You sure this is what You had in mind, Lord?" asked Reverend Billy Ray Halstad on the dusty, lonesome ride into Purgatory City. Only a minister who'd been truly saved from his past would commit himself to preaching in a dilapidated, drafty church to a congregation of unfriendly parishioners in an isolated ghost town. Billy Ray Halstad had never felt more lonely than he did those first forty days in Purgatory City, and began to question whether he'd lost his calling to do God's work. loan from CTLS Large Print Circuit.

Billy Ray was born during the Great Depression. Through totally unforeseen circumstances, he wandered through varied, random, and unrelated situations. His life seldom had a predictable direction. Despite that, he became successful in athletics, teaching, working, and schooling. This eventually led to his being a professor, textbook author, software test engineer, technical writer, consultant, and more. I hope you are enjoying your life, and I hope reading this book might help you!

Billy-Ray Belcourt's collection of personal essays opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile Cree Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

A collection of nine autobiographical essays by the son of a Mississippi sharecropper and author of Fay and On Fire takes readers into the heart of territory earlier made famous in the writings of William Faulkner. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Once, when the world was new, God looked down on His creation and was disappointed. The skies rained down on His world for forty days and forty nights. He made Noah the inheritor of His creation. What would He think if He looked down upon us now? What would we do if it started to rain and it did not stop? Where would we run when the water is everywhere? And who would be our Noah? Nine people have been chosen to build a new ark, to survive the Second Flood, to make good God's vision of humanity. Who are these Nine? And what about everyone else? It is time. . . Sink? Or swim?