Bobby S Watching

On the eve of announcing his run for Congress, a charismatic Chicago politician causes a deadly accident. Panicked, he frames his best friend, a good-hearted alcoholic, and flees the scene. As one man tries to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, the other embarks on a meteoric rise to political stardom. But when a dogged detective digs deeper into the case, the political superstar must decide just how far he is willing to go to keep his dark secret and avoid an explosive scandal that could ruin him and rock the entire nation. In this suspenseful thriller, author Joseph Hayes asks, is the greater good just a lie we tell ourselves to justify the sins we commit when no one is watching?

Bobby DuBois comes from a long line of misfits. Basically a good kid, he can't shake an inherited propensity for violence and drug abuse. When his father gets arrested it appears likely that Bobby, too, is headed into the system. Then Uncle Thaddeus rescues him and they take to the backwoods, managing to stay one step ahead of the law until hurricane rains swell the Swift River, ravaging Franklin County and flushing Bobby and Thaddeus out of the hills. Still on the run, Thaddeus teaches Bobby how to drink, fight and fornicate how to be a right DuBois. Perhaps the most important lesson Bobby learns, however, is that he doesn t want to grow up to be like his father or his uncle. The bristling action culminates with a disturbing custody battle waged in the shadows of Stillwater Bridge. The DuBois clan is in trouble and has been for generations, and at its core this beautiful and violent first novel is about Bobby s struggle to save his own soul.

A new thriller that takes us inside a hair-raising heist, where paranoia hangs as heavy as the tropical heat, and the only law is Murphy’s. Carr—ex-CIA—is the reluctant leader of an elite crew planning a robbery of such extraordinary proportions that it will leave them all set for life. Diamonds, money-laundering, and extortion go into a timed-to-the-minute scheme that unfurls across South America, Miami, and Grand Cayman Island. Carr’s cohorts are seasoned pros, but they’re wound drum-tight: months before, the man who brought them together was killed in what Carr suspects was a setup. And there are other loose ends. Some of the intel they’re paying for is badly inaccurate, and one of the gang—lately, Carr’s lover—may have an agenda of her own. Carr finds himself “working the paranoid calculus . . . mapping the shifting landscape of who-owes-who and who-owns-who, of loyalty, grudge, and pressure”—but his biggest problems are yet to come: few of his crew are what they seem to be, and even his own past will turn out to be built on a lie. Terrifically suspenseful and psychologically complex, Thick as Thieves is a rare, penetrating look into the sophisticated machinations of an unparalleled crime, and Peter Spiegelman’s most accomplished and galvanizing novel yet.

Originally published in 1992, when connectionist natural language processing (CNLP) was a new and burgeoning research area, this book represented a timely assessment of the state of the art in the field. It includes contributions from some of the best known researchers in CNLP and covers a wide range of topics. The book comprises four main sections dealing with connectionist approaches to semantics, syntax, the debate on representational adequacy, and connectionist models of psycholinguistic processes. The semantics and syntax sections deal with a variety of approaches to issues in these traditional linguistic domains, covering the spectrum from pure connectionist approaches to hybrid models employing a mixture of connectionist and classical AI techniques. The debate on the fundamental suitability of connectionist architectures for dealing with natural language processing is the focus of the section on representational adequacy. The chapters in this section represent a range of positions on the issue, from the view that connectionist models are intrinsically unsuitable for all but the associationistic aspects of natural language, to the other extreme which holds that the classical conception of representation can be dispensed with altogether. The final section of the book focuses on the application of connectionist models to the study of psycholinguistic processes. This section is perhaps the most varied, covering topics from speech perception and speech production, to attentional deficits in reading. An introduction is provided at the beginning of each section which highlights the main issues relating to the section topic and puts the constituent chapters into a wider context.

Neighbourhood Watch is based on family dynamics and lifelong repercussions of decisions and actions made in youthful haste. Self-preservation and maintaining a good public image are strong motives throughout the book. Such incentives can lead even the most upstanding people to deception and reveal a darker side, if only to themselves. Although the main characters differ greatly, they are all linked by events from the past. Neighbourhood Watch explores the danger of putting misplaced trust into institutions or their representatives, for this trust can be manipulated and used to the advantage of those it is placed in. Within the story, there is a heavy focus on the humanity of people and how they deal with a set of circumstances they may have no control over. There is an underlying current that is deconstructed – that a confident woman is seen as almost arrogant and untrustworthy, and is not to be given the benefit of the doubt.

When Stella Delray unexpectedly loses her job a week before Christmas, which is also the anniversary of her husband’s death, she is forced to stop talking to his ashes, come to terms with her loss, and get her life back on track for her young son’s sake as well as her own. She never expected that posting an ad on Craigslist would send her into the arms of not one but two men, one of whom is her former boss. Now she’s working as an admin for a retired Broadway star, bookkeeping for an erotic video production company, and writing love letters for the mysterious "Oaklander." Adding to the craziness of her new life, her monster-in-law resurfaces and the father-in-law she never met shows up on her doorstep. With the guidance of her best friend, Bono, Stella will learn to redefine the rules she’s always lived by.

The book is an investigation into the ways in which ideas of place are negotiated, contested and refigured in environmental writing at the turn of the twenty-first century. It focuses on the notion of place as a way of interrogating the socio-political and environmental pressures that have been seen as negatively affecting our environments since the advent of modernity, as well as the solutions that have been given as an antidote to those pressures. Examining a selection of literary representations of place from across the globe, the book illuminates the multilayered and polyvocal ways in which literary works render local and global ecological relations of places. In this way, it problematises more traditional environmentalism and its somewhat essentialised idea of place by intersecting the largely Western discourse of environmental studies with postcolonial and Indigenous studies, thus considering the ways in which forms of emplacement can occur within displacement and dispossession, especially within societies that are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, neocolonial exploitation or international pressure to conform. As such, the work foregrounds the singular processes in which different local/global communities recognise themselves in their diverse approaches to the environment, and gestures towards an environmental politics that is based on an epistemology of contact, connection and difference, and as one, moreover, that recognises its own epistemological limits. This book will appeal to researchers working in the fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies and comparative literature.