From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. With hundreds of pieces of original artwork, illustration and cartography, as well as a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae" for each work, Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction.

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    She surveyed the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, and made a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all. Now she leads us on a compelling journey into the cult and culture behind the obituary page and the unusual lives we don't quite appreciate until they're gone.

    Now Jack returns to recount another school year's worth of challenges, triumphs, and mishaps with a brand new cast of wild and crazy students.Six years have passed, and this time around, Jack gets a talking monkey sidekick, a beautiful love interest, and a top-secret undercover CIA assignment to Uranus. (Well, ONE of those things is true, anyway.)There are witty quotes, riotous stories, and more twists and turns than M. Night Shyamalan's small intestine.Through email correspondence with Fred Bommerson, Jack talks about PTA fundraisers gone awry, unnatural food chains, and how any action can be made acceptable as long as "it's for science." With subject lines such as "Diarrhea of a Wimpy Kid," "Green Eggs and Math," and "Houston, we have a word problem," it's perfect for reading in small chunks or one long session.If you liked the humor of Learn Me Good, you will love Learn Me Gooder!

    She married a Frenchman, took on all his compatriots, and has been the heroine of a love affair ever since. Her skirmishes with French traffic, French maids, French salesladies, French holidays, French law, French doctors, above all, the French language, are here set forth in a delightful and amusing record. Paraphrasing Caesar, Miss de Havilland says, "I came, I saw, I was conquered."

    It turns out, though, that making a French family takes more than just good intentions and a quick lesson in croissant-baking.Even while suffering from culture shock and struggling to communicate with and parent her ten-year-old stepson and thirteen-year-old stepdaughter in a culture drastically different from her own, Samantha is determined to adapt to her adopted homeland—because when love and a new life is on the line, giving up isn't an option.

    Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America.An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs — these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek — from Florida's Fountain of Youth to Plymouth's sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges, Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.

    Cole Moreton tells the story of the Blaskets through the eyes of the Kearney family, who lived there for generations until 1947 when they paid a terrible price for their isolation-a young man's life. Moreton discovers a few survivors still alive within sight of the Great Blasket, but most had left Ireland for America, settling in Massachusetts. Hungry for Home is a beautifully written and gripping account of a quest for a vanished people, and the Kearneys' incredible journey into the twentieth century is "a moving, atmospheric testament to the mythic lure of home". Entertainment Weekly.

    No Jobs. No friends. Just buckets of our own ignorance. Follow along in horror and hilarity as the family acclimates to the new small town way of life and the author bounces from jobs working in a school cafeteria to selling women’s clothing in a call center to opening a barbecue restaurant. Written in a smart, self-deprecating, salty style, Small Town Ho is all at once poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, full of the struggle of an ordinary family consisting of three boys, one big black lab, one assassin of a cat, and two very tired parents.

    Now, in this wise and engrossing dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, chronicle their travels together through Greece and France at a time when each was on a quest to redefine herself and rediscover each other. As Sue struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel, and Ann ponders the classic question of what to do with her life, this modern-day Demeter and Persephone explore an array of inspiring figures and sacred sites. They also give voice to that most protean of human connections: the bond of mothers and daughters.

    A hijacking, several nuclear explosions and a religious experience ... just some of the ingredients in the latest tour de force from the bestselling author of the Carpet Wars. In the searing summer of 2004, Christopher Kremmer returns to India, a country in the grip of enormous and sometimes violent change. As a young reporter in the 1990s, he first encountered this ancient and complex civilisation. Now, embarking on a yatra, or pilgrimage, he travels the dangerous frontier where religion and politics face off. tracking down the players in a decisive decade, he takes us inside the enigmatic Gandhi dynasty, and introduces an operatic cast of political Brahmins, 'cyber coolies', low-caste messiahs and wrestling priests. A sprawling portrait of India at the crossroads, Inhaling the Mahatma is also an intensely personal story about coming to terms with a dazzlingly different culture, as the author's fate is entwined with a cosmopolitan Hindu family of Old Delhi, and a guru who might just change his life.

    The author of the best-selling Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland reveals how Walt Disney's City of Tomorrow evolved into a sprawling resort where?despite extraordinary efforts to control every aspect of the show?everything doesn't always go according to script.

    Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever undertaken.Charrière's astonishing autobiography, Papillon, was published in France to instant acclaim in 1968, more than twenty years after his final escape. Since then, it has become a treasured classic -- the gripping, shocking, ultimately uplifting odyssey of an innocent man who simply would not be defeated.

    Vivid and outrageously funny.

    . . and your journey into both begins here. World adventurer and international monster hunter Josh Gates has careened through nearly 100 countries, investigating frightening myths, chilling cryptozoological legends, and terrifying paranormal phenomena. Now, he invites fans to get a behind-the-scenes look at these breathtaking expeditions. Follow Gates from the inception of the groundbreaking hit show (at the summit of Kilimanjaro) to his hair-raising encounters with dangerous creatures in the most treacherous locations on earth. Among his many adventures, he unearths the flesh-crawling reality of the Mongolian Death Worm, challenges an ancient curse by spending the night in King Tut’s tomb, descends into a centuries-old mine to search for an alien entity in subterranean darkness, pursues ghosts in the radioactive shadow of Chernobyl, and explores sightings of Bigfoot from the leech-infested rain forests of Malaysia to the dizzying heights of the Himalayas. Part journey into the unexplained, part hilarious travelogue, part fascinating look at the making of a reality-based TV show—and featuring never-before-published photographs— this Destination Truth companion takes readers on the supernatural expedition of a lifetime.