NCW Libraries

"After bottoming out, being institutionalized, and getting sober all by the tender age of fifteen, Moshe Kasher found himself asking: OK, so what else is out there? Over the ensuing decades, he found his way to the answer: a lot. From his current vantage point as a successful stand-up comic, Kasher looks back on his years careening from subculture to subculture, and he immerses readers in the hilariously strange nuances of each of the scenes he's...

Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly...

Thirteen-year-old Emily the Strange visits modern-day Seasidetown and attempts to avoid a "thought thief," save her psychic cousin, thwart her ancestral enemy, and finally claim her unusual inheritance.

A crowd of undisciplined young people gather for kicks on the Sunset Strip. Police Lieutenant Walt Lorimer is sympathetic to the kids but is pressured by businessmen to clear them out.

A friendly guy from the Midwest tries to fit in in a tough L.A. neighborhood.

Pigeons do somersaults in mid-flight, and there is a subculture of men in South Central L.A. devoted to this phenomenon as a competitive sport.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....

For the crew of the New Strand Theatre, the play "The Two Murderers" seems less performance than prophecy when a cast party ends in the shocking death of the theater owner's son. The crime scene is most unusual, even for Bryant and May. In a locked bedroom without any trace of fingerprints or blood, the only sign of disturbance is a gruesome life-size puppet of Mr. Punch laying on the floor. Everyone at the party is a suspect, including the corrupt...

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