A short, fictional book about how we love places to death... in spite of our best intentions.

You can and you can't; You will and you won't. You'll be damn'd if you do; You'll be damn'd if you don't. --LORENZO DOW; "Definition of Calvinism" We've all heard of the wonderful invention that the Big Corporation or the Utilities suppressed...? Usually, that Wonderful Invention won't work, actually. But there's another possibility, too.... The workshop-laboratory was a mess. Sam Bending looked it over silently; his jaw muscles were hard and tense, and his eyes were the same. To repeat what Sam Bending thought when he saw the junk that had been made of thousands of dollars worth of equipment would not be inadmissible in a family magazine, because Bending was not particularly addicted to four-letter vulgarities. But he was a religious man--in a lax sort of way--so repeating what ran through his mind that gray Monday in February of 1981 would be unfair to the memory of Samson Francis Bending. Sam Bending folded his hands over his chest. It was not an attitude of prayer; it was an attempt to keep those big, gorillalike hands from smashing something. The fingers intertwined, and the hands tried to crush each other, which was a good way to keep them from actually crushing anything else. He stood there at the door for a full minute--just looking.

When Hannah volunteers at a domestic abuse hotline and tries to help the women and children whose lives become entwined with her own, she's caught in the town’s secrets, lies, and double dealing. Raised in the Sixties on picket lines and peace marches, activist Hannah Fox can't turn her back when a friend's land is targeted by an eminent domain scam that threatens her small town in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. When the developer behind the fraudulent scheme is murdered and her young friend becomes a suspect, Hannah probes the dead man's shameful past. She faces hard choices, convinced the murder was a heroic act even when it's clear she may be the killer's next victim. Trouble invades Hannah's private life as she tries to curb the mounting attraction between herself and Jack Grundy, Senior Investigator for the New York State Police, while watching her own marriage crumble. Damned If You Don’t, which skillfully exposes the entrenched corruption in a rough-edged mountain town, is moving and disturbing, atmospheric and authentic. This dark traditional mystery with its strong protagonist keeps readers guessing until the very end.

First published in 1998, Anthony McMahon details the accounts of public agency child welfare dealing abused and neglected children and their families and the pressures on child welfare workers. Opening up the discussion on the ambiguities whilst dealing with balancing child welfare work whilst dealing with the societal pressure of the non-intrusion into family life.

Would you rather… Be rich and stupid or smart and poor? Have the CIA after you or have the Mafia after you? Be on vacation with your 60-year-old parents and have your mom insist on wearing a thong bikini or have your dad insist on wearing a tiny, Euro-style bathing suit? Warning! This book contains shocking content meant to inspire hilarious discussion. These field-tested conversation starters are guaranteed to provoke ridiculous fun, break the ice, and—if played correctly—open a unique window into the twisted imaginations of friends and family. It’s an addictive game in a book that challenges readers to ask—and answer—more than 100 questions that rank from the heinous to the outrageously funny.

Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated film. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets and a sexual identity problem. Everett skewers race, class, identity, surrealism and much more in this masterful short story collection from one of America's most inventive living writers. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.