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Darren Johnson's Best Short Stories of 2019

Author : Darren Johnson

Publisher : Darren Johnson

Page : 312 pages

File Size : 48,33 MB

Release : 2019-11-29

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1393227902

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Book Description

Flying monuments. Quantum, time-traveling historians. Controllable back hair. Unidentified bussing objects. 14 separate tales plus one immense crossover bringing them together because why not: SPEEDING STEALTH BUS: Its attacks on pedestrians both terrorized and crippled the nation. Now it's back and just as stealthy — and violent — as ever. THE GREATEST LOVE STORY THAT ALMOST WAS: They had the perfect relationship until fate stepped in. You won't see *this* sappy story around the holidays. SINGLE ELIMINATION EARTH: Eight billion competitors forced to fight to the death against their will. One winner. THE LAST CHANCE: He's been unsuccessful for ages. It consumes his every thought. And now, as the last human on Earth, he has one more chance. SITUATIONAL: Even though their lives are the same, they don’t feel quite right. Something is either wrong with them — or everyone else. A QUICK, NEIGHBORLY PROBLEM: The ride's over and your language skills suck. Let the insults fly! 5 YEARS THE VILLAIN: Kidnapped by aliens, he’s been given five years to help humanity clean up their act. The catch? He’s marooned in an alien spacecraft stuck in orbit. One can’t save the human race without pissing a few billion of them off. THE LESSON: If you don't brainwash your kids, who will? Oh, Father O'Malley! Yay! THE UNWONTED 5: Five strangers with "useless" powers come together to form something more. Sorry, bad guys. THE REARRIVALS: The old gods are back and tearing things up, baby! You know, maybe someone *should* question them. INTERVIEW WITH A CANDIDATE: A HORROR STORY: Even the devil would be disgusted by this guy. Do they not care in Alabama, or what? STUR TRONK: Captain Alex Q.T. Pecks has been charged with maintaining the peace. I give it a week. LIMO RIDER: He's used to riding in limos. However, he's also used to being let out. TIME TRAVEL ROMANCE: As Written by a 12-year-old Purely for the Money: subtitle says it all. THE GREATEST CROSSOVER OF ALL TIME 2: All the bad guys from the stories above are teaming up to take over the world(s) and then some. All the good guys are trying to stop them. Note: knowledge of the first (2018's) Greatest Crossover is NOT required. Heck, it's not even recommended. You like crossovers? Well, this is crossover-er than any of them!



Darren Johnson's Best Short Stories of 2018

Author : Darren Johnson

Publisher : Darren Johnson

Page : 244 pages

File Size : 39,70 MB

Release : 2019-02-04

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1386697281

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Book Description

Including eight disparate tales ranging in length from short story to novella, plus one huge crossover tying them together: THE BABY HUNTER: When mutant superhuman babies cause the apocalypse, you need... The Baby Hunter. They hunt us. He hunts them. CHASING COWQUEST: After thirty years, it seems someone has finally broken Max's record on a mysterious arcade game called Cowquest. With his wife's permission, he's returning to his hometown to get it back. QUINCUNX: In the final game of the Scrabble Championships, one player makes a move no one saw coming. MALTZIE: A CAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: For anyone that’s ever had a special little fuzzface in their life. Adopted as a kitten, Maltzie immediately forged a bond with his humans that only grew stronger with time. THE 2ND AMENDMENTERS: They worship the only Amendment that matters (to them). Second Amendment! TYRONE JACKSON AND THE HALF-COURT DUNK: Harry Potter meets Boyz n the Hood in this explosive parody. Includes special bonus features. IT WAS A GIFT FROM GOD, THEY SAID: Everyone on Earth is suddenly "blessed" with the gift of flight. Why question it? THE BEST DAMN COP ON THE FORCE: You don't get to be the best without taking a few risks. THE GREATEST CROSSOVER OF ALL TIME: They’re some of the worst, most poorly written characters ever created by one man in 2018. Now their worlds are about to collide. They thought they had problems before… Featuring all your favorite (and least favorite) characters from the above compilation. A thriller.



Entropy in Bloom

Author : Jeremy Robert Johnson

Publisher : Start Publishing LLC

Page : 296 pages

File Size : 22,34 MB

Release : 2017-04-24

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1597806072

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Book Description

For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds.



The Feather Thief

Author : Kirk Wallace Johnson

Publisher : Penguin

Page : 338 pages

File Size : 35,9 MB

Release : 2018-04-24

Category : Nature

ISBN : 1101981628

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Book Description

As heard on NPR's This American Life “Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.



A Man Melting

Author : Craig Cliff

Publisher : Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited

Page : 239 pages

File Size : 44,77 MB

Release : 2010-07-02

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1869791932

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Book Description

A startlingly original collection of short stories that was winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. A son worries he is becoming too perfect a copy of his father. The co-owner of a weight-loss camp for teens finds himself running the black market in chocolate bars. A man starts melting and nothing can stop it, not even poetry. This terrific collection of stories by an exciting new talent moves from the serious and realistic to the humorous and outlandish, each story copying an element from the previous piece in a kind of evolutionary chain. Amid pigeons with a taste for cigarette ash, a rash of moa sightings, and the identity crisis of an imaginary friend, the characters in these eighteen entertaining stories look for ways to reconnect with people and the world around them, even if that means befriending a robber wielding an iguana.



Anointed with Oil

Author : Darren Dochuk

Publisher : Hachette UK

Page : 688 pages

File Size : 35,9 MB

Release : 2019-06-04

Category : History

ISBN : 1541673948

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Book Description

A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.



The Topeka School

Author : Ben Lerner

Publisher : McClelland & Stewart

Page : 272 pages

File Size : 23,91 MB

Release : 2019-10-01

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 0771049331

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Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century, hailed by Maggie Nelson as Ben Lerner's "most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely novel to date." Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart--who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient--into the social scene, to disastrous effect. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.



Tetrapod Zoology

Author : Darren Naish

Publisher :

Page : 316 pages

File Size : 20,50 MB

Release : 2010

Category : Science

ISBN : 9781905723614

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Book Description

B logging has revolutionised the way we communicate our interests and spread news. This book is a compilation of various articles from the blog, Tetrapod Zoology(currently hosted at www.scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology). As of early 2010, Tet Zoo - as it's affectionately known - is in its fifth year. It's become reasonably popular (it has a daily readership of several thousand) and is now well known internationally. Or, it is, at least, among people interested in zoology and in scientific blogging. Welcome to the world of Tet Zoo: mphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals(the tetrapods), living and fossil. Their evolution, ecology, behaviour and biology. Think killer eagles, dinosaurs, giant caimans, mystery cats and lake monsters



Arnesto Modesto: The World's Most Ineffectual Time Traveler

Author : Darren Johnson

Publisher : Darren Johnson

Page : 226 pages

File Size : 29,63 MB

Release : 2018-06-08

Category : Fiction

ISBN :

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Book Description

What if you could go back and do it all over again? By sending his memories back in time, Arnesto Modesto gives himself a do-over. Of course, his much younger self may not be prepared to handle all that foreknowledge... Encouraged by his friend Pete, Arnesto attempts to use his limited recall to do some good — and winds up stumbling through some of the biggest events of the past quarter-century. Take it from Arnesto: Life isn't easier the second time around. (Think Groundhog Day if the main character went much farther back and only got to repeat his life ONCE.) For anyone who has ever wondered, "What if?"



The Missing Lynx

Author : Ross Barnett

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 361 pages

File Size : 32,41 MB

Release : 2019-07-11

Category : Nature

ISBN : 1472957334

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Book Description

Britain's lynx are missing, and they have been for more than a thousand years. Why have they gone? And might they come back? Britain was a very different place 15,000 years ago – home to lions, lynx, bears, wolves, bison and many more megafauna. But as its climate changed and human populations expanded, most of early Britain's largest mammals disappeared. Will advances in science and technology mean that we can one day bring these mammals back? And should we? In The Missing Lynx, palaeontologist Ross Barnett uses case studies, new fossil discoveries and biomolecular evidence to paint a picture of these lost species and to explore the ecological significance of their disappearance. He discusses how the Britons these animals shared their lives with might have viewed them and investigates why some species survived while others vanished. Barnett also looks in detail at the realistic potential of reintroductions, rewilding and even of resurrection in Britain and overseas, from the successful return of beavers in Argyll to the revolutionary Pleistocene Park in Siberia, which has already seen progress in the revival of 'mammoth steppe' grassland. As widespread habitat destruction, climate change and an ever-growing human population lead us inexorably towards the sixth extinction, this timely book explores the spaces that extinction has left unfilled. And by helping us to understand why some of our most charismatic animals are gone, Ross Barnett encourages us to look to a brighter future, one that might see these missing beasts returned to the land on which they once lived and died.