I’m Not Like Everybody Else is a collection of short stories and poetry that explores how the rainy North-West can create anti-heroes and rebel spirits. Drawing from the music and culture of the region, Richard explores themes of isolation, focusing on rebellious thoughts and actions from a cast of characters that have been marginalised and driven to the edge of society. “Manchester, you are in my blood, I can never leave you.” The book was written in an unplanned and spontaneous frenzy and at a time of extreme emotional turmoil for the author. I’m Not Like Everybody Else expresses themes of isolation through the eyes of those who are alienated by society: murderers, psychopaths, the homeless, the falsely accused, cross-dressers and fatalistic revisionists. “I’m not like everybody else. I feel that strong urge for isolation too.” Inspired by Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski, Richard’s second collection will be enjoyed by readers based in the North-West, as well as fans of poetry and short stories, and his first collection, I Wasn’t Made For These Times.

The last forty years have seen a massive change in the delivery of healthcarein the UK. Starting from well outside the establishment, SteveBollen negotiated his way through prejudice and personal problemsand, from a base in one of the most socially deprived areas in the UK,rose through the ranks to become one of the country's leading sportsinjury surgeons. Part autobiography, part observation, comment and commentaryon the Health Service, health, life, love and death, sprinkled withstardust from his long association with top sportsmen and women,his story shares the laughter, tears, frustrations and triumphs of a longand fulfilling surgical career.

Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else. Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant “disciplinary” mode of power to a “biopolitical” mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical “resistance” need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning—saying “no” to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the “attention capitalism” that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between “keepin’ it real” and “sellin’ out.”