Frank Carlson Library

"There's a certain kind of lost a boy feels in this world without a father. Tim felt it. I felt it. And we realized our only way out would be together. In an openhearted memoir of faith on the fringe, Roger Thompson meditates on the life and premature death of his best friend and business partner, Tim Garrety, cofounder of Skate Street Ventura. Roger and Tim's twenty-year friendship was forged in the surf and on the streets of 1980s California. Together...

The powerful account of one writer's unlikely friendship with his childhood bully, now the president of a motorcycle club in one of America's most dangerous cities. Once upon a time, Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham were mortal enemies: miniature outlaws in a Long Island elementary school, perpetually at each other's throats. Then they lost track of each other. Decades later, when they met again, Abramovich was a writer and Latham had become president...

On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie--working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt--is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie...

Best friends and the most daunting of bachelors, Charlie Harrington, a handsome philanthropist, has such high expectations for his perfect bride that no mortal need apply, Adam Weiss, a forty-something celebrity lawyer, prefers his women very young, very voluptuous, and very short-term, and for Gray Hawk, a gifted artist with a knack for attracting troubled relationships, the idea of family he can't imagine (particularly the family of the woman he's...

Nick and Charlie are in love. But what happens next?. Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. Shy and softhearted Charlie Spring sits next to rugby player Nick Nelson in class one morning. A warm and intimate friendship soon follows, and that soon develops int something more for Charlie, who doesn't think he has a chance. But Nick is struggling with feelings of his own, and as the two grow closer and take on the ups and downs of high...

Once upon a time, in the haunted city of derry, four boys stood together and did a brave thing. It was something that changed them in ways they could never begin to understand. Twenty-five years after saving a Down's-syndrome kid from bullies, Beav, Henry, Pete, and Jonesy -- now men with separate lives and separate problems -- reunite in the woods of Maine for their annual hunting trip. But when a stranger stumbles into their camp, disoriented and...

"It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to...

In 1967, John (Chick) Donohue was a 26-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran working as a merchant seaman when he was challenged one night in a New York City bar. The men gathered at this hearth had lost family and friends in the ongoing war in Vietnam. Now, they were seeing protesters turn on the troops. One neighborhood patriot proposed an idea many might deem preposterous: One of them should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies in combat,...

Dan and Charlie are two best friends who, together, have built a successful marketing empire, but have somehow managed to avoid ever really grown up. Their lives have been turned upside down when they are charged with the care of seven-year-old twins while on the verge of a big business deal. The clueless bachelors stumble in their efforts, leading to one debacle after another, with a gorilla and some pecking penguins. Dan and Charlie learn as much...

Ethan, Isaac and Chris have been friends since childhood, and for a decade, their yearly Christmas Eve reunion has been an annual night of debauchery and hilarity. Now that they2re entering adulthood, the tradition is coming to an end, and to make it as memorable as possible, they set out to find the Nutcracka Ball; the Holy Grail of Christmas parties.