The Belly Button That Escaped

Third grader Artie MacGivillray has a big problem: His belly button escaped, and now there's a hole in his life - for real! Will Artie's tiny friend come back? Find out when you read "The Belly Button that Escaped"

When Hailie and Madi ask their mom for a bedtime story, they aren't expecting THIS story... "Madi! Help! I'm falling into my belly button!" Inside Hailie's belly button, they hear growling, and look like the perfect snack for the big, hungry snake-beast living in Hailie's tummy. Unless they want to become monster food, they need to escape. Fast. Will Madi and Hailie escape, or will they be trapped inside Hailie's belly button forever?

“He’s a bad boy—cocky and damaged. So, why can’t I stop thinking about him?” Broken Dreams Sociable and unselfish, eighteen-year-old Tucker Graves loves two things—his darling little sister and the thrill of playing baseball. He never dreamed that he’d be homeless, but after a series of misfortunes, his life is nothing like he could have possibly imagined. Shocked and shattered, Tucker, his mother, and his baby sister now must brave the dangers of a dilapidated homeless encampment called Camp Roosevelt. A Wounded Heart Homeless since the age of fourteen, Dancer has mastered the tricks of living on the streets as a sex worker. The quiet, reclusive, and calculating ways of this twenty-year-old, green-eyed Adonis help him to survive. He hides his emotional scars from the world by interacting only with his clients, whose occasional bizarre requests he reluctantly fulfills. Dancer’s past has taught him to trust no one. A Second Chance When Tucker and Dancer come face to face on a stormy night, having been thrown together under the same roof, Tucker brings out a feeling in Dancer that he didn’t know still existed in him—desire. Neither man can deny the attraction he feels for the other. But some scars run deep, causing both Tucker and Dancer to question whether falling in love is even possible, especially when survival is on the line. Bryan T. Clark is a multi-published, Rainbow Award-winning author and LAMBDA finalist. *** One hundred percent of the royalties from the first year of this novel’s publication were donated to the Larkin Street Youth Services/Castro Youth Housing Initiative. The CYHI provides transitional housing in the city of San Francisco, California, for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. Fear of being raped, abused, or murdered should not be a part of anyone’s youth.

The Sanctimonious Psychoproctological Invasions By: The Reverend Dr. Len Bergantino, ED. D, PH.D. From 2012 through 2018, Len Bergantino began each day with pro bono writings and invasive interventions that insist and expand upon the first amendment rights of United States citizens. In all areas, he is both knowledgeable and feels national, state, and local governments are stuck in socially immobile positions. He created ways to invade entire cultures and governments to move those stuck in quicksand off the dime and into a society that spirals upward. He refers to the creation of these methods as sanctimonious psychoproctological invasions in the creation of a political psychology that should be studies by all human beings who want to make a difference and give meaning to their lives.

“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.” The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people. Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body. Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.

Annotation This work engages with the complex archaeological development of the religious sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. It investigates the physical remains of both sanctuaries to show how different visitors interacted with the sacred spaces of Delphi and Olympia in an important variety of ways during the archaic and classical periods.

I know the importance of the individual experience of metastacised melanoma cancer, because it is a very special journey. People are prone to forget, such as when one forgets they have a finger, until they hit it; people also forget they have a life until it is very seriously threatened. The worst sentence in this world that a doctor can pronounce is, I am sorry, but the medical profession can do nothing further for you. This work explores how my wife, Jeannie, who was my home caregiver, and I travelled the cancer journey together. The journey was not the same for Jeannie as it was for meit was my melanoma cancer, but I was Jeannies husband, and therefore the stress was that much more for her, as she never knew what further stresses she had to face. This book examines the strengths of our relationship, despite the difficulties of living on an island. It is interesting how we were aware of these difficulties, and yet we worked through them. Then came the details of how the cancer was treated, both by conventional and alternative treatment. My alternative treatment had a journey all of its own, incorporating several people, all of whom were heroes in their own right. This alternative treatment was later to be regarded as a miracle by several oncologists in a Brisbane hospital. It is a thoughtful, painful, and revealing account of the years spent fighting this cancer. This book is educative, giving a report on melanoma. Mainly, the message it brings is one of hope for those who now have seemingly no hope against melanoma. I had three CT scans and a bone scan in May 2012, proving I am still free of melanoma.

School Days (Chemin-d’Ecole) is a captivating narrative based on Patrick Chamoiseau’s childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It is a revelatory account of the colonial world that shaped one of the liveliest and most creative voices in French and Caribbean literature today. Through the eyes of the boy Chamoiseau, we meet his severe, Francophile teacher, a man intent upon banishing all remnants of Creole from his students’ speech. This domineering man is succeeded by an equally autocratic teacher, an Africanist and proponent of “Negritude.” Along the way we are also introduced to Big Bellybutton, the class scapegoat, whose tales of Creole heroes and heroines, magic, zombies, and fantastic animals provide a fertile contrast to the imported French fairy tales told in school. In prose punctuated by Creolisms and ribald humor, Chamoiseau infuses the universal terrors, joys, and disappointments of a child’s early school days with the unique experiences of a Creole boy forced to confront the dominant culture in a colonial school. School Days mixes understanding with laughter, knowledge with entertainment—in ways that will fascinate and delight readers of all ages.