Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.

Bob Mahoney has vividly portrayed the pressures, the dedication, and the fabled resourcefulness ofthe Mission Control Center team. His book comes alive because of his own personal experience and expertise to give us a 'Clancy-like' thriller of a story.Glynn S. Lunney, Former Apollo Flight Director* * * * *A work of fiction initially conceived more than twenty years ago, Damned to Heaven immerses the reader in a fast-paced world of real-time shuttle and space station operations, weaving an uncannily realistic storyline that taps the underlying yearning for humankind's continued exploration of the solar system.Like many, William Francis Drake grew up on the exhilarating promise of the early space program. Now a flight director in Mission Control, he must admit that his space program has fallen far short of that youthful promise. The bureaucracy of the present has eroded his passion for the future. Yet a new hope has been born-the President has formulated a grand but controversial blueprint for solar system exploration and exploitation. This new program's first critical milestone, however, involves unfinished business-completion of the ailing International Space Station Alpha.Into this technical and political maelstrom a crisis descends. During one of the final ISS assembly missions, orbital debris strikes space shuttle Discovery, compromising its cabin and rendering a successful reentry dubious. Flight Director Drake and his team must swiftly advise the seven-person crew to either attempt reentry with their damaged thermal protection system or dock the dying Discovery to Alpha (already supporting a three-person crew) in the hope the ground can launch a rescue before the Station'sdegraded systems reach their limits.Drake's struggle to retain his passion for spaceflight has suddenly become a matter of life and death-and even through the crisis, his battle with the bureaucracy rages on.

"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.

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.

Peter Cammann has written about fishing for more than 30 years. In that time, he has explored at length the lasting questions of fishing, chief among them, why anyone would spend their time doing it. This book presents the odd tales, confessions and musings of a deeply flawed angler, well-acquainted with the limits of his own abilities. These humorous tales are presented by the author as a kind of answer to why so many people spend hours in the water, facing off with fish, sometimes only to release them right away. Occasionally profound and always funny, Cammann's unique perspective on the sport will delight even those who have never cast a line.

Peter McManners gets underneath the well-known facts about the unsustainable nature of the aviation industry and argues for fundamental change to our travelling habits. The first book to transcend the emotional debate between the entrenched positions of those who are either for, or against, flying, this groundbreaking work argues that aviation is stuck in a stalemate between misguided policy and a growing imperative to deal with its environmental impact and that there is now little possibility that the transition to sustainable flying can be a smooth evolution.