The Pick Up Man

WEDDING DRESS FOR SALE Size 7, never worn. It's a masterpiece. He wasn't. Call Annie at 555-7255. After breaking her fourth engagement, Annie Jamison had a mountain of debts, a heal of white lace and a shoe box full of momentos. Why not sell the dress? She obviously wasn't destined to wear it anyway! But when the Bargain Shopper switched her phone number with an ad for a vintage truck, Annie had some choice words for the conceited oaf who called himself The Pick-Up Man. In the flesh, Mr. Pick-Up was gorgeous, sexy, with a body to die for. Unfortunately, he was also her first ex-fiancé—the only man she truly ever loved. Oh, and one small thing: He wanted to buy the dress—for another woman!

This underground classic of hard-boiled noir fiction follows two addiction-addled drifters as they struggle to make ends meet in the streets of 1950s California First published as an unheralded paperback original, Pick-Up is an authentic underground classic, an explosive bulletin from the urban underbelly of mid-1950s America. It was Charles Willeford’s second novel, after a rough and wandering earlier life that had taken him from Depression-era hobo camps and soup kitchens to wartime battlefields. The unblinking story of two lost and self-destructive drifters—a failed painter working as a counterman in a cheap diner and a woman in flight from domestic violence—trying to find a place for themselves in the back streets of San Francisco, Pick-Up is hardboiled writing at its nihilistic best: Willeford’s preferred title for the book was Until I Am Dead. Its bleak vision of life beyond the edge is haunted by rape, racism, alcoholism, suicide, and inescapable poverty, yet shot through with a tenderness and compassion sustained against all odds in a society offering few breaks to its outcasts and misfits. Pick-Up’s many twists and violent turns culminate in an ending that continues to surprise, confirming it as what critic Woody Haut has called “a razor-sharp narrative that rips open the genre.”

In the manual, let’s look at the main secrets of hunting for guys, which allows them to get almost any man into their networks. In fact, seduce and fall in love with a man a woman is much easier than a guy girl. The most important weapon is slenderness, grooming, style and professional skills. Read the guide and find out how easy it is to achieve any man / boyfriend, even if nature has not rewarded you with perfect external data.

There's an enormous subculture of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics for seducing women. Within the last half-decade or so, these underground "pickup artists" have burst into the popular consciousness, aided by Neil Strauss's bestselling book The Game and VH1's hit reality show The Pick-Up Artist. Some men in the seduction community are sleazy misogynists who want nothing more than power and control. Some are shy wallflowers who don't know how to say hi to a girl. The one thing they all have in common is a driving need to attract women. Clarisse Thorn, a feminist S&M writer and activist, spent years researching these guys. She observed their discussions, watched them in action, and learned their strategies. By the end of it all, she'd given a lecture at a seduction convention and decided against becoming the next great dating coach. In Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, Clarisse tells the story of her time among these Casanovas, as well as her own unorthodox experiences with sex and relationships. She examines the conflicts and harmonies of feminism, pickup artistry, and the S&M community. Most of all, she deconstructs and reconstructs our views on sex, love, and ethics - and develops her own grand theory of the game. Find Clarisse's blog at clarissethorn.com, or follow her on Twitter @ClarisseThorn.

To the fan, the rodeo cowboy is the distinctly American embodiment of the romantic Old West. But to the young men who live the profession, the realities are modest pay, continuous travel, and the constant threat of injury. While he was the Denver bureau chief of the New York Times, Dirk Johnson spent a year on the professional rodeo circuit with cowboys, watching them try to hang on to bucking horses and Brahma bulls?and to wives and livelihoods that seemed only one fall away from disappearing. Biting the Dust covers the circuit?s biggest events in Denver, the capital of the New West, to small towns on the Great Plains like McCook, Nebraska, where rodeo continues to thrive even as the population shrinks. Johnson takes the reader beyond sentimental visions of the rodeo cowboy and the American West and provides an unforgettable and authentic story of the rodeo today.

A very ordinary man wakes up in an African police cell. He has no idea how he got there, nor why he's there. He's tortured for information about which he has no idea, and then he's threatened with execution. When British Consular staff ignore his pleas for help because of a trade deal, he realizes that the only person who is going to help him, is himself. It's towards the end of the 1980s and all this is happening in the middle of a very unstable Zaire that is about to descend into civil war. He knows that to survive, he must escape. This he does, but only by killing some of his guards in the process. He on foot, in the middle of nowhere and everyone wants him dead; and now he must find out why he's Zaire's Public Enemy No1, if he wants to clear his name and return to a normal life.