila: Further in the Life and Destinies of Darcy Dancer Gentleman

J. P. Donleavy

Literature & Fiction

?A liltingly moving piece of writing from a wonderfully fruity romancerOCO - Financial Times Where Darcy departing Dublin descends on his darkly decrepit desmesne, skint as a boiled bone. There to ponder his leaking, bat-ridden birthright, devilishly diverted by sexy Miss von B and readily rolled up by Ronald Rashers. And Sees Leila. Lovely, lissome Leila ? who tells him no. A definite negative. So Darcy is back to Dublin and the noisome stews to dream of the one bright star in his eternal darkness ? As ThereOCOs foolOCOs gold at the end of every Irish rainbow, and tarnished silver linings in every cloud, so thereOCOs a shimmer on the far horizon for this particular broth of a boy. His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He is Darcy Dancer, youthful squire of Andromeda Park, the great gray stone mansion inhabited by Crooks, the cross eyed butler, and the sexy, aristocratic Miss Von B. This sequel to The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman finds our hero falling in with decidedly low company ? like the dissolute Dublin poet, Foxy Slattery, and Ronald Rashers, who absconds with the family silver ? before falling head over heels in love with the lissome Leila. "
Read online
  • 629
Modern Baptists

Modern Baptists

James Wilcox

James Wilcox

Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X.—ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over—moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown—it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the...
Read online
  • 626
Seductions

Seductions

Ray Garton

Ray Garton

In the debut horror novel from the author of Live Girls, a small town in Northern California finds itself at the whims of an old and hungry evil. Donald Ellis is in a bad place. On a forced leave of absence from work, his personal life has also collapsed. But he's certain that something else is going on—something dreadfully wrong with his town. People are disappearing, leaving inexplicable traces of what might have happened to them. And then there are the dreams—horrifying nightmares seeping slowly into even more troubling daytime visions. Then Freddie appears on his doorstep—a strangely powerful young woman who tells him that his intuition is right. A dark force has taken over his once-sleepy northern California home. Creatures are roaming the night, hungry for lust, thirsty for blood, and knowing exactly how to satisfy their cravings. To fight an evil that hides in plain sight, Donald and Freddie will have...
Read online
  • 619
Someday Angeline

Someday Angeline

Louis Sachar

Children's Books / Literature & Fiction

Nobody understands why Angeline is so smart. She could read the first time she picked up a book, she can play the piano without ever having had a lesson, and she even knows what the weather is going to be. But being smart is causing Angeline nothing but trouble. The mean kids in school call her a freak, her teacher finds her troublesome, and even her own father doesn't know what to do with an eight-year-old girl who seems to be a genius. Angeline doesn't want to be either a genius or a freak. She just wants the chance to be herself and be happy. But it's only when she makes friends with a boy the kids call "Goon" and the teacher they call "Mr. Bone" that Angeline gets that chance.
Read online
  • 614
How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household

How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household

Blu Greenberg

Blu Greenberg

Filled with practical advice as well as history, Blu Greenberg's book is a comprehensive guide to the joys and complexities of running a modern Jewish home.How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household is a modern, comprehensive guide covering virtually every aspect of Jewish home life. It provides practical advice on how to manage a Jewish home in the traditional way and offers fascinating accounts of the history behind the tradition. In a warm, personal style, Blu Greenberg shows that, contrary to popular belief, the home, and not the synagogue, is the most important institution in Jewish life. Divided into three large sections—"The Jewish Way," "Special Stages of Life," and "Celebration and Remembering"—this book educates the uninitiated and reminds the already observant Jew of how Judaism approaches daily life. Topics include prayer, dress, holidays, food preparation, marriage, birth, death, parenthood, and many others. This description of...
Read online
  • 607
Bronwyn's Bane

Bronwyn's Bane

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

As if it wasn't bad enough already that because of her frost giant heritage from her father the king's side of the family she was 6 feet tall when she was only 12 years old, poor Princess Bronwyn (the Bold) of Argonia was cursed at birth to tell nothing but lies. With her father away at war and her mother heavily pregnant, Bronwyn is even more in the way than usual, so she gets packed off.
Read online
  • 598
183