Home Groan

A deity laments her lost loves. A pickpocket steals more than just money. A young man wrestles with the colour of the homes he builds. In Home Groan, we take a deep look at Penang. From idyllic beaches to dangerous jungle, reflections on the past to current issues, island living to mainland life, we explore our beloved home state in both prose and poetry, spinning tall tales and telling it as it is. This is your Penang. This is your home. Come groan with us.

Discover the key to enjoying God in every moment of every day We believe in God, we serve God, we trust God, but would we say that we experience God on a day to day basis? Do we really know him personally? What exactly does a relationship with God look like, and how is it even possible? In this seminal work by Tim Chester, we’ll see how the three persons of the Trinity relate to us in our day-to-day lives and how to respond. We’ll discover that as we interact more with God, and understand how awesome he is, we will experience the joy of being known by the creator of the universe. Every Christian will benefit from discovering the key to enjoying God in every moment of everyday.

All Groan Up: Searching for Self, Faith, and A Freaking Job! is the story of the GenY/Millennial generation told through the individual story of author Paul Angone. It’s a story of struggle, hope, failure, and doubts in the twilight zone of growing up and being grown, connecting with his twentysomething post-college audience with raw honesty, humor, and hope.

Communication skills for kids that help them build stronger relationships with adults. Whatever kinds of grown-ups kids have in their lives, one thing is for sure: Life is better (and a whole lot simpler) when kids and grown-ups get along. And while grown-ups want kids to be respectful and thoughtful—toward everybody, not just grown-ups!—kids also deserve to be respected and treated thoughtfully. How to Take the GROAN Out of Grown-Ups (and Get Along!) provides practical communication skills for kids and shows them how to build relationships, have difficult conversations, and know when to seek more trusting adults. Relationships with grown-ups can be fun and fulfilling. They can lead to good times and great memories. They can make life better in all kinds of ways. (Like getting to eat French toast nachos for dinner once in a while!) How to Take the GROAN Out of Grown-Ups (and Get Along!) provides communication skills for kids that will help them build positive relationships with the adults in their lives. Laugh & Learn® Series Self-help, kid-style! Realistic topics, practical advice, silly jokes, fun illustrations, and a kid-centric point of view all add up to one of the most popular series that young people turn to for help with school, families, siblings, and more. Kids ages eight to thirteen can tote these pocket-size guides anywhere and learn to slash stress, give cliques and rude people the boot, get organized, behave becomingly, and in general hugely boost their coping skills.

"This is a novel about friendship, about infidelity, about emotional ignorance and animal malice, enacted within the framework of re-appropriated Greek mythology. It's a novel about ingratitude and imposition, about bad behavior and heavy drinking. In the end it's about not seeing it coming when you should have seen it coming, because after all, it's your fault." - Auric Adams Elliot Poulain is a crime scene reporter. He's also foul-mouthed, drunk, and caustic. Arthur Cannason is young, charming, and well-off. The friendship the two form is fast and unlikely, fueled on drunken late nights and Elliot's genial envy. When Elliot is offered the use of a colleague's lake house for the summer he invites the newly-divorced Arthur to come stay with him, to relax and get out of the city. Up at the lake they meet a beautiful woman, the wife of a renowned artist. Together the three spend the summer drinking, swimming, boating, and playing tennis. Elliot is happy, but happy isn't what Elliot is used to. Also, Arthur and the artist's wife seem to be spending more and more time alone. Auric Adams' debut is a moving and insightful story about how the hardest prisons to escape are the familiar ones we keep making for ourselves. Written by Auric Adams Cover design by Tom Maven

East Before South is the tale of a very long trip that began, innocently enough, with a fabulous party in Rio de Janeiro. The journey will take you on a ride in rattletrap buses, dugout canoes, camel trucks, army convoys, sea ferries, and clapped-out trains. It will take you through places not on any map. With hundreds of (sometimes) irreverent travel anecdotes of the kind you just won’t find in any other travel book, it’s the unvarnished truth. It will show you the world the way it really is. From Rio, the road took me across the heartland of Brazil to Belem at the mouth of the mighty Amazon and upriver into the heart of the jungle. Then down the coast for the Carnaval and further down still, hugging the beaches, toward Argentina and Buenos Aires. Tango. To the very tip of the continent: wind-blasted Patagonia. Up again, a yoyo trip, north to Salta, and through the unofficial border to Bolivia’s wild west. Then: a transcontinental flight to Europe: family and friends in Poland, then —Quickly!— across the Baltic Republics to the Russian border, where I was arrested and deported before I could properly enter the country. Two days later, back again, toward Moscow again, and farther east still, always east, on the Tran Siberian Express bound for Ulan Bator. A weeklong journey across the wasteland of Siberia to Mongolia: there are roads there, yes, like there are tracks on Mars. The Mongolians have a saying: “Two Chinese are worth one Korean. Two Koreans are worth one Japanese. Two Japanese are worth one Mongolian.” But that, of course, is a lie. South, then, toward Beijing and then more south to Shanghai and more south still to Hong Kong: stopping in places for reasons that are never specifically clear, the road taking me ever farther from the beginning. Hot-air balloon over Guilin. Then Bangkok in a blur: after a day of intensive culinary tuition, I can now burn Thai food with as much efficiency as I burn everything else. Then an island where I've been before —Ko Samui— which is no longer the same. Back to Bangkok. To Borneo. Back to Bangkok. To Manila. Then Alaska. Then half-neglected, half-lost, the ancient city of Leh: prophetic words on the roof of the world, their truth distilled to its crudest essence. Then, finally, South Korea: “The Soul of Asia” as proclaim the tourist slogan slapped across the fleet of taxis that cruise the wide boulevards of Seoul. From Korea, from Japan, around the Ring of Fire: Taipei, albeit ever so quickly: touch-and-go, really. KL for a massage. Singapore for the Singapore Sling. Then from the coffee plantations and volcanoes of Java to the primary rainforests and spiritual smorgasbord of Sulawesi and Bali: surfers’ paradise. Indonesia encompasses over 13,000 islands with 336 ethnic groups and a borderless rainbow babel of different languages, cultures and traditions. In addition to coffee-colored Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, this is the home of more Muslims than all the Middle East. Linking the islands is the lingua franca of Bahasa and an underlying songline of history: animist religions are uniting threads that cross oceans, adding layers of meaning to the word “multicultural”. Here some Muslims drink beer and arak in addition to java; some worship Buddha, Vishnu, Krishna, and Jesus in addition to Allah; while others leave offerings to good and evil pagan spirits (tourists included). In fact, clutched in the talons of the mythical Garuda, the national airline and state crest, is the motto “Unity in Diversity”. I muse about that in an undertaker’s shop, where he sells coffins and Coca-Cola side-by-side, and at the same time, it seems. There was much more. I hitched rides on logging trucks and dugout canoes, traveling often alone, crisscrossing language-zones and time-zones, transfixed by an idea of the world…, a way around it. The fourth book of the Travelogues, "East Before South" is a story of that trip.