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A Dirty Job
''A Dirty Job'' is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 2006. While still full of humor, Moore drew from his own experiences in tending to the needs of close family and friends in the stages of dying. Premise Charlie Asher, a "beta-male" (as opposed to " alpha-male") leads a satisfying life as the owner and proprietor of a second-hand store in San Francisco. At the moment when his wife Rachel unexpectedly dies in the hospital a short time after the birth of their first child (Sophie), Charlie is chosen to be a "death merchant" who retrieves souls of the dying and protecting them from the forces of the underworld, while he manages his store and raises his daughter. He realizes the ramifications of this business as clues and complications unfold. Movie rights and popularity Shortly after its release, ''A Dirty Job'' reached 9th place on the New York Times Best Seller list. An unabridged commercial compact disc recording of ''A Dirty Job'' has been issue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Moore (author)
Christopher Moore (born January 1, 1957) is an American writer. Early life Christopher Moore was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. An only child, Moore learned to amuse himself with his imagination. He loved reading and his father brought him plenty of books from the library every week. He started writing around the age of twelve and realized that this was his talent by the time he was 16, and he began to consider making it his career. Moore attended and Brooks Institute of Pho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orcus
Orcus was a god of the underworld, punisher of broken oaths in Etruscan and Roman mythology. As with Hades, the name of the god was also used for the underworld itself. Eventually, he was conflated with Dis Pater and Pluto. A temple to Orcus may once have existed on the Palatine Hill in Rome. It is likely that he was transliterated from the Greek daemon Horkos, the personification of oaths and a son of Eris. Origins The origins of Orcus may have lain in Etruscan religion. The so-called " Tomb of Orcus", an Etruscan site at Tarquinia, is a misnomer, resulting from its first discoverers mistaking a hairy, bearded giant for Orcus; it actually depicts a Cyclops. The Romans sometimes conflated Orcus with other underworld gods such as Pluto, Hades, and Dis Pater. The name "Orcus" seems to have referred specifically to the malicious and punishing side of the ruler of the underworld, as the god who tormented evildoers in their afterlife. Like the name Hades, "Orcus" could refer bot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels About Death
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term ''romance''. Such romances should not be confused with th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HarperCollins Books
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the " Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. HarperCollins is headquartered in New York City and London and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The company's name is derived from a combination of the firm's predecessors. Harper & Brothers, founded in 1817 in New York, merged with Row, Peterson & Company in 1962 to form Harper & Row, which was acquired by News Corp in 1987. The Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons, founded in 1819 in Glasgow, was acquired by News Corp in 1987 and merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins. The logo for the firm combines the fire from Harper's torch and the water from Collins' fountain. HarperCollins operates publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China, and publishes under vario ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Absurdist Fiction
Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, Play (theatre), plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent Meaning of life, purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value. In some cases, it may overlap with literary nonsense. The absurdist genre of literature arose in the 1950s and 1960s, first predominantly in France and Germany, prompted by post-war disillusionment. Absurdist fiction is a reaction against the surge in Romanticism in Paris in the 1830s, the collapse of religious tradition in Germany, and the societal and philosophical revolution led by the expressions of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Common elements in absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor, incongruity, the abasement of reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of being " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2006 Fantasy Novels
6 (six) is the natural number following 5 and preceding 7. It is a composite number and the smallest perfect number. In mathematics A six-sided polygon is a hexagon, one of the three regular polygons capable of tiling the plane. A hexagon also has 6 edges as well as 6 internal and external angles. 6 is the second smallest composite number. It is also the first number that is the sum of its proper divisors, making it the smallest perfect number. It is also the only perfect number that doesn't have a digital root of 1. 6 is the first unitary perfect number, since it is the sum of its positive proper unitary divisors, without including itself. Only five such numbers are known to exist. 6 is the largest of the four all-Harshad numbers. 6 is the 2nd superior highly composite number, the 2nd colossally abundant number, the 3rd triangular number, the 4th highly composite number, a pronic number, a congruent number, a harmonic divisor number, and a semiprime. 6 is al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2006 American Novels
6 (six) is the natural number following 5 and preceding 7. It is a composite number and the smallest perfect number. In mathematics A six-sided polygon is a hexagon, one of the three regular polygons capable of tessellation, tiling the plane. A hexagon also has 6 Edge (geometry), edges as well as 6 internal and external angles. 6 is the second smallest composite number. It is also the first number that is the sum of its proper divisors, making it the smallest perfect number. It is also the only perfect number that doesn't have a digital root of 1. 6 is the first unitary perfect number, since it is the sum of its positive proper unitary divisors, without including itself. Only five such numbers are known to exist. 6 is the largest of the four Harshad number, all-Harshad numbers. 6 is the 2nd superior highly composite number, the 2nd colossally abundant number, the 3rd triangular number, the 4th highly composite number, a pronic number, a congruent number, a harmonic divisor nu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Squirrel
Squirrels are members of the family Sciuridae (), a family that includes small or medium-sized rodents. The squirrel family includes tree squirrels, ground squirrels (including chipmunks and prairie dogs, among others), and flying squirrels. Squirrels are indigenous to the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, and were introduced by humans to Australia. The earliest known fossilized squirrels date from the Eocene epoch, and among other living rodent families, the squirrels are most closely related to the mountain beaver and dormice. Etymology The word ''squirrel'', first attested in 1327, comes from the Anglo-Norman which is from the Old French , the reflex of a Latin language">Latin word , which was taken from the Ancient Greek word (; from ) 'shadow-tailed', referring to the long bushy tail which many of its members have. ''Sciurus'' is also the name of one of its genuses. The native Old English language, Old English word for the squirrel, , only survived into Middle Eng ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denver, Colorado
Denver ( ) is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Consolidated city and county, consolidated city and county, the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Colorado, most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. It is located in the Western United States, in the South Platte River, South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains (United States), High Plains east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. With a population of 715,522 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010 United States census, 2010, Denver is the List of United States cities by population, 19th most populous city in the United States and the fifth most populous state capital. Denver is the principal city of the Denver metropolitan area, Denver Metropolitan area (which includes over 3 million people), as well as the economic and cultural center of the broader Front Range Urban Corridor, Front Range, home to more than ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emperor Norton
Joshua Abraham Norton (February 4, 1818 – January 8, 1880) was a resident of San Francisco, California, who in 1859 declared himself "Emperor of these United States" in a proclamation that he signed "Norton I., Emperor of the United States". Commonly known as Emperor Norton, he took the secondary title "Protector of Mexico" in 1866. Born in England and raised in South Africa, Norton left Cape Town in late 1845, sailing from Liverpool to Boston in early 1846 and eventually arriving in San Francisco in late 1849. After a brief period of prosperity, Norton made a business gambit in late 1852 that played out poorly, ultimately forcing him to declare bankruptcy in 1856. Norton proclaimed himself "Emperor of these United States" in September 1859, a role he played for the rest of his life. Norton had no formal political power but was treated deferentially in San Francisco and elsewhere in California, and currency issued in his name was honored in some of the establishments he fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cameo Appearance
A cameo appearance, also called a cameo role and often shortened to just cameo (), is a brief guest appearance of a well-known person or character in a work of the performing arts. These roles are generally small, many of them non-speaking ones, and are commonly either appearances in a work in which they hold some special significance (such as actors from an original movie appearing in its remake) or renowned people making uncredited appearances. Short appearances by celebrities, film directors, politicians, athletes or musicians are common. A crew member of the movie or show playing a minor role can be referred to as a cameo role as well, such as director Alfred Hitchcock who made frequent cameo appearances in his films. Concept Originally, in the 1920s, a "cameo role" meant "a small character part that stands out from the other minor parts". The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' connects this with the meaning "a short literary sketch or portrait", which is based on the lite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bloodsucking Fiends
''Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story'' is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1995. It combines elements of the supernatural and of the romance novel, as well as tongue-in-cheek humor. ''Bloodsucking Fiends'' is the first volume of a trilogy, followed by '' You Suck: A Love Story'' (2007) and '' Bite Me'' (2010). Reception In 1995, a review in ''Library Journal'' said that while ''Bloodsucking Fiends'' was nothing like the works of Anne Rice, the "delightful tale" was "filled with oddball characters, clever dialog, and hilarious situations that are Moore's trademarks", recalling his novel '' Coyote Blue'' (1994). Plot summary Jody, a young, single woman living in San Francisco, wakes up in a dumpster after being mugged and discovers she has been turned into a vampire. While attempting to adjust to her new nocturnal lifestyle, she finds the help of Tommy Flood, a wannabe writer who recently moved to the city and works as a night stocking manager (and champ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
