Albert Sparks Jr. was born in 1929, the only child of Albert and Mamie Sparks. The Sparkses were good people, non-educated, and much influenced by the southern rural, fundamentalist Protestant Church. Two years later, in early Depression times, they built a small brick home in Bodenheimer, a community about 10 miles from Winston-Salem, NC. Albert Jr. was reared in that home-centered, church focused environment, and at age 10 he became a member of Royal Ambassadors, a boys organization at Bodenheimer Baptist. Still a member even now, his leader is a maudlin, highly emotional lady, a teary and true daughter of the Lord. And then, a fellow RA offered him the opportunity to become a paperboy. A new life began! Albert Jr. had a route of 65 Bodenheimer customers, more or less. Every afternoon on his rounds he heard storiesCalvin Butner and his bootlegging, hauling white likker in a Nehi drink truck; Hub and Estelle Doty and their marital problems, and their strange succession of partners. Some stories have follow-up chapters, such as the German POW who walked away from a work detail. A key to the stories is Wellmans Store, where Albert Jr. meets the truck with his daily bundle of Tribunes. Every day he talks with Cece and Ella Mae Wellman about war news, and he hears gossip from the Ladies News Table. Most chapters have the date and a few headlines from that days paper. In the final chapter, on the night of V-J Day, he met the prettiest girl Ive ever seen, 15 years old, and so-o-o soft. Actually, shes the RA leaders niece. And they celebrated V-J Night, or at least they started. I probly wont go back to RAs.

Rudolph St. Clair had it all. Superpowers, fame and the love and respect of the citizens of New York City until one day a terrible incident occurred, and Rudolph lost his powers. Rudolph St. Clair settled into a normal human lifestyle. He soon married his college sweetheart, started a family and moved into what he thought was the perfect brownstone apartment in Brooklyn. Rudolph soon discovered that the brownstone apartment was haunted, and he would have to fight for his survival. In addition, family secrets, and a possible alien threat loomed in the background and created additional challenges for a man who no longer had superpowers. Rudolph would have to find the courage and strength to deal with the spiritual and alien forces and solves The Mystery of Brownstone 4067.

Now a major motion picture directed by Academy Award-nominated Lee Daniels and starring Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, David Oyelowo, and Macy Gray. The sun is rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call is found dead on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck is swiftly arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Ward James - hotshot investigative reporter - returns to his rural hometown, intrigued by the proposition from a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free her convicted 'fiancé'. Together, they barrel down Florida's back roads and through its seamy underbelly in search of The Story, racing flat out into a head-on collision that will make headline news.

The Paper-Boy is about a man's obsession with people from the past and how this undermines his judgement and brings confusion to his life. Marty Fox and his wife Nancy set off from Winnipeg for a holiday around Lake of the Woods to recharge their flagging marriage. The first night works for Marty because of a bottle of Scotch, a radio, and because he can imagine that Nancy is a stranger. The following evening he thinks he recognizes two attractive women, twins, with a much older man. The women are Constance and Rosemary, who moved into Erwin Sommerfeld's house on Marty's Winnipeg paper route in the sixties - Constance as Sommerfeld's 16-year-old wife and Rosemary as a kind of bonus. As a paper-boy, Marty had fantasized over these good-looking girls. Now it all comes back. But does Sommerfeld have a "married" relationship with both sisters? Rain and high water follow Marty and Nancy who go with Sommerfeld and the twins to a river resort. What really happens to Sommerfeld there? The holiday becomes a nightmare, with strange consequences back in the city not only for Marty, but also for Nancy and Constance and Rosemary.

Anyone wondering what sort of experience prepares one for a future as an engineer may be surprised to learn that it includes delivering newspapers. But as Henry Petroski recounts his youth in 1950s Queens, New York–a borough of handball games and inexplicably numbered streets–he winningly shows how his after-school job amounted to a prep course in practical engineering. Petroksi’s paper was The Long Island Press, whose headlines ran to COP SAVES OLD WOMAN FROM THUG and DiMAG SAYS BUMS CAN’T WIN SERIES. Folding it into a tube suitable for throwing was an exercise in post-Euclidean geometry. Maintaining a Schwinn revealed volumes about mechanics. Reading Paperboy, we also learn about the hazing rituals of its namesakes, the aesthetics of kitchen appliances, and the delicate art of penny-pitching. With gratifying reflections on these and other lessons of a bygone era–lessons about diligence, labor, and community-mindedness–Paperboy is a piece of Americana to cherish and reread.

'I reckon throwing that rock through the window of Phelan's butcher shop was one of the best things I ever did. But I didn't think so at the time ...' So begins the Ted Egan story. Old Phelan presented Ted's mother with a bill: TO WINDOW BROKEN BY TEDDY EGAN £5 5s 0d. Ted was going to have to find the money. He got it as a paperboy, shouting 'Herooda paper!' on street corners. Jumping on and off the No. 20 tram rattling out of the city of Melbourne into Coburg. Ducking back to the newsagency to get a Women's Weekly for a woman in the Ladies' lounge of Brown's Hotel. In The Paperboy's War the well-known outback folklorist, singer, songwriter, historian, and television presenter recalls his early days, his priestly vocation, the warmth of family life, the agony of puberty, and Melbourne in the 1940s. A great and terrible war raged, but here we see it from a unique perspective: the paperboy. At home the Yanks were taking over leafy Parkville, the dance floors and the women's hearts. Even - black Yanks! Nights at home would be spent tracing the exploits of brave Timoshenko at Stalingrad, speculating on how 'people who live in paper houses' like the Japanese couldn't cause too much trouble, and gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of divisional shoulder patches, enemy aircraft silhouettes and the classes of warships. Ted Egan rekindles the pride Australians felt for 'the Rats' at Tobruk and those who slugged it out on the Kokoda Trail. But life and dreams go on, war or no war. Every schoolday the excruciatingly beautiful Norma would hop on the tram at The Grove. Br. 'Slick' Edwards at the Christian Brothers would read Man Shy and there arouse a love of words. The return of cousin Frank, the bronzed Anzac from the Middle East, provided a role model. Aunt Mary's tales of the Murchison Goldfields stirred a wish to travel. And there was cousin Bill, who had run away to sea at 15, travelled the world and experienced the war at close quarters. He came back wearing Italian suits and gave the young Ted an idea. He too would be a sailor. Ted would leave Melbourne and go to Brazil, via Darwin. Ted Egan was born in Melbourne and spent the first sixteen years of his life there, the years covered by this book, the first of three telling of his life. He intended to drop in on the Northern Territorians for a month before going off to become a gaucho in South America, but ended up staying in the Territory for more than 40 years. Ted Egan studied under lamplight in the outback, gaining a BA from ANU. He is working on a post-graduate historical account of the clash between Aboriginal and western culture when a group of Japanese fishermen and a white policeman were speared to death in 1932. He learned two Aboriginal languages and has taught Aboriginal Studies at Alice Springs High School. He performs, writes, sings and records his own songs, and collects and records others. He is a television presenter and writer. He is a member of the Prime Minister's Reconciliation Council. Awarded the Order of Australia (AM) in 1993 for 'services to the Aboriginal community and contribution to the literary heritage of Australia through song and verse', he lives and works in Alice Springs.

Paperboy tells the story as only an afternoon paperboy in rural America in the sixties can. Thousands of readers identified with the unique characters of Colby while reading The Bridge. They grew to love Tommy and the band of boys, were entertained by their childish pranks, and touched by their generosity. In Paperboy, change is coming to Colby. The shoe factory has sold and a hat factory is taking its place. A factory manager has been named and he's definitely not from Colby. There's an influx of interesting newcomers. The high school principal is also new to Colby. He must deal with teenage pregnancy, the snooping high school office secretary, and the Colby Curls rumor mill. He, too, has a mysterious past and uses it to his advantage. The pregnant teen and her auto-mechanic single mother aren't Colby natives either. Rumors about both abound. The mother has a past which touches the present, and eventually involves the entire town. Tommy and Booger, while delivering the Colby Telegraph, discover that Colby's patriarch, Mr. Koch, has a heroic but classified history. While raking leaves for Mrs. Whitener, they learn the origin of her accent and how she got to Colby. It's not what most people think. Jupiter Storm, the town's primary purveyor of gossip, whose opinion always exceeds his knowledge, is perpetually annoying. But Tommy and Booger learn that Jupiter is a decorated World War II veteran. And when a threatening stranger appears on the scene, the entire town learns of Jupiter's unique but redeeming skill. How will Colby be different, and how will it be the same? About the Author Stan and his wife Debbie live in Southern Missouri where they raised three boys and a golden retriever. www.stancrader.com

"This little book of stories is for newspaper carriers and people who read the newspapers they deliver. It is also for people who grew up in small towns and in the country, and who live in small communities, even in big towns and cities. The stories were orginally for my grandchildren, and then some of them were published in Stone County Enterprise, the weekly newspaper in Wiggens, Mississippi. ... This little book is also about life in the 1950s which was a magcal time for me, a kid growing up in the village of Perkinston, Mississippi."-- Author's Preface.

A young man learns that there is more to being successful than the bottom line. A Paperboy's Fable is a concise, entertaining fable that makes revolutionary points using age old principles. Whether someone is opening a lemonade stand or leading a startup software company, the 11 Principles of Success make A Paperboy's Fable a timeless tale that is as fresh as it is universal. A Paperboy's Fable also features interviews with many professors, entrepreneurs, CEO’s and General David Petraeus.