They Don T Run Red Trains Anymore

A model walks into a life drawing class, drops her robe, and changes the life of a young sculptor forever. For the first time she understands obsession, passion and love. And learns that the currency of love is sacrifice.

Follow Don and Paul as they dive headlong into the deepest of human questions and find answers outside words?answers that have to be experienced to be believed. Day 1: "Trips like ours are greener grass left unknown for fear of believing trite sayings; sayings that are sometimes true. But our friends back home live an existence under the weight and awareness of times; a place we are slowly escaping; a world growing fainter by the hour and the mile." Day 13: "It feels again that we are leaving who we were, moving on into the people we will become, hopefully, people with some kind of answers, some kind of thing to believe tht makes sense of beauty, of romance. Something that would explain the red glow against Paul's face, the red glow that seems to be coming off the console . . . 'Did you notice the engine light is lit, bud?' I ask . . ." Day 83: "I sit in the van, waiting for her to come out when I notice a window in one of the classrooms open, and a backpack comes falling out, spilling a few books onto the lawn. After the backpack comes Elida, falling atop the pack and laying low, peeking back into the window to see if the teacher noticed. She gathers her books, reaches into the classroom and closes the window, then runs toward the van as though this were a prison break." As you read Through Painted Deserts, you'll soon realize this is not just one man's account of finding light, God, and beauty on the open road. Rather, this book maps the journey you're already traveling . . . or soon will be.

“How the characters in this story are interconnected is a marvel of storytelling.” — JOHN IRVING Fate, circumstance, and the symbolism of sight collide in this modern gothic novel. On a hot June day in 1965, two six-year-old boys, Gareth and Jack, compete to see who can climb higher up a tree. When Jack falls and loses his eye on a thorn bush, the accident sets off a series of events that will bind the boys together for the rest of their lives. When the best friends meet albino twins Clara and Blanca, a shared fate unfolds. With Gareth and Jack’s help, the twins are able to reclaim their lives and leave their nightmarish past behind them. From the shores of Lake Ontario to the hustle of Berlin, from the art of oculary to punk opera, this is a story of dark secrets, suppressed desires, forgiveness, and love.

Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, and Searching for God is authored by Donald Miller and bundled into a 3-in-1 collection.

Despite the "green" benefits of rail travel, Canada has lost much of its railway heritage. Across the country stations have been bulldozed and rails ripped up. Once the heart of communities large and small, stations and tracks have left little more than a gaping hole in Canada’s landscapes. This book revisits the times when railways were the country’s economic lifeline, and the station the social centre. Here was where we worked, played, listened to political speeches, or simply said goodbye to loved ones never knowing when they would return. The landscapes which grew around the station are also explored and include such forgotten features as station hotels, restaurants, gardens and the once common railway YMCA. Railway companies often hired the world’s leading architects to design grand station buildings which ranged in style from chateau-esque to art deco. Even small town stations and wayside shelters displayed an artistic flare and elegance. Although most have vanished, the book celebrates the survival of that heritage in stations which have been saved or indeed remain in use. The book will appeal to anyone who has links with our rail era, or who simply appreciates the value of Canada’s built heritage.

A model walks into a life drawing class, drops her robe, and changes the life of a young sculptor forever. For the first time she understands love, obsession and the redemption of creation, but it comes at a high price.

In this near-future dystopia, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And the few are slaves to the system. Fourteen-year-old Queenie is a gubmint girl, a welfare baby born to a single mother living in the projects. She's also one of the few fertile females of her generation, or any. When Mister and Missuz take her home from juvie, Queenie thinks everything's going to be just fine. She'll stay with them for a while, have her baby, then move back to the projects and get enough gubmint money for her and Junior to live on. But the rules changed when she wasn't looking, rules developed and implemented by Missuz and others like her. And what Missuz plans for Queenie isn't a life of government-funded freedom at all.

“A fascinating mix of fact, history, self-confession, self-accusation, and self-forgiveness—a diary of both emotional relationships and travel.” —Pasatiempo This classic account of self-discovery and railroad life describes Linda Grant Niemann’s travels as an itinerant brakeman on the Southern Pacific. Boomer combines travelogue, Wild West adventure, sexual memoir, and closely observed ethnography. A Berkeley Ph.D., Niemann turned her back on academia and set out to master the craft of railroad brakeman, beginning a journey of sexual and subcultural exploration and traveling down a path toward recovery from alcoholism. In honest, clean prose, Niemann treks off the beaten path and into the forgotten places along the rail lines, finding true American characters with colorful pasts—and her true self as well. “Ma[kes] the railroad experience come alive with all its grit, danger, romance, and general outrageousness . . . Possibly the finest book I’ve ever read about the actual experience of working on the railroad.” —Trains Magazine “Niemann has a taut, lyrically restrained but vividly descriptive style, with an observational vigilance befitting a brakeman’s mindset, and her narrative clips along like a boxcar rolling through the yard.” —Bloom Magazine “A remarkable adventure tale, the occupational odyssey of the Ph.D. in literature who immerses herself in blue-collar America.” —Library Journal