In Burning the Bacon, L. Austen Johnson navigates through deeply personal terrain, laying waste to it and watching its flowers regrow in the four sections of the collection: "Gravity," "In Memoriam," "Entropy," and "Parthenogenesis." She explores topics such as chronic illness, love, heartbreak, memory, and growing up with a blend of accessible language and rich metaphor.

"Adam Rapp’s brilliant and haunting story will break your heart. But then his words will mend it. . . . Absolutely unforgettable." – Michael Cart On the run in a stolen car with a kidnapped baby in tow, Custis, Curl, and Boobie are three young people with deeply troubled pasts and bleak futures. As they struggle to find a new life for themselves, it becomes painfully clear that none of them will ever be able to leave the past behind. Yet for one, redemption is waiting in the unlikeliest of places. With the raw language of the street and lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose, Adam Rapp hurtles the reader into a world of lost children, a world that is not for the faint of heart. Gripping, disturbing, and starkly illuminating, his hypnotic narration captures the voices of two damaged souls - a third speaks only through drawings - to tell a story of alienation, deprivation, and ultimately, the saving power of compassion.

Grieving from his brother's passing, Terry Rogers travels to Ticky Forest to commemorate one last photo with his friends. He soon ventures deeper into the forest alone and encounters a crazed family with "special" abilities.

From the founder of a bacon-themed restaurant, more than 200 recipes using bacon, the unexpected workhorse of savory ingredients. Bacon is Peter Sherman’s North Star. In 2014, he opened BarBacon, a bacon-themed gastropub in New York City, to immediate critical and financial success, and he has become the go-to bacon guru for the world. Sherman has a nearly religious devotion to bacon, and in his tome, The Bacon Bible, he shares more than 200 recipes that show you how to incorporate bacon into nearly any meal you can imagine. There are the classics, like BLTs, wedge salads, and mac and cheese, but the book really encourages you to cook with bacon in unexpected ways with recipes like Bacon Ramen, Chipotle Bacon Tacos, and Bacon Bourbon Oatmeal Pancakes. Peter also teaches you the basics, like how to cure simple bacon from scratch. He has a mad-scientist approach to bacon and is a firm believer that it should be a part of every meal. With this cookbook, you’ll never think of bacon the same way.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

We live in a fast-paced, hectic society which seems far removed from the less complicated days of the recent past when life was simpler but wasn't really all that easy in many ways. For all those kids who survived the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70's, these stories from the good old days may strike a familiar chord. Why, When I Was a Kid is a collection of heartwarming short stories from the true life experiences of a normal American country boy. These autobiographical ramblings offer a glimpse into a rural lifestyle that may inspire your own trip down memory lane. As you venture through the pages of this book you will be brought to laughter as the author guides you through story titles such as, 'Dirt Clods and Aspen Trees', 'Cowpies and Lady Fingers', 'Buttermilk and Bologna Sandwiches', and 'Skunk in the Backseat', all of which will paint a descriptive picture of a young boy's escapades. Then tender stories like 'Hero Worship', 'My New Cowboy Hat', or 'Pautzke Eggs' may touch your heart and bring you to tears as similar memories of our own come to the surface. These 'not so everyday' experiences range from a kid's perspective of life to a dad's realization that his daughter has grown up. Jim's gift for capturing these experiences in a fun and entertaining format will keep you reading till the end!