New Releases

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators.

Debauched pop star Howie Howden has led a charmed life – there has been nothing a fat cheque, a non-disclosure agreement or a course of penicillin hasn’t made go away. But a calamitous night on the town, with his troubled yet dutiful manager Eddy Katz, has consequences for both men.

200 years in the future, environmental catastrophe has befallen the Earth, leaving the skies and weather systems transformed into a nightmarish maelstrom of rainbow chemicals, and the city of London wiped off the map (opinion remains divided on whether or not this was the best outcome for the country).

Have you ever sat and listened to what people talk about when they sit in bars or travel on public transport? Most of it is banal, unfinished sentences talking over each other to get their point across. But every now and then, someone says something that ignites a thought, then that thought becomes an idea and before you know it a brand-new story is born. These 14 short stories were sparked from those randomly overheard conversations. Snippets snatched from the chit-chat of strangers, twisted and turned into surreal tales, sometimes dark, sometimes funny.

Native Texan Jacob "Mack" McKenzie is a well-meaning patriot in mid-life crisis. Confronted by the cognitive dissonance that surrounds him, he has been humbled by divorce and an ill-timed foray into entrepreneurship. Though he moved away from Texas for college and stayed in the Mid-Atlantic to work and raise a family, he always remained a Texan at heart.

Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the intrepid imposters eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings of self-help guru Brad Beard, and Professor Sayer's uncomfortably erotic couples counselling. But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel.

Tired of dry and dull history books that put you to sleep faster than a lullaby? Brace yourself for a literary rollercoaster like no other! "Emergency Services Humorous History Book" grabs your attention and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Step into a world where history meets humor, and the extraordinary tales of first responders (firefighters, EMS, police, dispatcher), nurses, military heroes, and those in corrections come alive with a side-splitting twist.

From surf-lifesaving to a hungover Army deployment, being broke with a gum infection in Europe, spooning Richie McCaw on a mountain, improvising make-up for Paul Holmes, running my first ultra-marathon and reinventing myself after redundancy: every wild, brilliant and hilarious experience has taught me something new. Whether it's how not to care about being judged, how to fake it till you make it, how to throw yourself into the unknown or how to push through the pit of despair, I've come to love that we are all works in progress. If I fail from time to time, that's okay too.

Don't Eat the Scraps describes the crucial and (as of now!) unknown theory of a behavior that men exhibit in the first six to eight weeks in dating. Women everywhere find themselves scratching their head, asking themselves the chin-quivering question, "Where did it all go wrong?" In a lighthearted, provocative and hilarious way, Jules lays out all the things that women need to know in order to navigate, step-by-step, through the first months of any relationship, armed with some of the soundest Jules' Rules dating advice they'll ever receive to overcome future hurdles (and scraps!).

Welcome to Rule 23: It’s the real-life tool that an elite coterie of trial lawyers has repurposed into a personal piggy bank for its members. With little cost and less risk, Rule 23 enables its acolytes to leverage a single client’s claim into hundreds, thousands, or even millions of similar claims and to reap the resulting profits. Exploiting the common folk hasn’t yielded such royal returns since they were serfs!