Almost Never

"Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring." —Roberto Bolaño This Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America's most admired writers to the English-speaking world. Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya. A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio's debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother's delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love—a most proper kind of love. Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own—boredom is not among them—and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.

Five years have passed since Cora Daniels left home. She’s back and supposed to be starting over. She left seeking freedom, the chance to find herself. The person she found wasn't who she expected. One poisonous relationship, two tragic events, and what seems like a lifetime of guilt leave her jaded and unsure of how to start a new life. She’s alone. Left behind to deal with the consequences of her actions. Until she meets Brady Maxwell. He’s warm, caring, and incredibly attractive. When a friendship blooms, Cora fears what will happen when the spark between them undoubtedly catches fire.

Alec Murray. He was the one. From the first moment I saw him, I knew. I had never been more certain of anything in my sixteen years on this earth. But Alec didn't notice me. At least not in the way that I wanted him to. He noticed my best friend instead. I stood by and watched their relationship blossom. An outsider looking in, wishing things were different. Torn between my loyalty to my best friend and the boy who had unknowingly stolen my heart. Weighted by feelings I could never express out loud, I wrote them all down. Every thought. Every feeling. I poured them all into a letter. A letter he was never meant to read. Only that's exactly what he did. He read it. Every single word. But by then it was too late. Even if he was no longer dating my best friend. Even if I was more in love with him than ever. He was leaving. I was leaving. And there was nothing either of us could do to change it. Alec Murray was my almost fairytale. The happy ending I swore I'd never get. But our story is far from over...

A horrendous, howling, and devastating blizzard strikes Santaville in the blackness of early morning, so severe that it blows away the doors to the stable, where Santa shelters his reindeer. Exposed to the raging storm, the reindeer come down with the flu and cannot fly. Santa, years before, came upon a group of young Polar bears who could leap high in the air. He finds them. With the help and encouragement of the villagers of Santaville, and the reindeer, the Polar bears fly, saving Christmas, and Santa keeps his promise to all good children everywhere on Christmas Eve, bringing them the gifts of their dreams.

The Internet isn't all cat videos. There's also Felicia Day -- violinist, filmmaker, Internet entrepreneur, compulsive gamer, hoagie specialist, and former lonely homeschooled girl who overcame her isolated childhood to become the ruler of a new world ... or at least semi-influential in the world of Internet Geeks and Goodreads book clubs. After growing up in the south where she was "homeschooled for hippie reasons", Felicia moved to Hollywood to pursue her dream of becoming an actress and was immediately typecast as a crazy cat-lady secretary. But Felicia's misadventures in Hollywood led her to produce her own web series, own her own production company, and become an Internet star. Felicia's short-ish life and her rags-to-riches rise to Internet fame launched her career as one of the most influential creators in new media. Now Felicia's strange world is filled with thoughts on creativity, video games, and a dash of mild feminist activism -- just like her memoir. Felicia's story demonstrates that everyone should embrace what makes them different and be brave enough to share it with the world, because anything is possible now -- even for a digital misfit.

"Outsider is the life of a child, boy, adolescent, student and young man in London between the Great Depression of the 30s and the sudden prosperity and social changes of the 60s, affected by the moral attitudes of the day, by the Blitz, post-war austerity and the new freedoms of the later 50s that were resisted with such obstinacy by the old regime. It is about education in the almost forgotten sense of the pursuit of learning for its own sake. It is about the imposed experiences of school and National Service and the chosen experience of being a student at the Courtauld Institute under Johannes Wilde and Anthony Blunt. It is about sex, pre-pubertal, in adolescence and in early adulthood, and the price to be paid for it. It is about art and the art market in the turbulent years of its change from the pursuit of well-connected gentleman to the professional occupation of experts."--Publisher description.

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense—a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really? Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever. But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.

The Strathmore Hotel ballroom once hosted presidents, but is now home to the feral boys of Warren Falls who skate the hills of the old New England mill town at night following Boy, a charismatic young leader without a past, animated by the shadows of the brutality of the town’s colonial history.

Tired eyes taking me to the promised land anew?....Sitting inside of eternal flux/Pushing my muse towards madness?....Challenging the NWO?....Always....The "madness" of Danny Wilson subsiding with one more shot of Jack Daniels?...Sigmund Freud "faking the funk!...Memories of Mrs Maye allowing me to "feel" Minnesota.

Gathers the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist's short prose into one volume that affords the reader a view of Beckett's development as an artist.