The Great Indoorsman

In these deeply funny and introspective essays, Andrew Farkas boldly surveys the “in-of-doors,” where a higher degree of comfort can be found than out-of-doors, and discovers that our lives are controlled much more by fiction than by anything “real.”

Noted TV personality and columnist Reid Duffy showcases 30 Indiana restaurants that have stood the test of time in this updated and expanded edition of Indiana's Favorite Restaurants. These showcased restaurants have been in existence for 25 years or more, and in some cases for several generations. Recipes for favorite dishes from these restaurants are included so that you can recreate the foods you love at home. Approximately 60 recipes -- from Acapulco Joe's Taco Filling to Nashville House Fried Biscuits -- accompany Duffy's reviews. "Comfort food" abounds in Indiana -- 162 restaurants are included in this category, and 23 well-known steak houses are highlighted in "Where's the Beef?" No fewer than 137 ethnic restaurants around the state are profiled here. Duffy looks to the future as well: he reviews 80 new restaurants that are "destined to stand the test of time." All of the restaurants popularized by Indiana Cooks! (IUP, 2005) have been included in this mouthwatering guidebook. Double the size of the original guide, Reid Duffy's Guide to Indiana's Favorite Restaurants serves up 432 thorough and extensive reviews. Each establishment has been visited in person and the food taste-tested. The result is the best guide to great dining for Indiana residents as well as visitors to the Hoosier state.

WINNER OF THE SILVER MEDAL IN HUMOR FOR THE 2019 IPPY AWARDS Welcome to the Great Indoors Are your couch, TV, and smartphone among your most prized possessions? Are you looking for proven methods to avoid imminent Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster attacks? How sick and tired are you of hearing your friends and family say, “Let’s go out”? Then you might be an Avid Indoorsman. Embrace the lifestyle with this hilarious handbook full of tips and tricks to help you survive and thrive in your comfy-yet-still-surprisingly-wild climate-controlled world: Take a 20-question test to determine your level of Indoorsmanship. Learn to identify and overcome the dangers of both the indoors and outdoors. Establish a healthy indoor routine, including plenty of sleep, “exercise,” and coffee. Dress the part by thinking simple and sleek…and wearing sweatpants often. Explore the science of ergonomics behind setting up the perfect indoor space. And much more to help you succeed indoors! So, stay inside, read this book, and be grateful for four walls and a fast Internet connection.

When a freelance man in need of money met a mysterious beauty, his plain life was bound to cause waves. She was sweet and mysterious. She was an intelligent planner during the day, a seductive seductress during the night, a web writer with black-rimmed glasses during the day, and a game master with black-rimmed glasses at night. She was a otaku when she met a beautiful woman, and an ordinary writer when she met a veteran planner.

In the fall of 1993, Alice Winkler of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" asked Reynolds Price to write a short story for a Christmas morning broadcast. This assignment would result in NPR's inviting Price to join its varied group of commentators on "All Things Considered." The laws of radio require a concision that has become a welcome new discipline for Price; and here are all the personal essays which he has broadcast since July 25, 1995. Whether recounting events from his past, examining the details of his current experience as a writer, teacher, traveler, and general witness of the world, Price demonstrates in his direct prose that a writer can instantly connect with his audience. He discusses a few predictable topics -- family, the poisonous mysteries of racial intolerance, and faith -- but he also deals with new matters: capital punishment, Gone With the Wind, his adventures while navigating an immensely inaccessible America in a wheelchair; and he provides a memorable piece on childlessness. Throughout, Price never loses sight of the origin of either the word or the spirit of the essay -- the French word connotes a try, an attempt -- and each piece here is a well-formed, revealing, often amusing and refreshing foray into a moment unlike any we've encountered in other forms from him. We're unlikely to read more thought-provoking work from a commentator for a great time to come.

Praise for One Mile Past Dangerous Curve: "This book aims to be about the best of us as it shows us at our least. Thank goodness for Darrell Spencer, the only writer in America to be trusted on the subjects of faith, love, weal and woe." ---Lee K. Abbott " . . . absolutely dire and dear, his best book, a novel about American life right now. . . . this book is accurate, acerbic, and heartfelt at once." ---Ron Carlson Praise for Darrell Spencer: "Mr. Spencer's writing crackles with freshness and lucidity, featuring characters who slide into one another in random encounters and relationships." ---New York Times Book Review "[Spencer] possesses a remarkable ear for the cadence of everyday speech." ---Michael Chabon From the acclaimed author of Caution: Men in Trees and A Woman Packing a Pistol comes a tale of kinship, love, and lawlessness. One Mile Past Dangerous Curve is the story of the Dancers---a family on the verge of collapse. Glen Dancer has come to Ohio to set up another in a series of Snapper franchises. But in the midst of construction, Glen finds himself fighting a painful and futile battle with cancer. His son Eddie, recently divorced, moves from Las Vegas to help. A sign painter by trade, Eddie finds only intermittent work in town until the day a mysterious and wealthy businessman commissions a series of twenty road signs, each different, all featuring odd, cryptic messages. It is on a back-country road, where Eddie has gone to assemble one of the signs, that some previously vague threats become concrete. Though Eddie doesn't know it, the neighboring woods hide a secret, a secret that a gun-toting rural gang wants to keep at any cost.

Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In A Whole New Life, however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life. Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means all) doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." A Whole New Life offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honest insight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.