Fair Peril


Nancy Springer - 1996
    Trouble ensues when Buffy's rebellious teenage daughter Emily does kiss the frog; soon she and handsome Prince Adamus disappear into the enchanted land of Fair Peril. It is up to Buffy to rescue Emily and, in the process, learn that magic does exist in the most ordinary of lives.

God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy


Mike Huckabee - 2015
    In Mike Huckabee’s new book God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, he asks the question, "Have I been taken to a different planet than the one on which I grew up?" The New York Times bestselling author explores today’s American culture, drawing from his travels as a presidential candidate to present average, small-town people and families, and their optimistic resilience in the face of hard times; their stories, says Huckabee, "will inspire readers to think about their own values and rediscover what makes America great." At times lighthearted, at others bracingly realistic, Huckabee's brand of optimistic patriotism lends itself to discussing the reintroduction of fundamental American values, as well as a bright outlook for future generations.

Cautionary Tales


Stephen Tobolowsky - 2011
    He has played everyone from Ned Ryerson in "Groundhog Day" to Sandy Ryerson in "Glee." He has amused thousands with his true stories on "The Tobolowsky Files" at Slashfilm.com. Here he shares some homespun philosophy and more true stories that prove tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll are often the most humiliating and almost always the most enjoyable.

Greek Drama


Moses Hadas - 1965
    For this volume, Professor Hadas chose nine plays which display the diversity and grandeur of tragedy, and the critical and satiric genius of comedy, in outstanding translations of the past and present. His introduction explores the religious origins, modes of productions, structure, and conventions of the Greek theater, individual prefaces illuminate each play and clarify the author's place in the continuity of Greek drama.

The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus


Jonathan Franzen - 2013
    In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose “calm, passionate critical authority” has been praised in The New York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today’s cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus’s work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

Final Girl


Daphne Gottlieb - 2003
    Sexy and tart, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, and Bride of Reanimator articulate the dark desires, fears, and traumas out of which pop culture is made. Author Daphne Gottlieb is the winner of the 2002 Firecracker Award and a 2002 Lambda Finalist.

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading


Sara Nelson - 2003
    From Solzhenitsyn to Laura Zigman, Catherine M. to Captain Underpants, the result is a personal chronicle of insight, wit, and enough infectious enthusiasm to make a passionate reader out of anybody.

So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures


Maureen Corrigan - 2014
    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami


Gretel Ehrlich - 2013
    In an eloquent narrative that blends strong reportage, poetic observation, and deeply felt reflection, she takes us into the upside-down world of northeastern Japan, where nothing is certain and where the boundaries between living and dying have been erased by water. The stories of rice farmers, monks, and wanderers; of fishermen who drove their boats up the steep wall of the wave; and of an eighty-four-year-old geisha who survived the tsunami to hand down a song that only she still remembered are both harrowing and inspirational. Facing death, facing life, and coming to terms with impermanence are equally compelling in a landscape of surreal desolation, as the ghostly specter of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power complex, spews radiation into the ocean and air. Facing the Wave is a testament to the buoyancy, spirit, humor, and strong-mindedness of those who must find their way in a suddenly shattered world.

Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography


Katherine Ramsland - 1997
    Now for the first time, Katherine Ramsland, the acclaimed author of Prism of the Night, cracks open Dean Koontz's protective shell to expose this ruthlessly honest, ambitious, and courageous artist who embodies in his own life and work the hope-filled light and frightening darkness that define America today. Based on extensive interviews with Koontz himself, this fascinating, unique portrait reveals the powerful influences--psychic, trauma, haunting secrets, troubling questions, and optimistic resourcefulness--that have shaped this gifted writer and his acclaimed fiction. Here, too, are the remarkable qualities--tenacity, vision, emotional strength, and business savvy--that have made him a success. Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography tells a story as thrilling, poignant, and unforgettable as this acclaimed author's most powerful novels.

Georgia on My Mind and Other Places


Charles Sheffield - 1993
    One of the most imaginative, exciting talents to appear on the SF scene in recent years.--Publishers Weekly

The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras


Brantley Hargrove - 2018
    “An instant classic of Americana.” —Hampton Sides “Many a novel is not written this memorably.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Masterful. This is what man versus nature is all about.” —Skip Hollandsworth “Hargrove is one today’s great science writers.” —The Washington PostAt the turn of the twenty-first century, the tornado was one of the last true mysteries of the modern world. It was a monster that ravaged the American heartland a thousand times each year, yet science’s every effort to divine its inner workings had ended in failure. Researchers all but gave up, until the arrival of an outsider. In a field of PhDs, Tim Samaras didn’t attend a day of college in his life. He chased storms with brilliant tools of his own invention and pushed closer to the tornado than anyone else ever dared. When he achieved what meteorologists had deemed impossible, it was as if he had snatched the fire of the gods. Yet even as he transformed the field, Samaras kept on pushing. As his ambitions grew, so did the risks. And when he finally met his match—in a faceoff against the largest tornado ever recorded—it upended everything he thought he knew. Brantley Hargrove delivers a masterful tale, chronicling the life of Tim Samaras in all its triumph and tragedy. He takes readers inside the thrill of the chase, the captivating science of tornadoes, and the remarkable character of a man who walked the line between life and death in pursuit of knowledge. Following the tradition of Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, Hargrove’s debut offers an unforgettable exploration of obsession and the extremes of the natural world.

By Bizarre Hands


Joe R. Lansdale - 1989
    Lansdale is your man. In his first collection of short stories, the gruseome and outrageous cult classic "The Drive-In" pilots a wildly thrilling, violent and vivid roller coaster ride to Hell and beyond...plumbing the eerie depths of his remarkable imagination to create horrors unique and unsettling - dark products of twisted genius that weave the grisly fabric of nightmares. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! (back cover copy)CONTENTSFish NightThe PitDuck HuntBy Bizarre HandsThe Steel ValentineI Tell You It's LoveLetters From The SOuth, Two Moons South Of NacogdochesBoys Will Be BoysThe Fat Man And The ElephantHell Through A WindshieldDown By The Sea Near The Great Big RockTrains Not TakenTight Little Stitches In A Dead Man's BackThe Windstorm PassesNight They Missed The Horror ShowOn The Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folk

Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of "To Kill a Mockingbird"


Mary McDonagh Murphy - 2010
    These interviews are compiled in Scout, Atticus, and Boo, the perfect companion to one of the most important American books of the 20th Century. Scout, Atticus, and Boo will also feature a foreword from acclaimed writer Wally Lamb.

The End in All Beginnings


John F.D. Taff - 2014
    Praised as one of the best collections of heartfelt and gut-wrenching horror written in recent history, it's a disturbing trip through the ages exploring the painful tragedies of life, love and loss.Each of the five masterfully written novellas included in THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS examine complex themes running the gamut from the loss of childhood innocence, to the dreadful reality of survival after everything we hold dear is gone, to some of the most profound aspects of human tragedy.As one of the best storytellers of the modern age, John F.D. Taff takes readers on a skillfully balanced emotional journey into nostalgia, through personal pain and beyond the everyday terrors that are uncomfortably real over the course of the human lifetime. His straight-forward, nuanced writing style is at times darkly comedic, often deeply poetic and always accurate in the most terrifying of ways.Evoking the literary styles of horror legends Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker, in THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS also pays homage to modern genre masters Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling and Clive Barker, solidifying author John F.D. Taff as modern horror's new King of Pain.