Good Guys, Bad Guys, Sad Guys, and Giants

Good Guys, Bad Guys, Sad Guys, and Giants
Author: Vin D'Angelo
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2004-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595302920

As a disaster worker, a chemical weapons response consultant, a SWAT instructor, a kayaker, a climber, and a lover of adventure Vin D'Angelo has filled his life with rich experiences and colorful companions. His adventures have shown him a surprising world peopled with good guys, bad guys, sad guys, and even some giants. He has drawn upon his memory of them to write this, his third, compilation of short fiction about people with whom he would share a campfire. There are no campfires in these ten stories, but there are some real characters. Zeke Anson returns in a story about disaster and rescue. Will Kennedy falls in love with a woman who leads him through a revolution to a revelation that he's a better man than he thought he could ever be. A man who found love and lost it struggles back from the edge of insanity. The Last Soldier and the Jazz Singer learn about sadness in war. Rich, in his wheelchair, remembers the goodness that came from another war. Ed Duncan loves a ghost; Ned fights savagery; Dick knows horror; and Streak discovers giants. They'll all share their marshmallows if you'll light the fire.

The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains

The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains
Author: Jon Morris
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-03-28
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1594749337

Meet more than one hundred of the oddest supervillains in comics history, complete with backstories, vintage art, and colorful commentary. This collection affectionately spotlights the most ridiculous, bizarre, and cringe-worthy criminals ever published, from fandom favorites like MODOK and Egg Fu to forgotten weirdos like Brickbat (choice of weapon: poison bricks) and Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. Casual comics readers and diehard enthusiasts alike will relish the hilarious commentary and vintage art from obscure old comics.

The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385353227

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory. In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven't seen in years. And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share. By turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving, The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.

Eastbound and Town

Eastbound and Town
Author: Eric Ugland
Publisher:
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 9781945346156

Freshly respawned.Far from home.All alone.Up until now, Montana's journey really only went one direction: up. But now he's back at square one, stuck on top of a mountain with only the most basic gear to help get him back to Coggeshall. It's going to be a loooong walk.But not a boring one.In one of LitRPG's most legendary medieval fantasy road trips (and also possibly the only one), Montana encounters a pack of just-this-side-of-feral wolf people; a town straight out of the Wild West - complete with heavy-handed sheriff; a lion desperately trying to take down a colossal fish monster; ancient cursed ruins; and a giant flying frog.Eastbound & Town is an epic story full of combat, loot, and achievements. You better believe Montana is loaded up and truckin,' and gonna do what they say can't be done.Hit the road with Montana today!

Superhero Thought Experiments

Superhero Thought Experiments
Author: Chris Gavaler
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2019-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1609386558

Examining the deep philosophical topics addressed in superhero comics, authors Gavaler and Goldberg read plot lines for the complex thought experiments they contain and analyze their implications as if the comic authors were philosophers. Reading superhero comic books through a philosophical lens reveals how they experiment with complex issues of morality, metaphysics, meaning, and medium. Given comics’ ubiquity and influence directly on (especially young) readers—and indirectly on consumers of superhero movies and video games—understanding these deeper meanings is in many ways essential to understanding contemporary popular culture. The result is an entertaining and enlightening look at superhero dilemmas.

Why Peacocks?

Why Peacocks?
Author: Sean Flynn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982101083

Until Flynn’s neighbor in North Carolina offered him one, he had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. His family became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle. Here he chronicles their first year as peacock owners, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg. He also examines the history of peacocks, from their appearance in the Garden of Eden. And Flynn travels across the globe to learn more about the birds firsthand. His book offers surprising lessons about love, grief, fatherhood, and family. -- adapted from jacket.

For the Love of Pete

For the Love of Pete
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt writing as Julia Harper
Publisher: Forever
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0446543551

Dante Torelli is an undercover FBI agent assigned to protect a mob informant and his family. But when the informant's hiding place is blown, a baby girl is snatched by a ruthless hitman. Now, Dante must save the toddler, uncover the traitor in his department, evade various bad guys, and deal with the toddler's sexy aunt, all before the biggest mob trial in Chicago history, set to begin in just three days. When Zoe Adler's stepsister went into the witness protection program because of her sleazeball boyfriend, she wasn't supposed to tell anyone. Except the two sisters have always been close, and Zoe has been babysitting her niece, Pete, since her birth. What harm could it be to secretly get Zoe an apartment in the same building where the FBI is keeping the family under protection? So when someone inside the FBI turns and a hitman snatches Pete, Zoe is right there. During the shootout, she jumps into a sexy, uptight FBI agent's car and hangs on as he pursues the hitman. No matter what it takes, Zoe is going to bring her niece back.

American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film

American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film
Author: Sara Martín
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2023-05-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000875806

Most documentaries deal with men, but what do they actually say about masculinity? In this groundbreaking volume Sara Martín analyses more than forty 21st-century documentaries to explore how they represent American men and masculinity. From Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In to Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, this volume explores sixteen different faces of American masculinity: the good man, the activist, the politician, the whistleblower, the criminal, the sexual abuser, the wrongly accused, the dependent man, the soldier, the capitalist, the adventurer, the sportsman, the architect, the photographer, the musician, and the writer. The collective portrait drawn by the documentaries discloses a firm critical stance against the contradictions inherent in patriarchy, which makes American men promises of empowerment it cannot fulfill. The filmmakers’ view of American masculinity emphasizes the vulnerability of disempowered men before the abuses of the patriarchal system run by hegemonic men and a loss of bearings about how to be a man after the impact of feminism, accompanied nonetheless by a celebration of resilient masculinity and of the good American man. Firmly positioning documentaries as an immensely flexible, relevant tool to understand 21st-century American men and masculinity, their past, present, and future, this book will interest students and scholars of film studies, documentary film, American cultural studies, gender, and masculinity.

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control
Author: Franz Nicolay
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1620971801

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, aka "the world's greatest bar band." Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war.> While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the postcommunist world in the kind of book a punk rock Paul Theroux might have written, with a humor reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.