If you want to learn how to become a player, this book isn’t for you. To be a true player you have to treat women like objects; you can’t afford to care about their feelings. In other words—you have to be an asshole. There are enough assholes in the world; I don’t need to add to their numbers.

If you want to learn how to listen to women, how to become more caring and understanding—again—this book isn’t for you. I can only teach what I know and I don’t know how to listen, care, or be empathetic.

A nerd values his intellect over everything else. You can have any other trait, but if your brain is your defining characteristic, you’re a nerd. I’ll teach you how to use your best trait to pick up real girls in real places.

To use my methods, you must become a hero. A hero refuses to live a life of quiet desperation. At the end of his life, a hero regrets the things he’s done, not the things he hasn’t. He doesn’t regret NOT asking a girl out.

Most nerds avoid hard work. Smart lazy people use their intellect to avoid stressful situations. They choose the path of least resistance and then wonder why they accomplish nothing. Picking up real girls in real places is a contact sport. There will be pain. There is no easy path forward. If you aren’t brave enough to try, you’ll never have an opportunity to succeed. If you don’t have the fortitude to throw yourself back into the fray after you crash and burn, your journey will be over before it started. If you have what it takes to be a heroic nerd, you might want to read this book.

Twenty-one stories for mature audiences only!

This collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories represents the best of the “Lansdale” genre—a strange mixture of dark crime, even darker humor, and adventure tales. Though varied in setting and theme, all the stories are pure Lansdale—eerie, amusing, and occasionally horrific. In “The Pit,” modern gladiators square off against one another using Roman methods. An alternate-history tale called “Trains Not Taken” shows Buffalo Bill as an ambassador and Wild Bill Hickok as a clerk. Lansdale’s love of large lizards and humor are evident in the stories “Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” and “Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland.”

The career of Joe R. Lansdale has spanned more than twenty-seven years, in which period he has written over two hundred short stories. This collection is the best of these. As Lansdale states in his Introduction, ". these stories are the ones I think best reflect my work." Some of these are obviously horrific : others, the realization will slowly, surely creep upon one. Others will visit alternate history, humor, or dark crime. Mixing the impossible, the improbable, and the never-before-thought-of, Lansdale uses his innate East Texas storytelling abilities to perfection. As an added bonus, each story starts with an introduction by Lansdale, describing the story-behind-the-story.

The team behind the bestseller turns conventional biography on its head—and shakes out the good stuff.

Following their Herculean—or is it Sisyphean?—efforts to save the living from ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention to the dead.

As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.” Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have employed a simple—but ruthless—criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to be interesting.

Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently obscure. Spades in hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up everything embarrassing, fascinating, and downright weird about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely irreverent observations.

Organized by capricious categories—such as dead people who died virgins, who kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, whose corpses refused to stay put—the dearly departed, from the inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve.

Discover:

• Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains

• The one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh

• How Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved)

Much like the country doctor who cured smallpox (he’s in here), Lloyd and Mitchinson have the perfect antidote for anyone out there dying of boredom. —like life itself—is hilarious, tragic, bizarre, and amazing. You may never pass a graveyard again without chuckling.