These recipes, stories, jokes, advice, farm lore, and illustrations were collected from a wide variety of American agricultural sources from the 1880s to the 1950s.

    The humor is ridden with pathos, and yet is quite sharp. This collection has 36 stories including: "The Gentleman is Cold," "Everything is Wild," "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife," "Hell Only Breaks Loose Once," "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," and "How to See a Bad Play." The London Times said, "There may be greater humorists writing in America today than James Thurber, but none with quite his individual touch and his flavor."

    Now, to celebrate a decade of delighting opera fans and foes alike, musical historian and humorist David Barber has prepared a special revised and expanded edition of his hilarious bestselling history of opera. Chapters such as Serious Buffoonery, Teutonic Tunesmiths and, of course, Italian Sausage Machines display Barber's rapier wit and knack for knowing fascinating, if sometimes useless, information about music, musicians and the offbeat world they live in. This expanded edition includes new material ranging from Strauss to ragtime, opera to the Tenor Menace. From Italian castrati to German Ring-bearers, from Handel's fights with rival sopranos to Puccini's nicotine habit, the author of Bach, Beethoven and the Boys and Tenors, Tantrums and Trills delivers a funny yet informative, irreverent yet affectionate history of serious music's most serious art form as only he can - and as only he would dare to do.

    Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.            With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.From the Hardcover edition.

    It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-"Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!"A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.

    Once we add these documents to what we learned from the CIA's own Howard Hunt, who made a deathbed confession in 2007, we find LBJ deeply implicated in the murder. The releases are absolutely revelatory.

    Her parents have died, her food is dwindling and the rent is due. When a stranger arrives bearing a note from an uncle, inviting Katka to join him and his wife in America, she leaves all that she has held dear to rebuild her life across the ocean. On the voyage to New York, she becomes friends with the stranger and begins to fall in love. But at Ellis Island, they are separated when he is detained by authorities as a suspected anarchist. Alone, Katka continues her journey to her uncle’s house on the rough and tumble Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Soon she is immersed in a lively community of iron miners and begins publishing an underground newspaper about their struggles and the heroism of the women on the Iron Range, as they are swept into a tumultuous strike that will change their lives forever. “Under Ground” is a work of fiction inspired by true events.

    With candor and humor, Mauceri makes clear that conducting is itself a composition: of legacy and tradition, techniques handed down from master to apprentice--and more than a trace of ineffable magic. He reveals how conductors approach a piece of music (a calculated combination of personal interpretation, imagination, and insight into the composer's intent); what it takes to communicate solely through gesture, with sometimes hundreds of performers at once; and the occasionally glamorous, often challenging life of the itinerant maestro. Mauceri, who worked closely with Leonard Bernstein for eighteen years, studied with Leopold Stokowski, and was on the faculty of Yale University for fifteen years, is the perfect guide to the allure and theater, passion and drudgery, rivalries and relationships of the conducting life.

     Updating, revising, and expanding on material from his cult classic Hellhounds on Their Trail, Patterson offers up a delectable feast of strange and occasionally frightening rock and roll tales, featuring the ironies associated with the tragic deaths of many rock icons, unsolved murders, and other tales from the "fell clutch of circumstance." Beginning with the fateful place where it all started -- a deserted country crossroads just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson made his deal with the devil -- through the Buddy Holly curse (rock and roll's first great tragedy) and beyond, this incredible volume uncovers some of rock and roll's most celebrated murders, twists of fate, and decades-long streaks of bad luck that defy rational explanation. Inside you'll find: Facts about Jimmy Page and the Zeppelin Curse. Chilling quirks of fate in the fatalities in the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Facts about Jimmy Page and the Zeppelin curse Chilling quirks of fate surrounding the deaths of musicians in the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd A provocative look at "The Club," membership in which requires an untimely death at age twenty-seven and whose inductees include Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin Cryptic messages in song lyrics that have proved eerily prophetic Carefully researched, wildly enjoyable, and often harrowing, Take a Walk on the Dark Side takes the reader on a mysterious ride through rock and roll history.

    But behind it were real men whose hard work and hard play, stoic toughness, and code of honor helped tame the American West. The epic cattle drives that were so much a part of the cowboys' heyday lasted only an astonishingly brief two decades. But the cowboy is still a basic part of the American character. Here, from historian Grayson Wyatt, is their surprising and little-told story.

    But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.

    An inspiring, no-holds-barred, audacious memoir by Bettye LaVette, one of R&B's greatest legends - guaranteed to make news, and make hearts break, too.

    This work tells the story of this one-off guitarist who came to prominence through the debauchery and stellar chart success of the American west coast's Guns N' Roses. Full description

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    The title, Regarding Wave,reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through theIndo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'GoneBeyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder'swife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder'sprevious collection of poems, The Back Country, this newvolume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth… the fertilityof the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, theterrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,the common work of the tribe…”