Three beautiful women are murdered in an Irish pub in Syracuse. The cops think it's an open and shut case, pointing the finger at bar owner James John Smith. But when the police fail to find Smith or any trail to his past, the mother of one of the victims hires former karaoke star and stripper Bill "Free Willy" Tedesco to investigate. The deeper Tedesco digs, the more secrets of the dead and living surface, and the question of who pulled the trigger becomes more important than why.

An email chronicle of residents' reactions to news of a bias incident in their town. About 50 individuals, most of them strangers to each other lay bare, in their own spontaneous and unredacted words, the best and worst of small-town dynamics--from outrage to suspicion to ridicule; from graphic hate mail to astonishingly perceptive meditations on individual and collective responsibility.

This New York Times bestseller is the hilarious philosophy course everyone wishes they’d had in school. Outrageously funny, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... has been a breakout bestseller ever since authors—and born vaudevillians—Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein did their schtick on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Lively, original, and powerfully informative, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... is a not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical thinkers and traditions, from Existentialism (What do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?) to Logic (Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything). Philosophy 101 for those who like to take the heavy stuff lightly, this is a joy to read—and finally, it all makes sense! And now, you can read Daniel Klein's further musings on life and philosophy in Travels with Epicurus and Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change it.

Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2017 For fans of Donna Tartt and Megan Abbott, a novel about a woman whose family and identity are threatened by the secrets of her past, from the New York Times bestselling author of She's Not There On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it’s not long before they realize they are locked in—and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate through the survivors’ lives. As they go their separate ways, trying to move on, it becomes clear that their dark night in the prison has changed them all. Decades later, new evidence is found, and the dogged detective investigating the cold case charges one of them—celebrity chef Jon Casey— with murder. Only Casey’s old friend Judith Carrigan can testify to his innocence. But Judith is protecting long-held secrets of her own – secrets that, if brought to light, could destroy her career as a travel writer and tear her away from her fireman husband and teenage son. If she chooses to help Casey, she risks losing the life she has fought to build and the woman she has struggled to become. In any life that contains a “before” and an “after,” how is it possible to live one life, not two? Weaving deftly between 1980 and the present day, and told in an unforgettable voice, Long Black Veil is an intensely atmospheric thriller that explores the meaning of identity, loyalty, and love. Readers will hail this as Boylan’s triumphant return to fiction.

Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

A Guardian and New Statesman Book of the Year The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic - charming, erratic, repellent - exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him. A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn't know whether to laugh or cry - and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he's been summoned to this performance.

It's the future. But only slightly. There are blackouts. No one knows what's causing them, but that doesn't stop people going missing in them. Now Steph and Bell, a schoolgirl and barmaid, have to search for their missing friend, until the outside world starts infecting the theatre that stands around them. Schoolgirl Steph walks into the seedy, empty bar where Bell works. Bell is dressed with everything short and low, and there are no longer any regulars at her bar. Whatever has happened to create this dystopian world remains a mystery, but we learn that there are frequent blackouts, people regularly go missing and women are being killed. Steph is looking for her friend Charlotte, a girl who also at some point walked into Bell's bar but then went missing. The relationship between Bell and Charlotte is unclear, as her conversations with Steph shift between truth, lies and fantasy. In this tense atmosphere, where there is a sense of growing fear, the play "forces the audience to turn detective not just to track down the elusive Charlotte but also to find meaning itself" (The Guardian). A Girl in a School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) is the third play by award-winning playwright Lulu Raczka and was produced at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2017 and the New Diorama Theatre in 2018.