Set during the production of an out-of-control television comedy in 1989 Toronto, Under the Table is a snappy heist novel that will keep 'em guessing. Much like the sketch show that it portrays, Under the Table entertains with dark humor, quirky characters, and celebrity appearances, while poking fun at the absurdity of societal constructs. Quippy and smart, Smith's prose is electric and crackles across the page. Wickedly funny, you'll laugh even though you know you shoul...

Set in pre-9/11 Toronto, detective noir Scratching the Flint takes place over twelve days during the spring of 2001. Smith's two-tone anti-fraud team of Alex Johnson and Cecil Bolan are back in their first full-length novel to investigate a vintage car theft ring à la MacGyver. When witnesses end up mocked and murdered, proof becomes a relative term to Cecil. Racked with guilt while the system sputters, he covertly assumes the role of not just investigating officer but also that o...

An all-out drug war explodes in 1970s Detroit when a young Vietnam veteran decides to rip off heroin kingpin Willis McDaniel. In the chaos, rival outfits, the Mafia, and even junkies themselves try to step in to fill the void while one lone assassin tries to hunt them all down—and one determined cop tries to stop it all.Vern E. Smith formerly served as the Atlanta Bureau chief and as a national correspondent for Newsweek. As a principal reporter with Newsweek's Special Projects Uni...

Journey to the Center of the Earth" is one of Jules Verne's best-known works and one of the most classic tales of adventure ever written.It is the story of the German geology professor Otto Lidenbrock who discovers a manuscript from a 16th century explorer who claims to have discovered a passageway that leads to the center of the earth.The professor hastily sets off with his nephew Axel and an Icelandic guide by the name of Hans to find the center of the earth. Great obstac...

Phileas Fogg is English exactitude personified. He eats breakfast at 8:23, shaves at 9:37, and leaves for the Reform club at 11:30. He reads, eats, and doesn't travel. But one day, after getting into an argument over an article in the Daily Telegraph, he is prompted to make the £20.000 wager with his club friends that he can travel all the way around the world in eighty days. And so he leaves, accompanied only by his new French valet Passepartout: it is 8:45 P.M. on Wednesday the 2nd of Oc...

Listen to The Blockade Runners with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Writing at the end of the American Civil War, Verne weaves this story of a Scottish merchant who, in desperation at the interruption of the flow of Southern cotton due to the Union blockade, determines to build his own fast ship and run guns to the Confederates in exchange for the cotton piling up unsold on their wharves. His simple plan becomes complicated by two passengers who board his ne...

From the Earth to the Moon is a humorous science fiction novel written by the French writer Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of three well-to-do members of a post-American Civil War gun club who build an enormous sky-facing canon and ride a spaceship fired from it to the moon.Jules Verne takes aim at some amusing stereotypes of Americans in this story of a pre-rocketry attempt to shoot a cannonball to the Moon. Those ...

This volume, entitled "The Great Navigators of the 18th century", forms the second of three volumes under the general title of "Celebrated Travels and Travellers". The first volume of the series, "Exploration of the World", covers a period in the world's history extending from B.C. 505, to the close of the 17th century, and the third volume gives an account of "The Great Explorers and Travellers of the 19th Century".

The Mysterious Island is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne.A story of castaways, similar to Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. The story begins in the American Civil War, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America. As famine and death ravage the city, five northern prisoners of war decide to escape by the unusual means of hijacking a balloon in the midst of a hurricane.After ...

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors last names A Royal Prisoner [Marcel Allain] The Man Who Knew Too Much,The Man Who Was Thursday: a Nightmare [G.K Chesterton] The Hound of the Baskervilles,The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle] The Nebuly Coat [John Meade Falkner] The Chestermarke Instinct,The Middle of Things,The Orange-Yellow Diamond,The Paradise Mystery [Joseph Smith Fletcher] Helen Vardon's Confession,The Singing Bone{R. Austin Freem...

The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of...

As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety.This edited collection challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities in difficult times.Combining numerous empirical studies and theoretical developments from around the world, the div...