A divorced financially successful father who was has been denied access to his three sons for the past ten years desires to learn what kind of young men they have become and how prepared to face the challenges of life ahead of them. he devises a test and uses deception to lure them into it.

Offers a selection of eighty entertaining cryptic challenges from the pages of the Daily Telegraph.

In the summer of 1941, the area around Kemmerer, Wyoming, is still in the grip of the Great Depression. World War II rages overseas in Europe and Asia but is not yet a reality in the United States. This is the story of eight young men, newly graduated from Kemmerer High School, as they make their journey from boyhood to manhood in a summer filled with new challenges, new opportunities, and new dangers. Some will succeed. Some will fail. This is their story.

Kit Andrews, owner of Rocky Mountain Searchers, receives a request from a woman in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to locate her missing son. Her son, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-Marine, disappeared two years before after being discharged from the Marine Corps at the conclusion of two tours of duty in Iraq as a scout sniper. The woman requires Kit to travel from Kemmerer, Wyoming, to Santa Fe to meet with her personally. When Kit arrives in New Mexico, he receives a shocking surprise about the identity of the woman and her son. Because the last sighting of the son was in Wyoming, Kit has been hired as a local expert. In addition, the other firms the woman had hired found no trace of her son in two years of searching. Kits partner, Swifty Olson, is sidelined with a broken foot, so Kit enlists his father to assist him in the search. Kit narrows his search to two possible locations in Wyoming that are inaccessible in winter. He and his father search and eliminate one area and concentrate on the Big Horn Mountains above Sheridan, Wyoming. They find some clues and decide to add some help. Kits father enlists the help of old friends from his days in the army, and they discover they are not the only ones searching for the womans son. It seems the ex-Marine sniper was so good at his job that Islamic fanatics have put a price on his head and sent a hit squad to the United States to kill him. Now, its a race to try to find the son before the terrorists and their hired thugs do.

Everything you wanted to know about the Lacanian critique of deconstruction, but were afraid to ask the Coen Brothers. The Coen Brothers’ films are rife with figures of absence. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude does nothing. He is put on the trail of a kidnapping that never happened, and solves the crime when he realizes that he paid the ransom with “a ringer for a ringer.” The Hudsucker Proxy features a dupe who draws zeros throughout the film, enthusiastically proclaiming, “You know, for the kids!” Barton Fink is a film that revolves around the absence of a film. In Apropos of Nothing, Clark Buckner appeals to these and other figures of the void in the Coen Brothers’ films in order to articulate the close proximity and ultimate opposition between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. In the process, he situates both theories in relationship to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, and undertakes a comparative analysis of the negativity in death, language, drive, anxiety, visual perception, paternity, and the unconscious. Formulating one of the most theoretically rigorous readings of the Coens’ oeuvre to date, Buckner also offers a readable overview of some central debates in late twentieth-century continental philosophy.

This examination of the distinctive cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen explores the theme of violence in their wide-ranging body of work. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence spans the career of the two-time Oscar-winning producer/director team, exploring the theme of violence that runs through a genre-spanning body of work, from the neo-noir of Blood Simple to the brutal comedy Burn After Reading (2008). In chapters focusing on major characters, Ryan Doom looks at the chaotic cinematic universe of the Coens, where violent acts inevitably have devastating, unintended consequences. The remarkable gallery of Coen characters are all here: hardboiled gangster Tom Regan from Miller's Crossing (1990), overmatched amateur kidnapper Jerry Lundergaard from Fargo (1996), accidental private eye "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski (1998), psychopathic assassin-for-hire Anton Chigurh from the 2007 Academy Award winner No Country for Old Men, and more.