
By Charles Willeford
In Pick-Up, Charles Willeford has created a piece of mental suspense that's immediately poignant, terrifying, and completely real in its depiction of alcoholic wish and destruction.
"Pick-Up follows the doomed trajectory of a couple of alcoholics who meet in a bar and locate they proportion a standard feel of futility encumbered by means of dashed desires and hopeless futures."
"That’s this kind of one-two punch Charles Willeford grants many times in Pick-Up (Beacon Books, 1955). First, a sobering dose of existentialism, focused right into a sturdy brick of fact that hurts to swallow, then he follows it up with an enigmatic description that belies the outside simplicity of the textual content. simply what's that smile on her face? who's this strolling lady contradiction, immediately a world-weary lush and a small baby, and who lives for romance and but loves simply because there's not anything left to reside for. And if the fellow is a failure, why does he even proceed to aim, no matter if all he attempts for is death?"
- Pulp Serenade
First released 1955
Read Online or Download Pick-Up PDF
Best fiction books
An exciting and strong novel a couple of younger boy lured to sea through the promise of event and present, with echoes of significant expectancies, Moby-Dick, and The Voyage of the Narwhal.
Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the tale of a nineteenth-century highway urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident with an escaped tiger, Jaffy is going to paintings for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of unique animals, along Tim, a great yet occasionally spitefully aggressive boy. therefore starts an extended, shut friendship fraught with ambiguity and contention.
Mr. Jamrach recruits the 2 boys to trap a fabled dragon throughout the process a three-year whaling expedition. Onboard, Jaffy and Tim benefit from the tough brotherhood of sailors and the brutal paintings of whale looking. They even achieve catching the reptilian beast.
But while the ship’s whaling enterprise falls wanting expectations, the workforce starts to treat the dragon—seething with feral strength in its cage—as undesirable success, a sense that's cruelly strengthened whilst a violent hurricane sinks the send.
Drifting throughout an more and more hallucinatory ocean, the survivors, together with Jaffy and Tim, are pressured to confront their very own position within the animal nation. Masterfully informed, wildly atmospheric, and thundering with rigidity, Jamrach’s Menagerie is a very haunting novel approximately friendship, sacrifice, and survival.
Because the shadows extend over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Downs - excessive lifestyles and coffee existence, society beauties and Whitechapel highway women, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and acrobats, punters and thieves. complete households move alongside the Surrey back-roads, in the direction of the best race of the 12 months.
Translated by means of Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant.
Introduction and Notes by way of Harold Tarrant
An epic tale of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historic novel is determined in Carthage within the days following the 1st Punic conflict with Rome.
Number one long island instances bestselling writer Tami Hoag brings again her fan-favorite Minneapolis investigators Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska within the haunting new mystery The ninth lady.
"Kovac had obvious extra useless our bodies than he might count number: males, girls, kids; sufferers of shootings, stabbings, strangulations, beatings; clean corpses and our bodies that were left for days within the trunks of automobiles within the lifeless of summer time. yet he had by no means obvious whatever particularly like this . . . "
On a frigid New Year's Eve in Minneapolis a tender woman's brutalized physique falls from the trunk of a motor vehicle into the trail of oncoming site visitors. Questions to whether she was once alive or useless while she hit the icy pavement lead to her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the 9th anonymous woman sufferer of the 12 months, and murder detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the duty of not just checking out who Zombie Doe is, yet who in her lifestyles hated her sufficient to break her. used to be it own, or may perhaps it simply were a criminal offense of chance? Their maximum worry is that not just is she their 9th Jane Doe of the 12 months, yet that she could be the 9th sufferer of a vicious temporary serial killer they've got come to name document Holiday.
Crisscrossing America's heartland, document vacation chooses his sufferers at random, snatching them in a single urban and leaving them in one other, consistently on a vacation. If Zombie Doe is one among his, he has introduced his ugly video game to a brand new and extra terrifying point. yet as Kovac and Liska start to discover the reality, they're going to locate that the monsters of their 9th girl's lifestyles could have lived towards domestic. or even as one other younger lady disappears, they must ask the query: that's the higher evil--the satan you recognize or the satan you don't?
Additional resources for Pick-Up
Sample text
Unfortunately, your legal expenses will be just as high if your spouse's lawyer takes control and your lawyer simply reacts. And if both spouses' lawyers fail to take control, the case will develop a life of its own, resulting in enormous fees being paid by both spouses to lawyers who do nothing but mechanically follow procedures and never take stock of their clients' goals and objectives. Does this sound overly grim? Are you comforting yourself with the belief that lawyers must do a good job because Page XIII they passed the bar exam?
No matter which side of the issue you are on, no matter what your gender, race, sexual preference, or religion, once you become embroiled in a divorce or custody battle, you are entering a minefield of lawyers and judges who could not care less that your life and your children's lives have been turned upside down. Just as lawyers are expected to do, your spouse's lawyer will drag you through the mud, invade your privacy, and threaten to take your home, your children, your car, your clothes, your retirement money, and your savings.
If you don't, your spouse may misread you and set an adversarial tone. Once that happens, both of you could waste a lot of time and money getting back onto a nonadversarial footing. On the other hand, if your spouse has been bullying you for years and you have consistently given in, now may be the time to make the statement that you aren't giving in anymore. Have your lawyer set that tone from the outset. Remember: the more bullying you accept, the more you Page 25 will be expected to accept. Let your spouse know, through your lawyer's actions, that you intend to be in control now.