The Etiquette Grrls have decided that things are simply getting out of hand, and they have Taken It Upon Themselves to step in with a helpful guide to navigate the Etiquette Quandaries in your day-to-day life. They dish up advice on cohabitation, letter-writing, telephoning, traveling, grooming, drinking, dining, dating, and marriage and, it would be Terribly Rude of you not to pay attention.Who are they, you ask, to be writing such a book? The Etiquette Grrls are graduates of New England Preparatory Schools and Prestigious Colleges; they are throwers of Great Parties; they can hold their liquor; their expertise on fashion and make-up and—especially Subversive Nail Polish colors-knows no bounds; they wear Doc Martens with their cashmere twin sets; and, most important, they know what they're talking about.The Etiquette Grrls' advice has been featured in Ladies Home Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, and Business Week Online.

    Club issue a slightly slanted pop-culture list filled with challenging opinions (Is David Bowie's "Young Americans" nearly ruined by saxophone?) and fascinating facts. Exploring 24 great films too painful to watch twice, 14 tragic movie-masturbation scenes, 18 songs about crappy cities, and much more, Inventory combines a massive helping of new lists created especially for the book with a few favorites first seen at avclub.com and in the pages of The A.V. Club's sister publication, The Onion. But wait! There's more: John Hodgman offers a set of minutely detailed (and probably fictional) character actors. Patton Oswalt waxes ecstatic about the "quiet film revolutions" that changed cinema in small but exciting ways. Amy Sedaris lists 50 things that make her laugh. "Weird Al" Yankovic examines the noises of Mad magazine's Don Martin. Plus lists from Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Ben Garant, Tom Lennon, Andrew W.K., Tim and Eric, Daniel Handler, and Zach Galifianakis -- and an epic foreword from essayist Chuck Klosterman.

    when they can be bothered to turn up.He confiscates their porn, booze and trainers, fends off angry parents and worries about the few conscientious pupils.Terrifying and hilarious, IT'S YOUR TIME YOU'RE WASTING is Chalk's real-life diary from the front line of the modern edukashun system.

    Just absorb a few pages, then let the hero worship begin!You will need:A hunger for greatnessSome duct tapeThis bookYou may want:Sidekicks and/or minionsAn impressive nicknameAn amazing outfit

    

    He has been a busy man. Yet, for the last two years, he has also managed to squeeze in a weekly column for The Times. Without fail, he sat down every week and wracked his brain to think of something to write 900 words about. Dispatches From the Sofa is the brilliant result. Alighting on such random topics as the potential demise of Margaret Thatcher, the love-hate relationship with your football club, Mike Read's musical of Oscar Wilde, fat pop stars, Serbian breakfast banter, the pleasures of air-guitar, the banking crisis and the evil phenomenon of Jedward, this is a thought-provoking, wide-reaching, hilarious and self-deprecating collection - which also includes the first two chapters from his unpublished novel - from one of our funniest, quickest and most beloved comedians.

    Pretending to work? That’s fudgelling, which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch, though by dinner time you will have become a sparkling deipnosophist.From Mark Forsyth, author of the bestselling The Etymologicon, this is a book of weird words for familiar situations. From ante-jentacular to snudge by way of quafftide and wamblecropt, at last you can say, with utter accuracy, exactly what you mean.

    I wonder how many cats have died because of this confusion.Fact: The most germ-laden place on your toilet isn't the seat or even the bowl--it's the handle.The solution: Don't flush. Let the next guy worry about it.There are "just the facts"--and then there are just the facts that will frighten the bejeezus out of you. And thanks to this little gem of a bathroom book, you'll never look at the world the same way again, without, er, dry heaving a little bit.From the sneaky fish that can swim up our genitals to the E. coli bacteria lurking in the very water we drink, disturbing phenomena are everywhere we turn. Educational, entertaining, and undeniably horrifying, this book isn't guaranteed to help you, um, go to the bathroom, but it's certain to make your time there more...informed.

    Devoted Times subscribers will find the many treasured recipes they have cooked for years—Plum Torte, David Eyre's Pancake, Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta—as well as favorites from the early Craig Claiborne New York Times Cookbook and a host of other classics—from 1940s Caesar salad and 1960s flourless chocolate cake to today's fava bean salad and no-knead bread.Hesser has cooked and updated every one of the 1,000-plus recipes here. Her chapter introductions showcase the history of American cooking, and her witty and fascinating headnotes share what makes each recipe special. The Essential New York Times Cookbook is for people who grew up in the kitchen with Claiborne, for curious cooks who want to serve a nineteenth-century raspberry granita to their friends, and for the new cook who needs a book that explains everything from how to roll out dough to how to slow-roast fish—a volume that will serve as a lifelong companion.

    From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

    Following an itinerary drawn up from surveys, polls, reviews and lazy personal prejudice, Tim Moore goes to all the places that nobody wants to go to - the bleakest towns, the shonkiest hotels, the scariest pubs, the silliest sea zoos. He visits the grid reference adjudged by the Ordnance Survey to be the least interesting point in Britain, and is chased out of the new town twice crowned Scotland's Most Dismal Place. His palate is flayed alive by horrific regional foodstuffs, his ears shrivelled by the 358 least loved tracks in the history of native popular music. With his progress entrusted to our motor industry's fittingly hopeless finale, he comes to learn that Britain seems very much larger when you're driving around it in a Bulgarian-built Austin Maestro.Yet as the soggy, decrepit quest unfolds, so it evolves into something much more stirring: a nostalgic celebration of our magnificent mercantile pomp, and an angry requiem for a golden age of cheerily homespun crap culture being swept aside by the faceless, soul-stripping forces of Tesco-town globalisation.

    In this extravaganza of linguistic delights A is for alley-oop, B is for brouhaha, and L is for, well, lollygag! Packed with oodles of tongue-tickling words and a hodgepodge of curious illustrations, fun trivia, and lists within lists, L Is for Lollygag is one humdinger of a dictionary. Huzzah!

    Be a hero, not a spectator. You want to be interesting. (Who doesn t?) But sometimes it takes a nudge, a wake-up call, an intervention! and a little help. This is where Jessica Hagy comes in. A writer and illustrator of great economy, charm, and insight, she s created How to Be Interesting, a uniquely inspirational how-to that combines fresh and pithy lessons with deceptively simple diagrams and charts.Ms. Hagy started on Forbes.com, where she s a weekly blogger, by creating a How to Be Interesting post that went viral, attracting 1.4 million viewers so far, with tens of thousands of them liking, linking, and tweeting the article. Now she s deeply explored the ideas that resonated with so many readers to create this small and quirky book with a large and universal message. It s a book about exploring: Talk to strangers. About taking chances: Expose yourself to ridicule, to risk, to wild ideas. About being childlike, not childish: Remember how amazing the world was before you learned to be cynical. About being open: Never take in the welcome mat. About breaking routine: Take daily vaca- tions . . . if only for a few minutes. About taking ownership: Whatever you re doing, enjoy it, embrace it, master it as well as you can. And about growing a pair: If you re not courageous, you re going to be hanging around the water cooler, talking about the guy that actually is.

    She proclaims, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. Using examples from literature, history, neighborhood signage, and her own imagination, Truss shows how meaning is shaped by commas and apostrophes, and the hilarious consequences of punctuation gone awry.Featuring a foreword by Frank McCourt, and interspersed with a lively history of punctuation from the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes a powerful case for the preservation of proper punctuation.

    Calvin Trillin employs everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan style, for describing George Bush’s rescue in the South Carolina primary by the Christian Right (“I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican”), to a bilingual approach, when commenting on the President’s casual acknowledgment, after months of trying to persuade the nation otherwise, that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11: “The Web may say, or maybe Lexis-Nexis / If chutzpa is a word they use in Texas.”Trillin deals not only with George W. Bush but with the people around him—Supreme Commander Karl Rove and Condoleezza (Mushroom Cloud) Rice and Nanny Dick Cheney (“One mystery I’ve tried to disentangle: / Why Cheney’s head is always at an angle . . .”) The armchair warriors Trillin refers to as the Sissy Hawk Brigade are celebrated in such poems as “Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?” and “A Sissy Hawk Cheer” (“All-out war is still our druthers— / Fiercely fought, and fought by others.”).Trillin may never be poet laureate—certainly not while George W. Bush is in office—but his wit and his political insight produce what has been called “doggerel for the ages.”