Take one good ol' country boy--trying his best to do right--toss in good-looking women along with a few crooks and what you get is another scrape for Rowdy Turnipseed. When he encounters two women in a nipple-pink Trans Am, his big red pick-up and his life take a right turn. He's infatuated by the woman who calls herself Yellow Feather but he can't pursue his new love because his missing cargo turns out to be a dead body and he's suspect number one. Rowdy's chased by Miami druggies, the cops and finally half-Indian FBI agent 'Cottonmouth' Cannon, a renegade for sure. To extricate himself, Rowdy tries fortune-telling, voodoo, soothsaying, country dancin' and beer drinking, all while on the run and coached by Truth, the little man who's always around reminding Rowdy right from wrong. Finally, Rowdy's old pal and former circus performer, Sooner Boone, helps pull a fast one on the crooks and cops. Rowdy survives again, but as usual, the most pressing question is: who gets the girl?

Liam Carroll's debut novel, Slippery, shines a blowtorch on the fundamental truths of the finance industry and the hedonistic world of the expatriate lifestyle in Southeast Asia. Flynn James, a young man from the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly, previously content to live his life as a physiotherapist and surfer on Australia's east coast, is awakened to the big bonuses on offer in the trading game. He abandons health sciences, embraces the greed is good mantra and manages to flare past thousands of candidates in a Geneva simulation trading day exercise, ushered through the shady doors of a fiercely private Swiss commodities trading company and set on the path to oil trading superstardom. Based in Singapore and Shanghai, Flynn learns the ropes of commodities dealing at breakneck haste. With the arrival of his first seven-figure bonus, the glossy veneer of his overpaid world crumbles, setting the stage for a shattering finale. Much more than another mere exposé on the world of trading, Slippery is an adventure/thriller. It explores the gritty realities of successful commerce in the corporate maelstrom of Southeast Asia, the inevitable moral compass decimation when you place money above all else and is done so with a side-splitting, bitter self-loathing, terminal awareness. You won't be able to put it down.

"We wait for baseball all winter long," Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, "or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that's what poets do, too." Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising. The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the reader--like the true baseball fan--must be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds families--and indeed the nation--together, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game's long season and to the lives of those the game engages.