Simon Paul Woodward

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

12 Devilishly Dark Horror Short Stories

None of us are what we seem to be on the outside. We are all pretending. We are all wearing skin. The Angel of Loughborough Junctions: An amoral filmmaker experiences the horror of the world through an angel's eyes. Children of Ink: A living tattoo breaks one of the Five Laws of Ink and suffers the terror of life away from flesh. Wearing Skin: Bigotry conquers true love in a blood-splattered tale of body swapping, sex and immortality.American Sexual Lobster: A seafood chef loses his mind and body on a night of shellfish slaughter. Manny & the Monkeys: An egotistical writer's life is ripped apart by escalating, and increasingly bizarre, coincidences. These 12 unsettling short stories include the British Fantasy Society award-winning Manny & The Monkeys. If you're a fan of Stephen King, Joe Hill or JT Lawrence you'll love these dark stories with a twist. Get ready to stay up all night with award-winning horror author Simon Paul Woodward.Click to buy now."The ideas, the language, the grasp of how people really talk, and think, and how close the dark is to all of us... this is an exceptional collection."Michael Marshall Smith New York TimesBestselling author

Wearing Skin

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An anthology of short stories by some of America’s most beloved horror authors.

(Stories)

Prime Evil

Dennis Cooper

From the author of “The Sluts”, the contents of “Wrong”will appeal to those who love splatterpunk with a Queer twist. This book was bought at an estate sale and is in good condition aside from some years on the back cover. Contains no highlights, writing, or creases. Whoever owned this book last left an everyday “bookmark” of emails inside, it will be left as a souvenir for the buyer, please do not email them.

Stories

For the last decade, Dennis Cooper has intrigued, shocked, and energized American writing. Whether described as the leading writer of the Blank Generation or the New Narrative or likened to Poe, Sade, and Genet, Cooper has consistently explored the boundaries of writing and the effect of literature on our imaginations and in our society. His stories have the shocking immediacy of newspaper headlines: grimy, splintered images illuminated by the city's neon bloom. By daring to use death to look at life, Cooper gives us a new perspective on our deepest fears and needs. This first collection of his work provides an overview of his evolution and, as William T. Vollmann wrote in the New York Times Book Review, a portrait of "our soulless and decaying society."

Wrong

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This is a former library book rescued from a local library sale. It’s in good condition and is a library-bound paperback.

And Other Stories

In Strange Gardens

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Quan Barry

Book is in good condition! Has some highlighting in pen inside.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

From the acclaimed author of We Ride Upon Sticks comes a luminous novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama--a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape--the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland as each possesses the ability to hear the other's thoughts. Proving once again that she is a writer of immense range and imagination, Quan Barry carries us across a terrain as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the western Altai mountains to the eerie starkness of the Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khaan. As their country stretches before them, questions of faith--along with more earthly matters of love and brotherhood--haunt the twins. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting what simply is.

When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East

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Ryan Lee Wong

Book is in like new condition! This novel is set in LA amid modern-day racial tensions between East Asian American and Black communities. The cover has a slight crease.

How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful-and funny-debut novel of generational change, a mother's secret, and an activist's coming-of-age

Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks?

In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother-once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition-demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son. As Reed zips around his hometown of Los Angeles with his mother, searching and questioning, he faces a revelation that will change everything.

Inspired by his family's roots in activism, Ryan Lee Wong offers an extraordinary debut novel for readers of Anthony Veasna So, Rachel Kushner, and Michelle Zauner- a book that is as humorous as it is profound, a celebration of seeking a life that is both virtuous and fun, an ode to mothering and being mothered.

Which Side Are You On

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J. D. Robb

Mary Blayney

Patricia Gaffney

Ruth Ryan Langan

Mary Kay McComas

Horror anthology. The book is used and is a little old.

A collection of five stories of romantic suspense includes J. D. Robb's "Chaos in Death," in which Eve Dallas and Roarke investigate a series of strange murders that are linked to a brilliant surgeon.

The Unquiet

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Mary Hartnett

Wendy W. Williams

The New York Times bestselling book from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—“a comprehensive look inside her brilliantly analytical, entertainingly wry mind, revealing the fascinating life of one of our generation's most influential voices in both law and public opinion” (Harper’s Bazaar). My Own Words “showcases Ruth Ginsburg’s astonishing intellectual range” (The New Republic). In this collection Justice Ginsburg discusses gender equality, the workings of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and the value of looking beyond US shores when interpreting the US Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book’s sampling is selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, who introduce each chapter and provide biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted. Witty, engaging, serious, and playful, My Own Words is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America’s most influential women and “a tonic to the current national discourse” (The Washington Post).

My Own Words

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Courtney Peppernell

A book of insta-poetry. Reads as much what you think it reads like. If you’re a poet, the frown that will etch itself into your forehead will stay for a couple of months after reading.

Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions. It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

Pillow Thoughts

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Ryan N. S. Topping

A slim textbook on rhetoric. Not the textbook on rhetoric that I would recommend.

English

A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians and Preachers: How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively

The Elements of Rhetoric offers a concise, comprehensive course in the rules for making your point stick. With copious examples from such masters of language as Cicero, Augustine, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Lincoln, Dickens, Newman, Chesterton, and Lewis, you will discover the 26 rules of persuasion and learn to apply them. Among the Elements you'll find: --The three modes of persuasion --How to structure an academic essay --How to spot and avoid logical fallacies --How to compose with literary figures --Practical tips for improving speed in composition --A Study Guide with exercises This is the essential guide to persuasive writing and speaking, in the tradition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. "Ryan Topping has produced a guide accessible and useful to those of all ages and experience levels, in the classroom, the political setting, and the pulpit."--Joseph R. Wood, Institute of World Politics "This is a splendid introduction to what you need to know to communicate wisely and well."--Quentin Schultze, Calvin College, author of An Essential Guide to Public Speaking "The Elements of Rhetoric is that rarest of rhetorical treats: a playfully serious and seriously playful summa of the art of communication--classical education at its very best "--Raymond F. Hain, Providence College "Leading by example, Topping delivers a handy guide for all of us who rely on the art of persuasion. The Elements of Rhetoric is a gem."--Daniel B. Coupland, Hillsdale College, co-author of Well-Ordered Language: The Curious Child's Guide to Grammar "This is the book I have sought for 35 years. For those like me, for whom public speaking and writing is their stock-in-trade, this book is a must-have daily companion."--Michael C. Gilleran, Business & IP Trial Lawyer & Partner, Burns & Levinson, LLP, Boston, MA "This versatile guide can supplement course material from any discipline in order to help students polish presentations and essays."--ANN MARIE KLEIN, Department of Catholic Studies, University of St. Thomas, MN Ryan N.S. Topping earned a doctorate in Theology from The University of Oxford and is a Fellow of Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts. He has published several books on education and Christian culture.

The Elements of Rhetoric

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Emily Ogden

How to Love and Other Essays

"Emily Ogden's On Not Knowing is at once a memoir and suite of pointed inquiries. Her brief, sharply observed essays invite the reader to think with her about problems she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Ogden moves nimbly across registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Unapologetically personal in its range of reference and idiosyncratic in its canon, On Not Knowing takes for its subject neither a life nor a library, but a cherished world. Ultimately, Ogden wants to teach herself to resist the temptation of knowingness: to encounter passionate love, well remembered art, and the new lives of her children without forearming herself with a sense that these things are already understood. Committed, as a scholar, to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness is, for her, a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. These essays want to learn with us to resist the temptation to cling to the wall at the edge of the pool, and instead to swim"--

On Not Knowing

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Kathleen Grissom

The Kitchen House

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Isabel Cañas

Bought new, but the book itself has been broken in. There is some writing in pencil on the inside pages. Spine is creased. Front and back cover is creased in certain places. 

Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches... During the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father was executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security that his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost. But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined. When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark the doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano? Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will save her. Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness. Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.

The Hacienda

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Christopher Buckley

"Fifty years ago, the three funniest writers in the English language were named Shaw, Mencken and Muggeridge. Today, they're named Thompson, O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley.Read this book and you'll die laughing. But as Wrong-Way Kennedy said, 'What a way to go.'"
-- Tom Wolfe

"Funny and devastating."
-- Entertainment Weekly

"Clever, erudite, sophisticated, funny and flip. Buckley shows that his antennae are ever alert to the absurdities in our world."
-- Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Buckley's comic muse -- and as Wry Martinis attests, he is one of the rarest specimens in his generation of that endangered species, the authentically inventive comic writer -- adorns the Benchley-Thurber line of social observation. He is probably the most versatile practitioner of that tradition today.... Wry Martinis has an astonishing range, all the way from the history of the miniskirt to the language of the New American Bible."
-- Boston Globe

Wry Martinis

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Bianca Marais

The Secret Life of Bees set in Johannesburg, now in paperback. A perceptive and searing debut about Apartheid South Africa, as told through the story of one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation, but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Their meeting should never have occurred...until The Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built, leaving Robin's parents dead and Beauty's daughter missing. In the aftermath, Beauty is hired to care for Robin, and the two forge an inextricable bond through their deep personal losses. But Robin knows that if Beauty reunites with her daughter, Robin could lose her new caretaker forever, so she makes a desperate decision with devastating consequences. Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the two narratives interweave to create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid South Africa. Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

Hum If You Don't Know the Words

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Jenny Xie

Poems

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette. Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. —from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season” Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here—colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes—bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception—both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”

Eye Level

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, compared by critics to the works of Graham Greene, Denis Johnson, and George Orwell,The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity, politics, and America, wrought in electric prose. The narrator, a Vietnamese army captain, is a man of divided loyalties, a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America after the end of the Vietnam War. A powerful story of love and friendship, and a gripping espionage novel,The Sympathizer examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

The Sympathizer

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Jon Krakauer

Krakauer's page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

"Terrifying... Eloquent... A heart-rending drama of human yearning." --New York Times

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. 

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

Into the Wild

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Julie Myerson

"Bloody brilliant."--Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson's beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies--past and present--haunting a picturesque country cottage.

Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn't been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It's idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them.



One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead--surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There's something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil.



Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there's something in the house. Children's whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard.



Has Mary's grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her...'

The Stopped Heart

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Bruce E. Hall

A Family Memoir of Chinatown

A compelling saga of one man's journey through his heritage, his quest to know and exorcise the ghosts of his ancestors, and the ways they brought to a magical corner of new York known as Chinatown. 16-page photo insert.

Tea That Burns

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J. R. R. Tolkien

Or There and Back Again

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.

The Hobbit

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Randy Boyagoda

Recovered from a library sale. As a former library book, it has all the requisite markings. Aside from this it’s in excellent shape!

A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He's going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature. But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over--including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school--Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too. The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It's a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda's place as "one of the best satirical writers today." (Micah Mattix, The American Conservative)

Original Prin

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Brian Broome

A memoir about the author’s navigation of the intersections of his identity.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Memoir

Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --

Punch Me up to the Gods

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Thomas Lynch

Alan Ball

A series of essays on death and the business of death by a small town funeral director. Front and back cover has some odd markings.

New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be

A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of The Undertaking. For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision. The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections—essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies—as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities—as an Irish American, undertaker-poet—is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog. In “Gladstone,” from The Undertaking, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. With brutal, generous honesty, “The Way We Are,” from Bodies in Motion and at Rest, grapples with Lynch’s time as a single parent coming to terms with generations of his family inheritance of alcoholism and recovery. The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means. As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.

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