Other books that might interest you

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  Fishing from the Rock of the Bay...

  James Batty

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  I hardly remember life without a rod in my hand, writes James Batty in the opening sentence of his autobiography in fishing. When his American wife moved with him to Cornwall, she saw his family photo album and commented that there was hardly a single picture of him in which he wasn't fishing.
  
  This witty, wacky account is James' tale of his obsession with his hobby of fishing, wherever his work took him around the world, seeking out lemon sharks in the Gambia, Striped Bass in New York and salmon in British Columbia. James' genre of writing is a mixture of John Gierach and Bill Bryson: his style is wry, witty and incisive.
  The end result is an entertaining insight into the mind of a dedicated angler, full of fishing anecdotes, tips and thought-provoking ideas.
  Extracts from the book
  
  - The great thing about anglers – especially when we meet fellow anglers – is that we don't try to hide our nuttiness. Pointless, I'm holding a rod, so are you, game over. We both know we're talking to a person who's a few bananas short of a bunch.
  
  - When you reckon you're going to catch something, you make more effort. If you think the session's a lost cause, 'one last cast' translates into, well, one last cast. Unthinkable. If you feel you're in with a chance it reverts to its normal meaning: half a dozen chucks with the diving plug, then a few with the slider just in case, and ten minutes on the sandeel shad because you really never know.
  
  - Guiding is not a job I'd do again, not as long as there's alternative employment cleaning out the grease traps at fast food restaurants or hand sorting the output of sewage farms.
  
  - They'll take jelly-fry under an inch long when the water's full of plump sandeels, and I don't know why. But it's the mysteries that keep us fishing.
  - The fish can't see my modest reel or my battered rod until it's too late to say, 'I have my pride, I refuse to be landed on that old shite'.
  
  - My financial situation was as tight as a toreador's Y-fronts.
  
  - Wave and weather are a mystery, like who's going to win next year's Grand National, where the stock market's going, or why people watch television shows about forgotten minor celebrities eating baboons' foreskins. Long range forecasts are as reliable as horoscopes, just less entertaining. Maybe the Met Office should juice them up, 'The month will be marked by deep Atlantic lows, even deeper discounts at your local supermarket. Don't be too proud to pick up some sausages.' Or they could tell the truth: 'Expect a combination of sunshine, rain, freezing fog, calm days, violent storms, blizzards, and perhaps a plague of frogs. Dress warmly but don't forget to pack a swimsuit.'

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  Possessed - The Infamous Texas...

  Kathryn Casey

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  The officer responding to a 911 call at one of Houston's hippest high-rises expected the worst. After all, domestic violence situations can be unpredictable. But nothing could've prepared him for what he found: a beautiful woman drenched in blood, an older man lying dead on the floor, and a cobalt blue suede stiletto with tufts of white hair stuck to its five-and-a-half-inch heel.With her stunning looks, magnetic personality, and erratic behavior, Ana Trujillo had a notorious reputation on the downtown Houston scene. She spoke often of occult powers, though few knew how deeply she believed such boasts. Stefan Andersson was a gentle soul, a Swedish transplant with a good career and trusted friends, who was desperate to find someone special. Theirs is a story of obsession, madness, and tragedy. Because once Stefan fell head over heels for Ana, he was under her control-and he didn't have a chance in hell.

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  American Smoke - Journeys to the...

  Iain Sinclair

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  The visionary writer Iain Sinclair turns his sights to the Beat Generation in America in his most epic journey yet"How best to describe Iain Sinclair?" asks Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian. "A literary mud-larker and tip-picker? A Travelodge tramp (his phrase)? A middle-class dropout with a gift for bullshit (also his phrase)? A toxicologist of the twenty-first-century landscape? A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts? An intemperate WALL-E, compulsively collecting and compacting the city's textual waste? A psycho-geographer (from which term Sinclair has been rowing away ever since he helped launch it into the mainstream)? He's all of these, and more."     Now, for the first time, the enigma that is Iain Sinclair lands on American shores for his long-awaited engagement with the memory-filled landscapes of the American Beats and their fellow travelers.     A book filled with bad journeys and fated decisions, American Smoke is an epic walk in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others, heated by obsession (the Old West, volcanoes, Mexico) and enlivened by false memories, broken reports, and strange adventures.     With American Smoke, Sinclair confirms his place as the most innovative of our chroniclers of the contemporary.

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  Lewis Ginter - Richmond's Gilded...

  Brian Burns

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  A biography of the nineteenth-century influential Richmond businessman.As a Confederate war hero, philanthropist and entrepreneur, Lewis Ginter was many things to Richmond. Performing integral missions for “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Ginter was commended for gallantry on the battlefield and became affectionately known as the “Fighting Commissary.” After the war, Ginter was the first major marketer of the hand-rolled cigarette in America. He developed one of America’s first streetcar suburbs and built the magnificent Jefferson Hotel, a symbol of Richmond’s ambition and prosperity. But beyond the well-known history of this River City icon, there are many aspects of his personal and professional life that few know about. Join local writer Brian Burns as he delves into the hidden history of Ginter’s extraordinary life to fill in the gaps between Ginter the man and Ginter the legend.“By using many original sources, [Burns] writes of details of Ginter's life that even longtime Richmond-history buffs may not know.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

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  Top 10 Short Stories The -...

  Leonid Nikolaevich Andreyev,...

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  The top 10 short stories of all time written by European authors. 
   
  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  The short story in Europe has a long and illustrious career yet is often unjustly neglected after a quick scan of de Maupassant and one or two others.  Across its seemingly endless cultures that enrich themselves across the canvas of time many other gems are apparent. In this volume we bring some of their bountiful harvest to your ears. 
  1 - The Top 10 - The European Short Story - An Introduction 
  2 - Silence by Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev 
  3 - The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov 
  4 - Youth by Joseph Conrad 
  5 - The Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac 
  6 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  7 - The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol 
  8 - The Dead by James Joyce 
  9 - In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka 
  10 - The Return of Martin Guerre  by Alexander Dumas 
  11 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Notes from a Colored Girl - The...

  Karsonya Wise Whitehead

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  This historical biography provides a scholarly analysis of the personal diaries of a young, freeborn mulatto woman during the Civil War years. 
   
  In Notes from a Colored Girl, Karsonya Wise Whitehead examines the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. Whitehead explores Davis’s worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia’s free black community in the nineteenth century. The book also includes a six-chapter historical reconstruction of Davis’s life. 
   
  While Davis’s entries provide brief, daily snapshots of her life, Whitehead interprets them in ways that illuminate nineteenth-century black American women’s experiences. Whitehead’s contribution of edited text and original narrative fills a void in scholarly documentation of women who dwelled in spaces between white elites, black entrepreneurs, and urban dwellers of every race and class. 
   
  Drawing on scholarly traditions from history, literature, feminist studies, and sociolinguistics, Whitehead investigates Davis’s diary both as a complete literary artifact and in terms of her specific daily entries. With few primary sources written by black women during this time in history, Davis’s diary is a rare and extraordinarily valuable historical artifact.

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