Humor

Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe

From "the reliably hilarious" (Entertainment Weekly) author of Love, Nina: a brilliantly funny and heartbreaking story of growing up and finding the independence you might not actually want . . .

Teenager Lizzie Vogel has a new job as a dental assistant. This is not as glamorous as it sounds. At least it means mostly getting away from her alcoholic, nymphomaniacal, novel-writing mother. But, if Lizzie thinks being independent means sex with her boyfriend (he prefers bird-watching), strict boundaries (her boss keeps using her loo) or self-respect (surely only actual athletes get fungal foot infections?) she’s still got a lot more growing up to do.

The winner of the 2019 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, Reasons to Be Cheerful is a novel that lives up to its title, confirming Nina Stibbe’s status as one of the most original and delightful writers at work today.

The INFJ Writer: Cracking the Creative Genius of the World’s Rarest Type by Lauren Sapala

After years of coaching writers who struggled with procrastination issues, high sensitivity to criticism, and crippling self doubt, Lauren Sapala realized that almost every one of her clients was an INFJ or INFP.

Using the insights gleaned from these clients, as well as her own personal story, Sapala shows us how the experience of the intuitive writer can be radically different from the norm. INFJ writers don’t think like anyone else, and their highly creative brains take a toll on them that they rarely share with the outside world.

The INFJ Writer discusses such topics as:

How an INFJ writer’s physical health is tied to their creative output

Why INFJ writers are more likely to fall prey to addictions

When an INFJ writer should use their natural psychic ability to do their best creative work

Whether looking to start writing again or to finish the novel/memoir they started so long ago, any writer with the self-awareness to identify themselves as highly sensitive and intuitive will benefit from this book that helps them to find their own magic, and to finally use it to build the creative life that actually works for them.

Scaling Your Business with MOD Virtual Professionals: How to Drive Revenue, Save Time, and Create Your Dream Company by Daniel Ramsey

Scaling your Business with MOD Virtual Professionals is the ultimate how-to guide for entrepreneurs who are looking to reduce costs & rapidly scale their business. It contains practical, tactical advice from MyOutDesk, a leading virtual assistant staffing organization that helped over 5,000 business in the US & Canada hire talented professionals to drive revenue and scale.

Whether your current business is large or small, it’s important that you understand two things before you begin to scale: where you are and where you are going. You’ll learn that and much more in Scaling Your Business With MOD Virtual Professionals — the go to guide for entrepreneurs who are looking to hire Virtual Assistants and rapidly scale.

There are about 28 million businesses in the United States. According to the US Small Business Administration, all but about 20,000 of those are small businesses–that is, they have fewer than 500 employees. If you want to stand out from the pack, if you want to grow beyond that 99% of businesses ever achieve, then you need an action plan to get there. This book is that plan.

In this new book you’ll learn how to effectively scale any business using virtual assistant knowledge & expertise. It starts by identifying where your business currently is, and then implementing a proven roadmap to success that helps you easily & effectively reach the next level. This is the step-by-step handbook for business growth you’ve been waiting for, written by the founder of the nation’s largest white-glove virtual assistant staffing agency – MyOutDesk, LLC.

Since 2008 MyOutDesk has delivered the highest quality virtual assistant services available, using an innovative talent matching process that combines top-tier talent sourcing with personality profile matching & the most stringent background checks in the nation. In this book, you’ll learn how we built this staffing model – and as well as how you can employ it in your own business to reduce costs, grow revenue and build the business of your dreams.

The Munich Girlby Phyllis Edgerly Ring

Anna Dahlberg grew up eating dinner under her father’s war-trophy portrait of Eva Braun.
Fifty years after the war, she discovers what he never did–that her mother and Hitler’s mistress were friends.

The secret surfaces with a mysterious monogrammed handkerchief, and a man, Hannes Ritter, whose Third Reich family history is entwined with Anna’s.

Plunged into the world of the “ordinary” Munich girl who was her mother’s confidante–and a tyrant’s lover–Anna finds her every belief about right and wrong challenged. With Hannes’s help, she retraces the path of two women who met as teenagers, shared a friendship that spanned the years that Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress, yet never knew that the men they loved had opposing ambitions.

Eva’s story reveals that she never joined the Nazi party, had Jewish friends, and was credited at the Nuremberg Trials with saving 35,000 Allied lives. As Anna’s journey leads back through the treacherous years in wartime Germany, it uncovers long-buried secrets and unknown reaches of her heart to reveal the enduring power of love in the legacies that always outlast war.

Feel the Spin by Marshall Moskow

An absorbing historical drama about science, faith, and social upheaval during Reconstruction. Thomas Walters has joined the faculty of Tideland College in the fall of 1875 as professor of the recently introduced disciplines of natural philosophy and astronomy. Walters finds himself caught up in the broader conflict between science and religion, as well as the bitter struggle between the ways of the Old South and the advance of a new national identity that embraces social equality, women’s rights, and rationality. The reader follows the experiences of Thomas, his family; two former slaves employed by him; a professor of Latin from Germany with a secret past; and three questioning, rambunctious students. Many colorful supporting characters enhance the action and atmosphere of the story. Feel the Spin is beautifully written, well-researched, thought provoking, and speaks to issues that remain unresolved in the present day.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

The #1 international bestseller, from Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose

“Vintage Eco . . . the book is a triumph.” – New York Review of Books

Nineteenth-century Europe–from Turin to Prague to Paris–abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man?

“[Eco] demonstrates once again that his is a voice that compels our attention” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale . . . Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” – New York Times

“Classic Eco, with a difference.” – Los Angeles Times

The Rebuilding of Tom Cooper by Spencer Brown

British humour at its best in the hilarious debut novel from stand-up comedian Spencer Brown. A laugh-out-loud comedy about life, love and contemporary manhood, Tom Cooper is a male Bridget Jones for our times.

‘A gloriously self-aware, satirical romp through the terrors of relationships, family life and survival. Philip Roth meets Cold Feet!’ Helen Lederer (Absolutely Fabulous, Losing It (P.G.Wodehouse Award nominee))

‘Spencer Brown is endlessly inventive and delightfully, dependably silly, like a joy-seeking missile’ Richard Ayoade (The IT crowd, Submarine, The Crystal Maze)

‘An aspirational figure for the men of today’ Omid Djalili (Live at the Apollo, The Infidel)

‘Very funny. Peep Show combined with Outnumbered. But you know. In a book.’ Josh Howie (Josh Howie’s Losing it, BBC Radio 4)

‘Hilarious and heart-warming’ Andi Osho (Live at the Apollo, Curfew)

Tom Cooper’s life has fallen apart. His wife has left, he’s stuck in an accountancy job he hates and he can’t even call on the grandparents for support – they’re too busy – after all, a Scrabble trophy doesn’t engrave itself.

But when a creative position opens up at the advertising agency he works for, he sees the opportunity to turn things around. All he has to do is pitch a product to a new market, convince Maestro J he is sufficiently finger-clickingly ‘creative’, beat his weaselly co-worker/nemesis John to the job, and try not to fall for his new mentor, Amanda. Oh, and try to blend in with people 10 years younger than him, survive the office obstacle course using his imaginary agility and stop accidentally turning up to work in the exact same outfit as Doug. The Rebuilding of Tom Cooper is a laugh-out-loud comedy about life, love and 21st century manhood. 


About the author

Spencer Brown cut his teeth in the Cambridge Footlights alongside John Oliver and Matthew Holness, before becoming an internationally acclaimed stand-up comedian and TV presenter on shows including Lip Service which he hosted with Holly Willoughby. He has also appeared in cult comedies including Nathan Barley and Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace, as well as starring in the films ‘Shed of the Dead’ and the upcoming ‘The Devil went down to Islington’. He is also an award winning film maker, having written and directed The Boy with a Camera for a Face, which won multiple prizes including the Oscar qualifying Best of Fest at SLIFF.

F*** Leadership: How to Motivate and Mentor Your Team to True Success by Josh Coats

You want to succeed. You want to reach your goals. Even more, you want to make a difference. You want to inspire others and help them to succeed.

But that takes leadership. And according to what you have seen, heard, and read, that means you have to be a larger-than-life personality. You have to have a celebrity status on social media. You have to be the most organized and structured human on the planet. You have to memorize thirty-seven different personality types and know how to communicate properly with each one.

How in the world can you do that and still find a way to lead by example? Apparently, being a leader is only for super-humans that have some type of natural-born qualities the rest of us just do not possess.

This is what you’ve grown to believe. That is why your business has become a struggle and a burden instead of a purpose and a passion.

I’ve mentored some of the top leaders in the network marketing industry, and trained thousands in my online training groups. I’ve spent four years developing simple systems that help average people to get extraordinary results.

This book will challenge you to lead from the front and become the kind of person that people want to follow. You will also learn simple systems, that when applied, will lead to team energy beyond what you could imagine!