"David can eat an entire sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza in four minutes and thirty-six seconds. Not bad. But he knows he can do better. In fact, he'll have to do better. He's going to compete in the Super Pigorino Bowl pizza-eating contest, and he has to win it because he borrowed his mom's credit card and accidentally put two thousand dollars on it. So he really needs that pizza money. Like, yesterday. And as if training to be a competitive eater weren't...

Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends--one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater--who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

Desperate for cash, small town cop Joe Crow takes a security job that could cost him his life Joe Crow celebrates his thirty-third birthday in his patrol car, watching for speeders and sniffing fat lines of cocaine. A depressed cop with a faltering marriage, a rotten stomach, and an increasingly expensive drug habit, Crow is just looking for a drink and a poker game when he steps into Birdy's. Instead, he meets a man who might be able to save his...

Targeted by drug addicts, a carnival taco vendor must defend his fortune After years playing professional poker, Axel Speeter knows not to trust people. Retired from the table, this no-nonsense old salt makes ends meet by selling tacos at the Minnesota State Fair, and he's got two things on his mind: developing a state-of-the-art burrito, and keeping an eye on the $260,000 he's got squirreled away in coffee cans inside his room at the Motel 6. He's...

To save a friend's daughter from a bad marriage, Joe Crow confronts cultists, carnies, and cocaine wackos Poker-playing ex-cop Joe Crow has been dealt some rotten hands in his life, but he's survived them all. When Axel Speeter starts begging for help, Crow suspects his luck is about to run out. A taco-dealing former poker pro, Speeter's worried about his girlfriend's daughter Carmen. She's the sexiest trouble magnet the state of Omaha has ever seen,...

Lita is the writer. Adam is the entrepreneur. They are Just Friends.So Adam would never sell copies of a self-help book before he'd even written it. And Lita would never try to break up Adam's relationship with Blair, the skankiest girl at school. They'd never sabotage their friends Emily and Dennis. Lita would never date a guy related to a girl she can't stand. They'd never steal each other's blog posts. And Adam would never end up in a fist fight...

In this captivating story about loss, love, and changing your ways, National Book Award--winning author Pete Hautman imbues the classic road trip novel with clever wit and heartfelt musings about life and death. Steven Gerald Gabel-a.k.a. Stiggy-needs to get out of Minnesota. His father recently look his own life, his mother is a shell of the person she used to be, and his sort-of-girlfriend ghosted him and skipped town. What does he have left to...

For Annie's tenth birthday, her papa gives her a pad of paper, some colored pencils, and the Klimas family secret. It's called the nuodeema burna, or eater of sins. Every time Annie does something wrong, she writes it down and sticks the paper in a hidden hole in the floor of their house. But Annie is quick to discover that her inheritance has a dark side. With each paper fed to the burna, Annie feels less guilty about the mean things she says and...

When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.

Sixteen-year-old Denn finds himself alienating both friends and family when he becomes obsessed with playing high-stakes poker with adult gamblers.