This title provides a complete guide to the mythical beasts and beings from a variety of cultures around the world, including Mesopotamian, ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian and Chinese, Japanese, Nordic, Celtic and Native American.

    But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient, capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day."Our house," writes Jackson, "is old, noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books." Jackson's literary talents are in evidence everywhere, as is her trenchant, unsentimental wit. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages, which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.

    Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

    In this memoir, Catton remembers his youth, his family, his home town, and his coming of age. With nostalgia, warmth, and humor, Catton recalls it all with a wealth of detail: the logging industry and its tremendous effect on the face of the state, the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic who first sparked his interest in the Civil War, the overnight train trips on long-gone "sleepers," the days of great resort hotels, and fishing in once clear lakes. Although he writes of a time and place that are no more, his observations have implications that both underline the past and touch the future.

    Determined, controversial, and visionary, she creatively worked to bridge the gap between her own culture and mainstream American society and advocated for Native rights on a national level. Susan Rose Dominguez provides a new introduction to this edition.

    Richard Shenkman and Kurt Reiger have uncovered numerous stories about hoaxes, inventions, secrets, and rare incidents -- many involving the most famous and powerful people in America.President U. S. Grant was arrested for speeding in his horse carriage.J. Edgar Hoover refused to allow people to walk on his shadow.France shipped Louisiana twenty-five prostitutes because women were in short supply in 1721.H. L. Hunt won his first oil well in a game of five-card stud.Even historians find that One-Night Stands with American History features fascinating stories they never knew. Now updated with facts and anecdotes from the last twenty years, this volume is a treasure trove of remarkable stories that will startle, entertain, and inform you. And the best part is that they're all true!

    Sometimes it's made when a chauffeur takes a wrong turn, a scientist forgets to clean up his lab, or a drunken soldier gets a bit rowdy. That's the kind of history you'll find in The Greatest Stories Never Told.This is history candy -- the good stuff. Here are 100 tales to astonish, bewilder, and stupefy: more than two thousand years of history filled with courage, cowardice, hope, triumph, sex, intrigue, folly, humor, and ambition. It's a historical delight and a visual feast with hundreds of photographs, drawings, and maps that bring each story to life. A new discovery waits on every page: stories that changed the course of history and stories that affected what you had for breakfast this morning.Consider:The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock because they ran out of beerSome Roman officials were so corrupt that they actually stole time itselfThree cigars changed the course of the Civil WarThe Scottish kilt was invented by an EnglishmanBased on the popular Timelab 2000® history minutes hosted by Sam Waterston on The History Channel®, this collection of fascinating historical tidbits will have you shaking your head in wonder and disbelief. But they're all true. And you'll soon find yourself telling them to your friends.

    Crafty and cagey -- often the victim of his own magical intrigues and lusty appetites -- he created the earth and man, scrambled the stars and first brought fire . . . and death. Barry Lopez -- National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams and recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for his bestselling masterwork Of Wolves and Men -- has collected sixty-eight tales from forty-two tribes, and brings to life a timeless myth that abounds with sly wit, erotic adventure, and rueful wisdom.

    Accompanied by evocative illustrations, these compelling retellings of 30 popular folktales feature supernatural occurrences and ghosts of all sorts, from fiddling ghosts to the story of the Jack o'Lantern. Whether read around the fire on a dark and stormy night or in the backseat of the family van on the way to Grandma's, each expertly told tale is guaranteed to make readers look at the South--and over their shoulders--again and again.

    A collection of stories focuses on contemporary Native American concerns--white injustice, the fragmenting of the Indian community, and the loss of tribal identity--and recalls Indian legends and tribal stories.

    Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. With the long-awaited publication of this book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital and important of ancient myths: that of Inanna, the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.The stories and hymns of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar) are inscribed on clay tablets which date back to 2,000 B.C. Over the past forty years, these cuneiform tablets have gradually been restored and deciphered by a small group of international scholars. In this groundbreaking book, Samuel Noah Kramer, the preeminent living expert on Sumer, and Diane Wolkstein, a gifted storyteller and folklorist, have retranslated, ordered, and combined the fragmented pieces of the Cycle of Inanna into a unified whole that presents for the first time an authentic portrait of the goddess from her adolescence to her completed womanhood and godship. We see Inanna in all her aspects: as girl, lover, wife, seeker, decision maker, ruler; we witness the Queen of Heaven and Earth as the voluptuous center and source of all fertile power and the unequaled goddess of love.Illustrated throughout with cylinder seals and other artifacts of the period, the beautifully rendered images guide the reader through Inanna's realm on a journey parallel to the one evoked by the text. And the carefully wrought commentaries providing an historical overview, textual interpretations, and aannotations on the art at once explicate and amplify the power, wonder, and mystery embedded in these ancient tales.Inanna--the world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible--is tender, erotic, frightening, and compassionate. It is a compelling myth that is timely in its rediscovery."A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade

    In these pages you will meet extraordinary beings from Hindu and Navajo religions, Scandinavian tales, Russian folklore, Lithuanian stories, Irish oral history, American tall tales, and Aztec myth. Just some of the monstrous entourage:• Baku, a benevolent Japanese monster with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the legs of a tiger, who helps people by devouring their nightmares.• Kurma, the giant tortoise of Hindu myth, whose upper shell forms the heavens and lower part the earth.• Missipissy, the feared fish serpent of North America's Great Lakes region.This illustrated encyclopedia not only identifies and describes individual beasts in their cultural context but also groups them together across cultures and discusses common mythological strands and conceits.

    The table of contents lists all of the addresses so that the reader may view and explore all of the sites personally. The work also contains a bibliography of thirty-three sources, one hundred thirty-one footnotes and an index of one hundred sixteen entries. It is fully illustrated with photographs, a map, and Marie Laveau's death certificate.It is the first book written exclusively about the ghosts of New Orleans since Jeanne de Lavigne's 1946 classic Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. The author visited personally each of the sites, conducted interviews and took photographs. During the course of his research the author experienced two paranormal occurrences which are documented in the narratives.New Orleans Ghosts also contains an epilogue that articulates the six theories that apply to ghostly phenomenon. Each of the theories is further highlighted by being exemplified by reference to individual stories within the text.This book alone has been responsible for the creation of a growing arm of New Orleans tourism-- the "Ghost Tour." Before 1993 such tours did not exist. In 1998 the author is aware of ten such tours. Virtually all of these tour guides have informed the author that his book is the "Bible" for haunted tour guides.

    Ten masterful, complex drawings by Bill Reid and ten tales demonstrate the richness and range of Haida mythology, from bawdy yet profound tales of the trickster Raven to poignant, imagistic narratives of love and its complications in a world where animals speak, dreams come real, and demigods, monsters, and men live side by side.

    A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world’s great literary treasures – as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.