From the porn magazine to the moving truck to the dark sewers of California, Brandon Christopher’s journey in the American job market is not only absurd, but also full of wit and profound observations. He steps out from behind the driver’s wheel, the cash register, and the office desk to record the lighter and darker sides of humanity in the workplace. Christopher’s tale makes even the most mundane job seem fascinating and the most exciting career appear hum-drum and hollow. The Job Pirate strips off the façade of the average employee to see what is hidden underneath: “That new employee that you see hanging his vintage blazer onto the backrest of his swivel chair is me. My cubicle is right next to yours. I don’t say much, I dine alone, I drink a lot of coffee, and I know my legal right to two cigarettes in an 8-hour workday. And yes, you were right, I’m not really the Marketing Strategist that I told the boss I was. But I’m sitting here in this cubicle, and the resume that got me this job is in my attaché case right beside me. It clearly states that I have more than enough experience to run this company’s entire advertising department and I’ll be here between three weeks and a year, so you better get used to the idea.” Often hilarious and sometimes profound, Christopher’s stories take us through the offices, department stores and kiosks of the West Coast. We ride along with him as he chauffeurs the famous, the dead and sometimes just their furniture. Christopher gives us an irreverent inside glimpse into the work life of the people we see everyday. Even though at times he exhibits moral ambiguity, we find ourselves rooting for him against all the odds because we can see our own struggles in his attempts to acclimate. We can all relate to this story of selling our soul to the company store and then buying it back for pennies on the dollar, just to have that one more day of freedom.

A charming mix of how-to, RR love and operation. Short of the "bible," Armstong's The Railroad--What It Is..., this is the best work on the history, development, use and function of track, rolling stock, signals that we've found outside the textbooks. Jargon is explained (including a 45 p. glossary). Fine, fun, informative book. Published by Sand River Press, 1319 14th Street, Los Osos, CA 93402. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The true story of a boy who sets out with absolutely nothing to find his mother who went to the US from Honduras to look for work.

A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction Selection When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world. Martin Riker grew up in central Pennsylvania. He worked as a musician for most of his twenties, in nonprofit literary publishing for most of his thirties, and has spent the first half of his forties teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2010, he and his wife Danielle Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a Publishing Project. His fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, London Review of Books, the Baffler, and Conjunctions. This is his first novel.

The Code of Federal Regulations is the codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government.

“To truly understand the United States, one must understand The Not-Quite States of America.” —Mark Stein, best-selling author of How the States Got Their Shapes Everyone knows that America is 50 states and… some other stuff. The U.S. territories—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and their 4 million people are little known and often forgotten, so Doug Mack set out on a 30,000-mile journey to learn about them. How did they come to be part of the United States? What are they like today? And why aren’t they states? Deeply researched and richly reported, The Not-Quite States of America is an entertaining and unprecedented account of the territories’ crucial yet overlooked place in the American story.