How far can you push a child before he snaps? Rocks in the Belly tells the story of an eight-year-old boy and the adult he becomes. When he is young his mother fosters boys, despite the jealous turmoil it arouses in her son: jealousy that reaches unmanageable proportions when she fosters Robert, a child she can't help bonding with. As the connection between them grows, the son's envy triggers an event that profoundly changes everyone. Especially Robert. At twenty-eight, still haunted by his childhood, the son returns to face his mother, who is now chronically ill. He hasn't forgiven her for what happened to Robert, and yet she isn't the same domineering woman anymore. Now she's the dependent one and he the dominant force — a power he can't help but abuse. Written in two startlingly original voices, Rocks in the Belly is about the effortless destruction we wreak on one another in the simple pursuit of our own happiness, and a reminder that we never leave our childhood behind. A fast-paced, powerful, yet often beautiful and funny novel.

Belly Full of Rocks, Tyler B. Perry's second book of poetry, delves deep into the psyches of Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, the Huntsman, Mama Bear, and other fairy tale characters as they struggle to piece together their broken lives. The wolf, bloated, torn and battered, is pulled by a dark hunger into the city. A rebellious Red Riding Hood searches for solace in dangerous places, and the third little pig spends his days in the depths of a mental institution built of bricks. These narrative, lyric poems are dark and playful, unsettling and humorous, and refuse to paint their characters as the archetypes they are commonly known to be, instead revealing the primal desires, obsessions and dark urges that are buried within us all.

An in-depth history of rock and roll's Louisiana roots. Taking the position that rock and roll started in New Orleans in 1947 when Roy Brown recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," Aswell provides an expansive history of this beloved American music form. By looking at the Louisianan influences of swamp pop, Cajun, zydeco, R&B, rockabilly, country, and blues music, the author explores the way these musical forms gave birth to rock and roll as we know it today.

Describes the role that collisions with meteors, comets, and asteroids have played in the history of Earth and other planets in the solar system and examines what is being done to protect Earth from future collisions.

Bold, graphic art by indie rocker Chris Gorman of Belly captures the thrill and challenges of marching to your own beat. Meet a pogo-dancing, punk-rock-loving kid who loves to express himself in his own unique way. His clothes, hairstyle, music, and just the way he hears the world, all set him apart. Not everyone understands him, but he likes being one of a kind--even though it's lonely sometimes. Fortunately, it's a wide world out there, and if he looks around a kid is sure to find other one-of-a-kinds with common interests.

A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. When Normal Mailer was writing The Executioner's Song, he received a letter from Jack Henry Abbott, a convict, in which Abbott offered to educate him in the realities of life in a maximum security prison. This book organizes Abbott's by now classic letters to Mailer, which evoke his infernal vision of the prison nightmare.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.