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  Charlie's Boy - A Memoir

  D. L. Hughley

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  The long-awaited memoir by the comedy legend and author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, a beautiful and mesmerizing book that reveals as never before his childhood in South Central Los Angeles, his time in the infamous Bloods gang, and how humor became his salvation. 
  I learned a joke could be more than humor. It was body armor. Could be a spell. Could be a sword and a shield, all in one breath.  
  He was always Charlie’s Boy—even before he found his name, his voice, his fame. 
  In this raw, cinematic, and deeply personal memoir, acclaimed comedian and cultural critic D.L. Hughley documents his rise from the streets of South Central Los Angeles to the national spotlight—and the man who quietly stood behind him through it all. 
  While his mother’s wrath shaped his early years with fear and rejection, it was Charlie Hughley—a soft-spoken bag handler at the Los Angeles Airport—who raised D.L. and taught him how to survive through tough love and sacrifice. Though he was not D.L.’s biological father—a fact only revealed when D.L. was ten—Charlie gave his boy the only thing he truly needed: a sense of being seen. 
  It was a time when gangs ruled the streets of South Central, and D.L. rose through the ranks of the Bloods. But when his mother’s car was shot up and dead roses were left on his doorstep—signaling he was marked for death—D.L.’s mother knew that he couldn’t stay in Los Angeles. So, D.L. boarded a bus to Ohio and left behind everything he understood. It was exile. But it proved to be a fresh start. 
  This is not just a coming-of-age story. It’s the story of how one man found his voice by being raised in silence—and how he learned to get on stage and turn pain into punch lines. Through storytelling that’s both unsparing and funny, Charlie’s Boy is a tribute to the man who never asked for one, and a reckoning for the boy who had to wrestle for love, identity, and truth.

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  All About Yves

  Yves Rees

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  A timely and thought-provoking memoir about the trans experience. 
   
  Was I always trans, part boy beneath my skin, or was it that I landed in a place where 'girl' was a container so small it could break your bones?  
   
  I learn that a ready smile and sympathetic ear are the only props required to impersonate a woman. The performance becomes so familiar I almost forget that it's staged. 
   
  What happens when, aged 30, you realise you're transgender?  
   
  This was the question that confronted Yves Rees, a historian whose life was upended by gender transition in 2018. Then known as a woman called Anne, Yves was forced to grapple with the sudden realisation that they were not, in fact, female at all.  
   
  But when you've lived a lie for so long, how do you discover who you really are? And how do you re-learn to live in the world as a different gender? 
   
  All About Yves tells their moving journey of re-becoming, at the same time laying bare the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. It shares the challenges and joys of being transgender in Australia today, and reveals how trans experiences like Yves' can teach all of us about what it means to be human. 
   
  'Rees provides us with their deep insights into contemporary trans and gender diverse history as it's being made . . . All About Yves is the book I wish I'd been able to give my mother when I was transitioning.' SAM ELKIN, Transgender Victoria Board Member 
   
  'A book of great heart and gentle intelligence, and one that will mean a great deal to many people.' FIONA WRIGHT, author of The World Was Whole 
   
  'A balm for anyone who has lived on the margins.' RICK MORTON 
   
  'Brilliant, brave and paradigm-shifting.' CLARE WRIGHT

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  Fake Work - How I Began to...

  Leigh Claire La Berge

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  In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother YouWhile headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Andersen People (her fellow consultants) believed held world-saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey.After performing a series of equally mundane tasks, one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback catapulted her into the ranks of middle management. It wasn't long before she found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, and giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world.By the end of her brief time as a businessman at a fake firm, in a fake industry, dedicated to solving a fake crisis, Leigh Claire had accumulated a lifetime's worth of lessons about the absurdity of work and the nature of financialized capitalism. Fake Work blends memoir with post-facto theoretical interjections on the philosophical problems posed by contemporary corporate culture—from the inadequacy of poststructuralist inquiry to the alienation of office jobs—to tell the story of the techno-armageddon that wasn't.

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  The Unparrelled invasion - From...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California.

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  A Diagnosis of Death - From...

  Ambrose Bierce

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  Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on 24th June 1842 at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio. His parents were poor but they introduced him to literature at an early age, instilling in him a deep appreciation of books, the written word and the elegance of language.  
  Growing up in Koscuisko County, Indiana poverty and religion were defining features of his childhood, and he would later describe his parents as “unwashed savages” and fanatically religious, showing him little affection but always quick to punish. He came to resent religion, and his introduction to literature appears to be their only positive effect. 
  At age 15 Bierce left home to become a printer’s devil, mixing ink and fetching type at The Northern Indian, a small Ohio paper. Falsely accused of theft he returned to his farm and spent time sending out work in the hopes of being published. 
  His Uncle Lucius advised he be sent to the Kentucky Military Institute. A year later he was commissioned as an Officer.  As the Civil War started Bierce enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment.  
  In April 1862 Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh, an experience which, though terrifying, became the source of several short stories. Two years later he sustained a serious head wound and was off duty for several months. He was discharged in early 1865.  
  A later expedition to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains took him all the way to San Francisco. He remained there to become involved with publishing and editing and to marry, Mary Ellen on Christmas Day 1871.  They had a child, Day, the following year.  
  In 1872 the family moved to England for 3 years where he wrote for Fun magazine. His son, Leigh, was born, and first book, ‘The Fiend’s Delight’, was published.  
  They returned to San Francisco and to work for a number of papers where he gained admiration for his crime reporting. In 1887 he began a column at the William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner.  
  Bierce’s marriage fell apart when he discovered compromising letters to his wife from a secret admirer. The following year, 1889 his son Day committed suicide, depressed by romantic rejection. 
  In 1891 Bierce wrote and published the collection of 26 short stories which included ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’.  Success and further works including poetry followed.  
  Bierce with Hearst’s resources helped uncover a financial plot by a railroad to turn 130 million dollars of loans into a handout. Confronted by the railroad and asked to name his price Bierce answered “my price is $130 million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States”.  
  He now began his first foray as a fabulist, publishing ‘Fantastic Fables’ in 1899.  But tragedy again struck two years later when his second son Leigh died of pneumonia relating to his alcoholism.  
  He continued to write short stories and poetry and also published ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’.  
  At the age of 71, in 1913 Bierce departed from Washington, D.C., for a tour of the battlefields where he had fought during the civil war. At the city of Chihuahua he wrote his last known communication, a letter to a friend. It’s closing words were “as to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” Ambrose Bierce then vanished without trace.

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  The Tractae Middoth - From their...

  M R James

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  Montague Rhodes James is cited as perhaps the greatest English writer of ghost stories, an opinion few would disagree with. 
  James was born on 1st August 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage in Kent, where his father was Curate but at age 3 the family went to live at Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia.  
  From early childhood he had a passion for mediaeval books and antiques. He was educated initially as a boarder at Temple Grove School in East Sheen, west London, before gaining a scholarship to Eton and thence Cambridge where he gained a double first, becoming a distinguished linguist and mediaevalist.  
  Before the Great War vacations were usually spent touring Europe absorbing cultures and references for his later writing. 
  A man of enormous knowledge it was said he timed his breakfast egg whilst he completed the Times crossword.  
  Many of his elegant yet terrifying tales were created by discarding the prevailing gothic cliches and placing his characters and narrative in a realistic setting.  Thereby the stories gained atmosphere and menace on a grand scale and he was famed as the originator of the antiquarian ghost story. 
  Although story-telling and writing these 30 or so tales was a hobby, when published their effect transformed the genre and still chill the bones in our more modern times. 
  James was also a medievalist scholar and translator whose work remains highly respected. He was also Provost of Eton College between 1918 and 1936. 
  M R James died on 12th June 1936 at Eton in Buckinghamshire.  He was 73.

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