Inspired by the outcasts, outlaws, and other outré inhabitants of rock legend Lou Reed’s songbook, Dirty Boulevard traffics in crime fiction that’s sometimes velvety and sometimes vicious, but always, absolutely, rock & roll. Inside, you’ll find stories from the fire escapes to the underground, stories filled with metal machine music, stories for gender-bending, rule-breaking, mind-blasting midnight revelries and drunken, dangerous, dark nights of the heart. Upcoming genre stars like Alison Gaylin team up with crime fiction legends such as Reed Farrel Coleman, along with Cate Holahan, Gabino Iglesias, Tony McMillen, and many of the most exciting new names in crime and horror fiction, who teach us that a perfect day is often anything but, that the power of positive drinking is a destructive force rarely contained, and that knock-down-drag-out drag queens are probably way tougher than you.

Loving anyone is the hardest thing we will ever do, it takes real work. Many in our age seem to believe that it just happens and then they live a life unloved wondering what is wrong with them. The fact of the matter is that love begins with the decisions we make about our own life and it continues with our outward actions toward others. Learning to love people is always hard; they are just so unlovable most of the time. Some place inside of us we want to love people but when we try we are often frustrated. The journey of love is deep and far and it will end up taking you to the very end of yourself but it is completely worth the effort. It is at the end of yourself that love is found and finally understood. You cannot buy it, sell it, hold it, own it, or even understand it… you can only receive it. So on that day you enter into its realm… be prepared to experience it… maybe for the very first time.

In these Talks, given in India and Saanen, Krishnamurti speaks to the necessity for a new way of looking, thinking and being in the world. "What is the effect or value of an individual changing? How will that transform the whole current of human existence? What can an individual do?...... there is no such thing as an individual consciousness; there is only consciousness of which we are a part. You might segregate yourself and build a wall of a particular space called the `me'. But that `me' is related to the whole, that `me' is not separate. And in transforming that particular section, that particular part, we will affect the whole of consciousness. And I think this is very important to realize: that we are not talking about individual salvation or individual reformation, but about being aware of the particular in relation to, the total. Then out of that realization comes action which will affect the whole

Set during the bloody American Civil War, From the Darkness Risen is a story of courage, valor and what it means to be a family. A young couple with a toddler son, the Cavanaughs endure the explosion of civil war, separation and the struggle of keeping the family farm out of enemy hands. Robert, a captain in the Stonewall Brigade, is captured during the fight at Sand Ridge, Virginia, and taken to a Union prison in Illinois. When Isabelle hears the frightening news, she abandons her post as a nurse in Staunton, Virginia's Confederate Army Hospital with futile hopes of securing her husbandâÂÂs freedom. Along the way, Isabelle sees the brutality of war through her deeply religious sensitivity, and struggles with the traditional roles of a 1860s wife and mother against her desire to be something more. When her companion, Eva Reed, sabotages the dangerous escape, Isabelle and Robert find themselves fighting for their lives. Will they make it out of enemy territory alive?

Blatman writes about the end phase of the German concentration camp system when the Nazis, realizing that they were losing the war, were faced with the enormous problem of what to do with the people being held captive. As these camps were being evacuated, the collapse of the front in Poland and the advance of the Red Army generated frantic waves of flight and the evacuation of millions of civilians and soldiers. The panicky retreat created conditions under which prisoners were murdered in horrific death marches. Gas chambers in faraway camps were no longer in use, and now the slaughters took place on the very doorsteps of ordinary German civilians' homes and in the streets German and Austrian towns. Unknown numbers of ordinary civilians across the dissolving Reich, fearing for the fate of their families and property, participated in the lethal eruption of violence. The book is divided into two sections. The first part provides an detailed overview of the camp system and a thorough chronological treatment of the camp evacuations during the winter of 1944-45 and the spring of 1945. The second part is a case study of the atrocity in the German town of Gardelegen where over 1000 prisoners were murdered, along with about 400 in the surrounding villages. This event serves as a focused example of the breakdown of the evacuation plans at the end of the war.