This is a profound, philosophic but sensational and shocking tale of the arts and artists, those who grope in the dark and are finally driven to the wall ... and those who 'make it.'In this disquieting but profoundly philosophical novella, Linda, through an appalling tale of intense drama, follows four women artists, three photographers and a writer, as they struggle to achieve recognition in their chosen fields. Fame, eminence, immortality-these are the only goals that drive Anne Sinclaire. But does Anne possess some astonishing talent hidden within her? Can she become a great painter, writer, composer, or dancer? Or is she ordinary, destined to be a nobody-her name and life obliterated by death. This appears to be Anne's destiny until an electrifying revelation strikes, a revelation unmasked by the populace and affirmed by three needy artists who wander into her life.

More than 55 million Americans play golf regularly, and they all know that the best chance of lowering their handicap (which is every player's obsession) is in the “short game”—that is, all strokes from about 100 yards into the green. Based on the popular syndicated single-panel golf-tip feature “Master Strokes”—and following up Running Press's successful book Master Strokes (2003)—Master Strokes: The Short Game is a handy pocket-sized compendium that includes single-page illustrated tips to help improve putting, chipping, pitching, sand trap play, reading greens, and much more. Master Strokes: The Short Game is a must-have tool for any golf bag or locker, and the perfect gift for golfers of any level.

DIVDIV/divDIVAfter a boozy Oxford reunion, Bognor is distressed to learn one of his classmates is a killer/divDIV /divDIVNothing depresses Simon Bognor like a university reunion. Every pimply-faced boy he knew two decades prior has made something of himself, while Bognor languishes at the Board of Trade, muddling along in an investigatory position for which he is hideously unqualified. Although more often than not his job requires catching murderers, he lacks even the observational powers to notice when the head of his old college has been poisoned. Both quite drunk, they totter off to their respective beds. Bognor makes it, but the master doesn’t—he collapses dead at the top of the stairs./divDIV /divDIVDue to the dead man’s ties to the government, Bognor is asked to sort out who did him in. At long last he has the opportunity to prove himself at his old college—but Bognor knows it is just as likely that he will end up in the dunce’s cap./div DIV /div /div

When it comes to playing golf, all players--amateurs to pros--have one thing in common: the desire to lower their scores. This collection of the most read column on golfing, "Master Strokes," distributed by United Feature Syndicate, is a practical, succinct instructional companion. Designed to offer easy-to-follow tips, each mini-lesson is presented alongside a detailed, full-page illustration. With more than 400 illustrations to help readers visualize new techniques, Master Strokes is perfect for beginning and seasoned golfers alike. Created by Phil Franke, staff illustrator for Golf Tips magazine, and Nick Mastroni, senior editor of Senior Golfer magazine, this sporty guide is ideal for golfers at every level.

Born in a landlocked town in the center of Kansas, Pip is tall, flat, smart, funny, and supernaturally buoyant. On land, she has her share of troubles: an agoraphobic mother, a lost father, and a school full of nuns who just want her to sit still. But in the water, Pip is unstoppable. Swimming her way from a small Midwestern team to the Barcelona Olympics, Pip’s journey is the story of a young girl with an unsinkable spirit, struggling to stay afloat in the only way she can.

Richard Dadd is a trickster, a pre-post-modern enigma wrapped in a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream; an Elizabethan Puck living in a smothering Victorian insane asylum, foreshadowing and, in brilliant, Mad Hatter conundrums, entering the fragmented shards of today’s nightmarish oxymorons long before the artists currently trying to give them the joker’s ephemeral maps of discourse. The author thinks of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” that cryptic refusal to reduce the warped mirrors of reality to prosaic lies, or, perhaps “All Along the Watchtower” or “Mr Tambourine Man.” Even more than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which curiously enough comes off as overly esoteric, too studied, too conscious, Dadd’s entire existence foreshadows the forbidden entrance into the numinous, the realization of the inexplicable labyrinths of contemporary existence, that wonderfully rich Marcel Duchamp landscape of puns and satiric paradigms, that surrealistic parallax of the brilliant gamester Salvador Dali, that smirking irony of the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Robert Indiana; that fragmented, meta-fictional struggle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. John Lennon certainly sensed it and couldn’t help but push into meta-real worlds in his own lyrics. Think of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” and the more self-conscious “Revolution Number 9.” In “Yer Blues,” he even refers to Dylan’s main character, Mr Jones from “Ballad of a Thin Man.” If Lennon’s song is taken seriously, literally, then it is a dark crying out by a suicidal man, “Lord, I’m lonely, wanna die”; or, if taken as a metaphor for a lover’s lost feelings about his unfulfilled love, it falls into the romantic rant of a typical blues or teenage rock-and-roll song. However, even on this level, it has an irony about it, a sense of laughing at itself and at Dylan’s Mr Jones, who knows something is going on but just not what it is, and then, by extension, all of us who have awakened to the fact that the studied Western world doesn’t make sense, all of us who struggle to find meaning in the nonsense images, characters, and happenings in the song, and perhaps, coming to a conclusion that the nonsense is the sense.