title: Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money
author:  Rebecca Curtis 
description: Mostly female loners, outsiders and have-nots populate this marvelous, bleak debut collection. A young woman extracts herself from an overly insistent blind date who violates her privacy in Big Bear, California, only to find her usual certainty shaken years later by the memory of his grasping, petulant behavior. In Summer, with Twins, a college-age woman waitressing during the break wavers in declining her greasy boss's indecent proposal, perpetuating a crisis of self-worth that reverberates through her tenuous summer friendships. Among the 13 pieces, surreal vignettes serve as a taut, dramatic counterpart to the more straightforward narratives: The Wolf at the Door in particular has a being-chased-in-your-dreams feel of danger and terror, as a woman battles to keep an anthropomorphic wolf from entering her house, until he asks her to open the door and her sister insists that she do so, saying, it's polite! Delving into extremes of monotonous oppression, Curtis describes a reality that must be endured: her characters cling fiercely to their rationalizations, but even the more avaricious are sympathetic. <I>(July)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: **Contents**
  
    
  
  Title Page
  
  Rights
  
  Dedication
  
  Prologue
  
  One
  
  Two
  
  Three
  
  Four
  
  Five
  
  Six
  
  Seven
  
  Eight
  
  Nine
  
  Ten
  
  Eleven
  
  Twelve
  
  Thirteen
  
  Fourteen
  
  Fifteen
  
  Sixteen
  
  Seventeen
  
  Eighteen
  
  Nineteen
  
  Twenty
  
  Twenty-one
  
  Twenty-two
  
  Twenty-three
  
  Twenty-four
  
  Twenty-five
  
  Epilogue
  
  Don't forget!
  
  Also By Jessica Gadziala:
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  About the author:
  
  Stalk Her
  
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  **“Cash”**
  
   _A Henchmen MC Novel_
  
    
    
  
   **Jessica Gadziala**
  
  Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Gadziala  
  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof  
  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever  
  without the express written permission of the author except for brief
  quotations used in a book review.
  
  "This book is a work of fiction. the names, characters, places and incidents
  are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and
  are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead,
  actual events, locales or organizations is entirely co