"After a few centuries, the only death 'big enough' is a human sacrifice. I know, because I'm an animator. My name is Anita Blake". Working for Animators, Inc. is just a job — like selling insurance, but now there's a rogue animator who's not just raising the dead…he's raising Hell

When Evan Nazarenus returns from a teaching post at the summer school in Nebraska, he cannot wait for a couple of blissful weeks spent with his wife and two children in Clovis, a small town where his brother has a summer house. But soon after they arrive for the long awaited holiday, Swan, Evan's wife, announces that she is expecting a child … who is not fathered by Evan. This news shocks and hurts Evan deeply, but for his children's sake he decides to keep it to himself through the holidays they dreamt of for so long. But a family secret of such calibre is difficult to hide and the curious small-town neighbours begin to notice that something is amiss with the couple. The Laughing Matter, first published in 1953, is a disturbing family drama set against the landscape of a small Californian town, with a close-knit community who embrace new-comers with the curiosity of those hungry for gossip. William Saroyan draws his characters with immense sensitivity for human erring and self-inflicted suffering

Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game. Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years’ absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country’s civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He’s probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago. Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko’s stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko’s fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko’s clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland — but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness

SUGAR' WILLEM FLOURES That's a name I built from the ground up. I wasn't the first to systematically climb the ranks, beating the sugar out of everyone I had known to be inferior, leaving only the sour taste of defeat, my claim forever being: "I am the greatest!" I can still hear it now. In the silence of this locker room, blood drying on my face, I can still hear those words. And I was. I was the greatest. JAB LEFT HOOK JAB LEFT HOOK RIGHT HOOK JAB STRAIGHT TO THE BODY: JAB JAB POWER SHOT STRAIGHT POWER SHOT STRAIGHT UPPERCUT And then a voice says, "'Sugar'… you are no longer sweet with the science