Why Do All the Nice Girls End Up Getting Kidnapped and Held for Ransom? In this book, YOU, the reader, are a thirtysomething part-time actor/full-time waiter suddenly caught up in a kidnapping. Julia, the girl you went out with last night, has been TAKEN HOSTAGE. What will you do? Will you go to the police and ask for help? Will you burst into the hideout, killing everyone in sight, then tell Julia that she shouldn't misinterpret this as some sort of big commitment? Or will you unplug your phone and just get really, really drunk? The choice is yours! You awake to the sound of the phone ringing. "Hello?" You hear a man's voice. It is muffled. "We've got Julia." "Wait, what do you mean?" "We have kidnapped your girlfriend. If you ever want to see her again---" "Whoa, she's not my girlfriend," you say. "I just met her. I mean, I had a good time with her and all, but I wanna take it slow with this one, I think." "We understand," the voice says. "But she's new to the city, and presently, you're all she has. Give us fifty thousand dollars by tomorrow or we'll blow her head off." If you want to go and ask your parents if you can borrow fifty thousand dollars, go to page 173. If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183. BE VERY CAREFUL! You're directing the story and the CHOICES you make can result in MURDER, GRADUATE SCHOOL ENROLLMENT, TORTURE, MARRIAGE, POST-APOCALYPTIC SLAVERY, UNWANTED PREGNANCY, even TEMPING! It's YOUR STORY and YOUR LIFE. All you've got to do is decide which page you want to turn to. JUST MAKE A CHOICE!

On July 11, 2054, in the capital city of the new world government, someone murdered the governors wife. Although absolutely certain that the young man currently sweating bullets on Death Row for the crime is innocent, the governor has no solid evidence. Powerless to stop the execution without incriminating his son, the governor turns to the only person he can trust. Nick Trevor, on his first case as a private investigator, has a scant seventy-two hours to save an innocent man. With the clock ticking, Nick forms an impromptu alliance with his old friend, Detective Gabriel MacDougal, who is investigating the sudden disappearance of one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Overcoming countless setbacks during their joint investigations, Nick and Gabe realize that both cases are intimately linked. As they plow their way through the seedy criminal underground and into the lifestyles of the incredibly rich and powerful, they unveil myriad shrouds of truth. While discovering that solving his case is merely the prelude to a complex tale of deception and betrayal, Nick Trevors ultimate reward is rediscovering several pieces of himself that he honestly believed had vanished forever.

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. FEATURING ORIGINAL STORIES BY: Chris Adrian • Rob Agredo • Kurt Andersen • Rachel Axler • Rob Baedeker • Nicholson Baker • Rosecrans Baldwin • Matthew Battles • Charles Baxter • Kate Bernheimer • Susanna Breslin • Kevin Brockmeier • Matt Brown • Blake Butler • Meg Cabot • Tim Carvell • Patrick Cates • Dan Chaon • Susanna Daniel • Adam Davies • Kathryn Davis • Matthew De Abaitua • Stacey • D'Erasmo • Helen DeWitt • Doug Dorst • Mark Doty • Ben Ehrenreich • Mark Frauenfelder • Amy Fusselman • William Gibson • Myla Goldberg • Ben Greenman • Jason Grote • Jim Hanas • Jennifer Michael Hecht • Sheila Heti • Christine Hill • Dara Horn • Shelley Jackson • Heidi Julavits • Ben Katchor • Matt Klam • Wayne Koestenbaum • Josh Kramer • Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer • Neil LaBute • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Jonathan Lethem • Todd Levin • Laura Lippman • Mimi Lipson • Robert Lopez • Joe Lyons • Sarah Manguso • Merrill Markoe • Tom McCarthy • Miranda Mellis • Lydia Millet • Maud Newton • Annie Nocenti • Stephen O’Connor • Stewart O’Nan • Jenny Offill • Gary Panter • Ed Park • James Parker • Benjamin Percy • Mark Jude Poirier • Padgett Powell • Bob Powers • Todd Pruzan • Dan Reines • Nathaniel Rich • Peter Rock • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Greg Rowland • Luc Sante • R.K. Scher • Toni Schlesinger • Matthew Sharpe • Jim Shepard • David Shields • Marisa Silver • Curtis Sittenfeld • Bruce Sterling • Scarlett Thomas • Jeff Turrentine • Deb Olin Unferth • Tom Vanderbilt • Matthew J. Wells • Joe Wenderoth • Margaret Wertheim • Colleen Werthmann • Colson Whitehead • Carl Wilson • Cintra Wilson • Sari Wilson • Douglas Wolk • John Wray

The concluding volume in the saga of Kelvin of Rud. The Prophesies of Mouvar, a great magician, have proven to be an accurate roadmap for the career of Kelvin and his children. But the evil wizards who strove against Kelvin in this universe and the parallel ones to which they can travel are not finished yet. Mouvar himself will be needed for this final challenge.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHEDAfter successfully coming back to the other world, Kaito happens upon Leticia, only to discover that she doesn’t recognize him. From there, he and his two newest accomplices, Mai and Yuuto, travel to the town of Zolkia and start climbing the ranks at the Adventurers Guild. Don’t think they’ve turned over a new leaf, however—it’s all in service of drawing the attention of their next targets: a prince of the beast lands named Leon and Leticia’s elder sister Lilia. In the past, this accomplished duo betrayed Kaito out of a conviction that it would save their realm. But Kaito couldn’t care less about their motivations; the only thing he’s concerned with is returning the pain they inflicted on him, a thousand times over.