Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

About the Author:

Susan Gregg Gilmore has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Review:

The town of Ringgold, Georgia, has a population of 1,923, one traffic light, one Dairy Queen, and one Catherine Grace Cline. Quickwitted and more than a little stubborn, Catherine Grace is dying to escape her small-town life.
When her dream to go to Atlanta becomes a reality, she immediately makes the move, leaving behind the boy she loves. But all too soon, tragedy brings Catherine Grace back home. As a series of extraordinary events alter her perspective, Catherine Grace begins to wonder if her place in the world may actually be, against all odds, right where she began.

Sometimes you have to return to the place where you began, to arrive at the place where you belong.

It's the early 1970s. The town of Ringgold, Georgia, has a population of 1,923, one traffic light, one Dairy Queen, and one Catherine Grace Cline. The daughter of Ringgold's third-generation Baptist preacher, Catherine Grace is quick-witted, more than a little stubborn, and dying to escape her small-town life.
Every Saturday afternoon, she sits at the Dairy Queen, eating Dilly Bars and plotting her getaway to the big city of Atlanta. And when, with the help of a family friend, the dream becomes a reality, Catherine Grace immediately packs her bags, leaving her family and the boy she loves to claim the life she's always imagined. But before things have even begun to get off the ground in Atlanta, tragedy brings her back home. As a series of extraordinary events alters her perspective — and sweeping changes come to Ringgold itself-Catherine Grace begins to wonder if her place in the world may actually be, against all odds, right where she began.

"Every female will find herself identifying with Catherine Grace's search for her place in the world." Chattanooga Times Free Press

"Susan Gregg Gilmore's debut novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, is storytelling at its best, entertaining and lively and full of surprises. Catherine Grace Cline, the endearing witty heroine, gives her domestic journey titles of Biblical proportion as she finds more than salvation along the way." Jill McCorkle, author of Carolina Moon

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

About the Author:
Mignon Fogarty is the creator of Grammar Girl and founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips Network. A technical writer and entrepreneur, she has served as an editor and producer at a number of health and science Web sites. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and an M.S. in biology from Stanford University. She lives in Reno, Nevada.

"Grammar Girl's daily e-mail tips and podcasts are invaluable. And now, congratulations on a year on paper, Grammar Girl! This book should be on every writer's shelf, and in this age of e-mail and blogs, that's almost everyone."

Review:

Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out bad grammarbut shes also determined to make the process as painless as possible. One year ago, she created a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating. The podcasts have now been downloaded more than seven million times, and Mignon has dispensed grammar tips on Oprah and appeared on the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Written with the wit, warmth, and accessibility that the podcasts are known for, Grammar Girls Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. From “between vs. among” and “although vs. while” to comma splices and misplaced modifiers, Mignon offers memory tricks and clear explanations that will help readers recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Chock-full of tips on style, business writing, and effective e-mailing, Grammar Girls print debut deserves a spot on every communicators desk.

If Nobody speaks of Remarkable Things

About the Author

Jon McGregor is twenty-six, and this is his first novel. It was published in Britain in 2002 to critical acclaim, and was inspired in part by the phenomenal media attention that surrounded the death of Princess Diana. Around the same time, a young man was shot in McGregor’s own neighborhood; the novel, he writes, is about “how the everyday miracles of life and death go unwitnessed in favor of celebrity and sensation, and the difficulty of experiencing community in an increasingly transient society.” McGregor lives in Nottingham, England.

Review:

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a haunting story of the events that transpire over a single day at the end of summer on a small urban street in England. Risky in conception and "daringly un-ironic" for our times, this is a prose poem of a novel — intense and highly evocative — with a whodunit at its center, which keeps the reader in suspense until the final page.
In delicate, intricately observed close-up, we are invited into the private lives of the street's residents to witness their hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs: the man with scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house, a group of young club-goers just home from an all-night rave, the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love.
The peace and tranquility of the unexceptional day are shattered at day's end when the street becomes the scene of a terrible accident. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendition of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its original freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope.

Banana Heart Summer

About the Author

Merlinda Bobis has received numerous awards, prizes and fellowships for her fiction, poetry and plays, among them the Prix Italia for Rita's Lullaby, the Steel Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Judges' Choice Award (Bumbershoot Bookfair, Seattle Arts Festival) and the Philippine National Book Award for White Turtle, or The Kissing, and the Philippine Balagtas Award, a lifetime achievement award for her fiction and poetry in English, Pilipino and Bicol. Her plays have been performed in Australia, the Philippines, France, China, Thailand and the Slovak Republic. Banana Heart Summer is her first novel; its Australian edition was short-listed for the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal. Her second novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, will be released in the U.S. in 2009. As a performer for stage and radio, Merlinda works with artists from various genres. She lives in Australia where she teaches creative writing.

"...[D]elicious, wise, funny, warm, glorious and heartbreaking....The second reading was even more delectable....this is a book to savor. Merlinda Bobis is a poet and wise woman."

Review:

"Poet Bobis serves up compassion and tenderness in generous portions in her fiction debut. Twelve-year-old Nenita is the first of six children born to her destitute parents in a Filipino village. Hungry and abused by her overwhelmed mother, Nenita drops out of school one summer in the hopes of earning enough money to support the growing family. Hired as the house girl of her well-to-do neighbors, the Valenzuelas, she befriends her mistress, the beautiful Seorita VV. The entire village experiences profound change during that sweltering summer, mirroring Nenita's coming-of-age. Nenita's passion for food sustains her through difficulties of all sorts, and she relishes each morsel and taste as a treasured gift, even as she faces continued difficulty." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In her lush, luminous debut novel, Merlinda Bobis creates a dazzling feast for all the senses. Richly imagined, gloriously written, Banana Heart Summer is an incandescent tale of food, family, and longing — at once a love letter to mothers and daughters and a lively celebration of friendship and community.
Twelve-year-old Nenita is hungry for everything: food, love, life. Growing up with five sisters and brothers, she searches for happiness in the magical smell of the deep-frying bananas of Nana Dora, who first tells Nenita the myth of the banana heart; in the tantalizing scent of Manolito, the heartthrob of Nenita and her friends; in the pungent aromas of the dishes she prepares for the most beautiful woman on Remedios Street. To Nenita, food is synonymous with love — the love she yearns to receive from her disappointed mother. But in this summer of broken hearts, new friendships, secrets, and discoveries, change will be as sudden and explosive as the monsoon that marks the end of the sweltering heat — and transforms Nenita's young life in ways she could never imagine.

Down River

About the Author: John Hart was born and raised in North Carolina. He earned degrees in French, accounting, and law, but always aspired to write novels. After careers in law and asset management, John now writes full-time. He still makes his home in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Review: "Complex relationships blur the lines between friend and foe, heightening the suspense in this intricate, haunting story of a family in crisis, and the writing is simply superb. Highly recommended."

Everything that shaped him happened near that river... Now its banks are filled with lies and greed, shame, and murder... John Hart's debut, The King of Lies, was compelling and lyrical, with Janet Maslin of The New York Times declaring, "There hasn't been a thriller as showily literate since Scott Turow came along. "Now, in Down River, Hart makes a scorching return to Rowan County, where he drives his characters to the edge, explores the dark side of human nature, and questions the fundamental power of forgiveness. Adam Chase has a violent streak, and not without reason. As a boy, he saw things that no child should see, suffered wounds that cut to the core and scarred thin. The trauma left him passionate and misunderstood — a fighter. After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam is hounded out of the only home he's ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears, fades into the faceless gray of New York City. Now he's back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind. But Adam has his reasons. Within hours of his return, he is beaten and accosted, confronted by his family and the women he still holds dear. No one knows what to make of Adam's return, but when bodies start turning up, the small town rises against him and Adam again finds himself embroiled in the fight of his life, not just to prove his own innocence, but to reclaim the only life he's ever wanted. Bestselling author John Hart holds nothing back as he strips his characters bare. Secrets explode, emotions tear, and more than one person crosses the brink into deadly behavior as he examines the lengths to which people will go for money, family, and revenge. A powerful, heart-pounding thriller, Down River will haunt your thoughts long after the last page is turned.

The Best American Travel Writing

About the Author

Anthony Bourdain, best-selling writer, chef, television host, and traveler, edits this year's collection of the finest travel writing from the past year. Easy to read and hard to put down, these essays capture with fine detail the extraordinary wonder of travel (Chicago Sun Times).
In his introduction fearful, sublime, and absurd; the small epiphanies familiar to the full-time traveler, interspersed by a sense of dislocation--and the strange, unholy need to record the experience. With this in mind, Bourdain and series editor Jason Wilson have assembled a wide-ranging and wonderfully eclectic collection that delves headlong into those darker moments and subtle realizations, looking to absorb, provoke, and offer a moving record of what it means to travel in the twenty-first cto The Best American Travel Writing 2008, editor Anthony Bourdain writes that the pieces that spoke the loudest and most powerfully to me were usually evocative of the darker side, those moments entury.
Here you will find Seth Stevenson's extraordinary experience of Looking for Mammon in the Muslim World as he makes his way through sweltering and paradoxical Dubai. Exotic tastes and larger-than-life personalities abound as Bill Buford accompanies the chocolate maker Frederick Schilling to the rain forests of Brazil. And on the other side of the world, Calvin Trillin trolls Singapore for the ultimate street food, while Kristin Ohlson delves into the harrowing challenges faced by proprietors of restaurants in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The twenty-five pieces in this collection have their fair share of the absurd as well. David Sedaris explains the hilarious highs (sundaes) and woeful lows (sobbing with your seatmate) of flying Business Elite. Gary Shteyngart goes To Russia for Love during St. Petersburg's vodka-soaked wedding season. And Emily Maloney gets up close and personal with her fellow travelers -- and their massage devices -- in a South American hostel.
Culled from an amazingvariety of publications, the writing in this volume is so vibrantly good, you'll feel like you've armchair-traveled around the world (Chicago Sun Times).

A Hunt for Justice: The True Story of a Woman Undercover Wildlife Agent

About the Author: Lucinda D. Schroeder was a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1974 to 2004. She was not allowed to write about her experiences until she retired, but in 1994, she appeared on A&E to discuss the operation. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Synopsis:An explosive first-person account of an illegal Alaskan big-game hunting camp brought down by one woman.

For thirty years, Lucinda Delaney Schroeder held an unusual government position: she was one of the handful of women special agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her job: to investigate crimes against wildlife. Unlike the majority of hunters who respect both their prey and the laws, evidence was piling up against an unscrupulous outfitter who was decimating populations of big game in Alaska's Brooks Range. In August 1992, she accepted an assignment that forever changed and endangered her life. She left her husband and seven-year-old daughter behind in Wisconsin and posed as a big-game hunter in Alaska in order to infiltrate an international ring of poachers out to kill the biggest and best of that state's wildlife.
A Hunt for Justice recounts her dramatic story a story she was not legally permitted to write about until her retirement in 2004.
Risking personal safety, Schroeder joined a team of government agents to expose and arrest the poachers. Posing as "Jayne," a divorcee who was willing to break the rules in order to hunt trophy animals, the diminutive blue-eyed blonde fooled criminals so wily that their crimes could only be cracked from within. A Hunt for Justice takes readers along on Schroeder's dangerous and exciting mission. More than simply an adventure or true-crime tale, it's a story of a woman surviving in a male-dominated field, a woman against the wilderness, and a wife and mother risking it all for a cause she believes in. Whether you are a crime buff, nature lover, sports hunter, or someone who just loves a gripping-first-person tale of justice triumphing over evil, this book is for you.

"This consistently engrossing first-person account by a retired special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gives readers the inside track on a 1992 undercover hunt for illegal poachers in the Alaskan wilderness. One of nine women in an often misogynist agency of 210, Schroeder brings to life a motley crew of characters. Lewd, unreliable and usually drunk Roy Hanson is a paid informant who poses as the happily married Schroeder's 'boyfriend' and hunting partner. Moose James, a poacher and cunning guide who treats his wife like a servant, bolsters his big ego with the carcasses of hundreds of grizzly bears, bighorn sheep and other trophy animals. The mastermind behind a secret operation that guarantees rich hunters their quarry by herding animals with small planes, Bob Bowman brags that he'll kill any undercover cop who infiltrates his camp. A Spanish client, Pedro, is shameless about his greed: 'Every hunter should get what they want, no matter what it takes.' Although the penalties imposed by the undercover sting seem unusually light given the danger, and the time, money and energy expended, and the line between legal 'harvesting' and illegal poaching will blur for nonhunters, Schroeder illuminates an unusual, insular world with unflinching grit and good humour."