Books published by publisher Emerald Publishing Limited

This second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language (as with Ella Minnow Pea - his first book) to a small town in the South.Welcome to Higby follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. The weaving of narratives brings us Stewie Kipp and Marci Luck, whose love for one another has grown stale as Stewie’s faith becomes impertinent; Carmen Valentine and Euless Ludlam, whose shared debilitating shyness threatens to derail a relationship that has hardly gotten started; the Reverend Oren Cullen, a widower who struggles to renew ties to his emotionally distant son Clint in the midst of lingering grief and a midlife crisis; Tula Gilmurray, whose love for her brother Hank can’t heal her worry over his fading mind; and Talitha Leigh whose thirst for adventure delivers her into the hands of a vegan cult that ignores her protestations, but tries to calm her with hearty legumes.Welcome to Higby is a Southern-comical tale about simple dreams both realized and thwarted by all the complexities of the human heart.

In a moving retelling of Hansel and Gretel, a woman is murdered during a terrorist attack, leaving her three sons in the care of their grandmother, Lilli. As the four prepare to celebrate Christmas without her, Lilli is drawn into a lonely world of memories, forced to confront the horrors of the Nazi persecution she managed to survive. After losing her entire family in the Holocaust, Lilli finds that it is this final death—that of her daughter—that allows her to reach out to the next generation and, with them, forge a unique path toward peace and reconciliation.

Agency leaders spend the majority of their time on three areas - their people, clients and new business. These are all important levers for consultancy growth. But too often, agency owners forget two more essential tools for growth: attention to the numbers, and investment in their leaders.The consultancy leadership role can seem like an endless stream of fires to put out. It can leave leaders feeling as if their team, or their clients, are running their business rather than themselves. That's where this book comes in.Grow, Build, Sell, Live features practical and implementable advice and tools to address the day-to-day reality of running a successful agency. In addition to giving guidance on people, clients and new business, the book covers leadership and the numbers in detail to ensure leaders have the tools and knowledge to be in control.The content draws on proven approaches, helpful science and real-life examples to give practical recommendations to improve readers' ability to achieve the controlled growth which is essential to agency success.If you are thinking about starting your own agency; have started one and hit your first round of growing pains, or are a veteran looking for an exit, this book is for you. It will appeal to current and aspiring agency owners who want to understand and be conscious of their choices and take control of their agency.

From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn's most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Mark Dunn is the author of five previous novels—including Ella Minnow Pea and Ibid—and more than thirty full-length plays. He is currently the playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.

Izzy’s eccentric, complicated mother committed suicide on her forty-first birthday. Now, on the night before Izzy herself is to turn forty-one, she struggles with the realization that she will be older than her mother ever was. And to make matters worse, her widowed father, unstable sister Ellie, and precocious niece have decided to accompany her to Colorado for what promises to be an emotionally charged weekend. As Izzy is flooded with memories from her past and wonders about her future, she must face a choice that could break her family apart.ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elisabeth Hyde is the author of The Abortionist’s Daughter, Monoosook Valley, and Her Native Colors. Born and raised in New Hampshire, she briefly practiced law for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., before leaving to write full time. She currently lives with her family in the Colorado foothills. Her website is www.elisabethhyde.com.

Vincent Spinetti is the archetypal tortured artist—a sensitive young writer who suffers from alienation, parental neglect, poverty, depression, alcoholism, illness, nervous breakdowns, and unrequited love. However, he is unaware that these torments are due to the secret manipulations of New Renaissance, an experimental organization that hopes to improve mindless main-stream culture by raising writers who emphasize artistic quality over commerce. New Renaissance hires ex-musician Harlan Eiffler to manipulate its most promising prodigy, Vincent. Wickedly antisocial and disgusted by what passes for entertainment in the twenty-first century, Harlan ensures that Vincent remains a true artist. He poses as Vincent’s manager and nurtures his career, all the while continuing to torture him.Smart, funny, and poignant, Torture the Artist examines the timeless idea that true art can only result from suffering. “If you could bottle Joey Goebel's imagination and sell it by the glass, we'd all be in rehab. Torture the Artist – which addresses the premise that art, like grapes in a wine press, can be squeezed out of an artist by various torments – is as full of surprises as a brand new vintage, and Joey Goebel is the wunderkind of contemporary American fiction.” – Ed McClanahan, author of The Natural Man and FamousPeople I Have Known“In Torture the Artist, Joey Goebel performs a mad exorcism on the society of the spectacle, unearthing the secrets of the American dream, doing it with the inventiveness of a twenty-first-century Mark Twain fueled by love and sorrow.”Peter Plate, author of Fogtown and Police and Thieves“Wickedly ingenious…Goebel's ebulliently funny writing sparkles off the page. He's created a whole, living, breathing world, filled with vividly sympathetic souls, and deliciously evil ones…one of the most interesting and engaging books I've read in a while, a smart, witty, deeply moving parable about the things we do for art -- and for love.”Caroline Leavitt, Boston Globe“So as Fitzgerald tagged his generation’s excesses and delusions in The Great Gatsby and Bret Easton Ellis did the same in the 1980s with Less Than Zero, Goebel grabs the Zeitgeist by the nape of the neck and gives it a good twirl in Torture the Artist…hilarious, anarchic, and – this is no faint praise – adolescent.”Pages Magazine“…lively new novel…[with] well-drawn characters and smooth, highly readable prose.”–Baltimore City Paper“Surprisingly funny, anything-but-predictable story…This novel, a pointed commentary on the media machine that continuously grinds away at our culture, is by turns hilarious, thought-provoking, chilling, and sad. Goebel (The Anomolies) is a quirky, fresh, and relevant voice for our time.”Library Journal STARRED review“…a trip down the dark side of creativity…[Goebel] is one of the fresh young voices in contemporary fiction. Although he’s only 24, his writing and perceptiveness is that of a more seasoned writer. Keep an eye on this talented author.”Kentucky Monthly“If Franz Kafka had lived into the 21st century and were as funny as Jon Stewart, he might have written a novel something like Torture the Artist…[with] wonderfully funny dialogue and observations, written in flawlessly crafted sentences that make you want to phone up like-minded friends and say, ‘Listen to this. Have you ever heard anything more perfect?’”Courier-Journal“Goebel takes his strange characters on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, through a world filled with a strange brew of cynicism, satire, humor and real affection, a bizarre combination of imagination, artifice and insanity.”Curledup.com“Torture The Artist is a great piece of writing that will stick with you long after the last page is turned… another great book from this young author. And I can hope that we have more like this in the future from Goebel…no one is really writing stories like he is.”Indieworkshop.com

In this enchanting debut, a young girl faces the secrets buried in the mud-rich, rain-soaked landscape of her mother’s childhood. When fourteen-year-old Allie’s mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears in the dark waters of the harbor, Allie is taken by Julia—an aunt she barely knows—to stay at the dilapidated dairy farm where her mother grew up. As the days pass and the heat of the wet season swells, Allie confidently waits for her mother’s call, certain that Mae will reappear as she always has in the past. In the meantime, Allie watches her aunt, who is determined to replant the trees of the forest and undo the damage her family has inflicted upon the land. And Allie lurks around the cabin belonging to her mother’s first love, a man who still lives deep within the valley.When the truth about Mae’s childhood and Allie’s mythical father, the Balloon Man, begins to surface, Allie must sort through the lies her mother has told her and come to grips with the many secrets held close in the valley.

In many countries, society seems to be going off the rails. Economies are mired in widening and deepening inequality while the polity has deteriorated into a state of permanent hyper-partisan confrontation. Compromise and pragmatism seem a thing of the past. The central value of fairness has been cast aside. An individual's freedom and prosperity increasingly appear to depend not on personal and social commitments to the fundamental institutions of market economy and political democracy, but rather on whether his or her side dominates in the struggle for power.Leading political economist Lloyd J. Dumas presents a pragmatic alternative view of a society that is capable of maximizing individual freedoms and producing sustained prosperity while preserving socially responsible behavior. In six interconnected essays, he investigates how to secure political freedom and sustainable democracy while avoiding the deliberate manipulation that produces less-than-democratic results; how to achieve equity and material abundance within the market system while avoiding the disadvantages of excessive income and wealth inequality; how to foster individual attitudes that promote progress rather than destroy the idea of individual dignity; how to shape the international organizations and institutions that will construct a solid and truly global social foundation; and how to sustain these foundations through democratic transitions. No blue sky utopian vision of idealists living in a perfect society, this book draws upon real examples from around the globe in order to outline an achievable future where ordinary, fallible human beings can overcome the most troubling limitations of democratic institutions and free market economics in order to harness their power to bring prosperity and maximize personal freedom.With chapters that collectively build a pragmatic conceptual foundation for envisioning an optimally ethical international politico-economic system, Building the Good Society is a must-read for political economists and policymakers interested in realistic, theoretically rigorous recommendations for social development. Because its chapters are digestible as standalone essays, this book is also of interest to anyone concerned with the most pressing political, economic, and social issues of the past ten years.

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Torture the Artist, a fiercely funny novel about red-state politics, family traditions, and a common man who decides to fight back. Somewhere in the middle of America dwells Blue Gene Mapother, a mullet-headed patriot who staunchly supports the American war effort without question. Besides his patriotism, little enlivens him except for pro wrestling, cigarettes, and any instance in which he thinks his masculinity is at stake. And though you wouldn’t know it, Blue Gene hails from one of the wealthiest families in the country. His mother, a fanatical Christian socialite, has a dream in which she sees Blue Gene’s older brother, the handsome but anxious John Hustbourne Mapother, becoming an apocalyptic world savior. Eager to fulfill his mother’s prophecy, John runs for Congress but finds that as a corporate executive, he’s not very popular with his largely working-class constituents. And so, after years of estrangement, the Mapothers reach out to Blue Gene, realizing that they need his common-man touch in order to cast their family name in a more favorable light with voters. With absurd humor and poignant wit, this timely, small-town epic takes us from flea markets to mansions to abandoned Wal-Mart buildings, all the while examining the bizarre relationship between the “high” and “low” classes of America.Joey Goebel lives and teaches creative writing in Henderson, Kentucky. He is the author of the novels The Anomalies and Torture the Artist, both of which have been published in nine languages.