Novak's One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut collection that signals the arrival of a welcome new voice in American fiction.Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, Novak's assured prose and expansive imagination introduce readers to people, places, and premises that are hilarious, insightful, provocative, and moving-often at the same time.In One More Thing, a boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes - only to discover that claiming the winnings may unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins - turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A school principal unveils a bold plan to permanently abolish arithmetic. An acclaimed ambulance driver seeks the courage to follow his heart and throw it all away to be a singer-songwriter. Author John Grisham contemplates a monumental typo. A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who debate how to stage an intervention in the era of Facebook. We learn why wearing a red t-shirt every day is the key to finding love; how February got its name; and why the stock market is sometimes just... down.Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, from the deeply familiar to the intoxicatingly imaginative, One More Thing finds its heart in the most human of phenomena: love, fear, family, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element that might make a person complete. The stories in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.

    An unknown plague sweeps the planet. The dead rise to claim the Earth as the new dominant species. Trapped in the midst of a global tragedy, he must make decisions...choices that that ultimately mean life, or the eternal curse to walk as one of them.

    This is the perfect guide for parents who want to teach their children science through their favorite adventures as well as for the millions of adult fans of the series intrigued by its marvels and mysteries.- An ALA Booklist Editors' Choice -

    She's also not like other girls her age, but then, who would be when the family business is monster hunting? Combat boots, ratty hooded sweatshirts, and hair worn short so nothing with claws can get a grip, Maggie's concerns in life slant more toward survival than fashion or boys. Which presents a problem when Maggie's mother informs Maggie that she can't get her journeyman's license for hunting until she loses her virginity.Something about virgin blood turning vampires into pointy rage monsters. Blood and gore and insides being on the outside and all that. Maggie's battled ghosts and goblins and her fair share of house brownies, but finding herself a boy - fitting in with her peers - proves a much more daunting task than any monster hunt. Did you know normal girls don't stuff their bras with holy water balloons? Nor do they carry wooden stakes in their waistbands. And they care about things like "matching" and "footwear." Of course, they also can't clean a gun blindfolded, shoot a crossbow, or exorcise ghosts from a house. Which means they're lame and Maggie's not. Because Maggie's awesome. The Awesome, in fact. Just ask her. She'd be more than happy to tell you. After she finds herself a date.

    And when Maurice turns Reginald to save his life, it's just Reginald's own further bad luck that he wakes up to discover he's become the slowest, weakest, most out-of-shape vampire ever born, doomed to "heal" to his corpulent self for all of eternity.As Reginald struggles with the downsides of being a fat vampire -- too slow to catch people to feed on, mocked by those he tries to glamour, assaulted by his intended prey and left for undead -- he discovers in himself rare powers that few vampires have… and just in time too, because the Vampire Council might just want his head for being an inferior representative of their race. Fat Vampire is the story of an unlikely hero who, after having an imperfect eternity shoved into his grease-stained hands, must learn to turn the afterlife's lemons into tasty lemon danishes.

    In this love story wrapped in a tale of zombie mayhem, a resourceful couple flees from and picks off their undead pursuers with fast-paced ingenuity and an entertaining range of zombie-thwarting tools. As the zombies shuffle and stumble their way toward a variety of gruesome ends, our heroes must come up with new ways to escape sticky situations and stay together. This darkly funny illustrated tale--think Bunny Suicides meets Edward Gorey meets Hallmark--celebrates the romantic side of a zombie plague, with plenty of BRAINS and a lot of heart.

    Here we follow him around the globe on the trail of the Uncanny and in pursuit of unexplained footsteps, apparitions, and other psychic phenomena.Along the way, he introduces us to the ghosts who still inhabit homes, cling to castle walls, and lurk at lonely country crossroads. These are just a few of the ghosts we meet: Grandma Thurston, whose ghost still works the loom, tugged at the Ghost Hunter's elbow in an eighteenth-century farmhouse. The Ghost at the Altar is that of a pastor whose wooden church burned down, destroying many years of work and many dreams. The specter of railroad man Joe Baldwin, who lost his head while trying to forestall a collision, still patrols a section of track in Wilmington, North Carolina. A haunted house in Los Angeles is the site of a nightly party where invisible guests celebrate as the horrified inhabitants listen on.We watch from a front-row seat as Holzer establishes a connection to the spirits behind these and other hauntings in deep-trance sessions conducted with renowned psychics. In these sessions, he eases the spirits' transition from this world to the next-and brings the reader face to face with haunted places and people around the world.Hans Holzer, Ph.D., author, investigator, parapsychologist, and expert on extrasensory perception, is known throughout the world as the Ghost Hunter. The author of more than 100 books, including True Ghost Stories, he is regarded as a leading authority on the paranormal, ranging from hauntings and ghosts to telepathy, clairvoyance, and other psychic experiences of the human mind. Educated at the University of Vienna and at Columbia University, Dr. Holzer has written, produced, and appeared in numerous television documentaries.

    She clears your path of all those merciless judgments pronounced by the Quilting Queens. She invites you to make quilts that are full of life. This funny book offers these nine principles for the 20 million quilters in America:           1. Pretty fabric is not acceptable. Go right back to the quilt shop and exchange it for something you feel sorry for.           2. Realize that patterns and templates are only someone's opinion and should be loosely translated. Personally, I've never thought much of a person who could only make a triangle with three sides.           3. When choosing a color plan for your quilt, keep in mind that the colors will fade after a hundred years or so. This being the case, you will need to start with really bright colors.           4. You should plan on cutting off about half your triangle or star points. Any more than that is showing off.           5. If you are doing applique, remember that bigger is dorkier. Flowers should be huge. Animals should possess really big eyes.           6. Throw away your seam ripper and repeat after me: "Oops. Oh, no one will notice."           7. Plan on running out of border fabric when you are three-quarters of the way finished. Complete the remaining border with something else you have a lot of, preferably in an unrelated color family.           8. You should be able to quilt equally well in all directions. I had to really work on this one. It was difficult to make my forward stitching look as bad as my backward stitching, but closing my eyes helped.           9. When you have put your last stitch in the binding, you are still only half finished. Your quilt must now undergo a thorough conditioning. Give it to someone you love dearly—to drag around the house, wrap up in, spill something on, and wash and dry until it is properly lumpy.           "No reason not to have quiltmaking be a pleasure", says Lisa Boyer, who has as firm a grip on her sense of humor as she does on her quilting needles. "If we didn't make Dorky Homemade quilts, all the quilts in the world would end up in the Beautiful Quilt Museum, untouched and intact. Quilts would just be something to look at. We would forget that quilts are lovable, touchable, shreddable, squeezable, chewable, and huggable -- made to wrap up in when the world seems to be falling down around us."

    That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows' writers, many of whom have advanced degrees in mathematics in addition to their unparalleled sense of humor. While recounting memorable episodes such as “Bart the Genius” and “Homer3,” Singh weaves in mathematical stories that explore everything from p to Mersenne primes, Euler's equation to the unsolved riddle of P v. NP; from perfect numbers to narcissistic numbers, infinity to even bigger infinities, and much more. Along the way, Singh meets members of The Simpsons' brilliant writing team-among them David X. Cohen, Al Jean, Jeff Westbrook, and Mike Reiss-whose love of arcane mathematics becomes clear as they reveal the stories behind the episodes. With wit and clarity, displaying a true fan's zeal, and replete with images from the shows, photographs of the writers, and diagrams and proofs, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets offers an entirely new insight into the most successful show in television history.

          Written and compiled by the Lord of Evil himself, The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia matches the playful, subversive tone of the series, detailing everything anyone will ever need to know about the postapocalyptic land of Ooo and its inhabitants—secret lore and spells, fun places you should visit and places where you will probably die, whom to marry and whom not to marry, how to make friends and how to destroy your enemies—plus hand-written marginalia by Finn, Jake, and Marceline. An indispensable companion to the show, this side-splittingly funny love letter to Adventure Time is sure to appeal to fans of all ages. Heck yeah! From the Back Cover: Written by the Lord of Evil Himself, Hunson Abadeer (a.k.a. Marceline the Vampire Queen's dad), to instruct and confound the demonic citizenry of the Nightosphere, The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia is perhaps the most dangerous book in history. Although seemingly a guidebook to the Land of Ooo and its postapocalyptic inhabitants, it is in fact an amusing nightmare of literary pitfalls, bombastic brain-boggles, and ancient texts designed to drive the reader mad.  Complete with secret lore and wizard spells, fun places you should visit and places where you will probably die, advice on whom to marry and whom not to marry, and how to make friends and destroy your enemies, this volume includes hand-written marginalia by Finn, Jake, and Marceline. Arguably the greatest encyclopaedia ever written since the beginning of the cosmos, it is also an indispensable companion to humans and demons who know what time it is: Adventure Time!

    It's been downhill ever since. For all this talk of our dazzling modern age, the two biggest advances of the past decade are Wi-Fi and Nando's. That's the best we can do.'In his latest laugh-out-loud collection of misanthropic scribblings, hideous Q-list celebrity failure Charlie Brooker tackles everything from the misery of nightclubs to the death of Michael Jackson, making room for Sir Alan Sugar, potato crisps, global financial meltdown, conspiracy theories and Hole in the Wall along the way. The collapse of civilisation has never felt this funny (unless you're a sociopath, in which case it's been an uninterrupted laugh riot since the days of the Somme).This book is guaranteed to brighten your life, put a spring in your step, and lie to you on its back cover.

    Illustrations.

    You know where you can go? The f**k to sleep.”Go the Fuck to Sleep is a book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, it captures the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. Read by a host of celebrities, from Samuel L. Jackson to Jennifer Garner, this subversively funny bestselling storybook will not actually put your kids to sleep, but it will leave you laughing so hard you won’t care.

    It was a cartoon that appeared for many years in daily newspapers and was loved by millions. (And was confusing to millions more.) But one day he stopped.Gary went into hiding. He made a couple short films. He played his guitar. He threw sticks for his dogs. They threw some back.Yet Gary was restless. He couldn't sleep nights. Something haunted him. (Besides Gramps.) Something that would return him to his roots in biology, drawing and dementia--a tale called There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story.It begins a few inches underground, when a young worm, during a typical family dinner, discovers there's a hair in his plate of dirt. He becomes rather upset, not just about his tainted meal but about his entire miserable, wormy life. This, in turn, spurs his father to tell him a story--a story to inspire the children of invertebrates everywhere.And so Father Worm describes the saga of a fair young maiden and her adventuresome stroll through her favorite forest, a perambulator's paradise. It is a journey filled with mystery and magic. Or so she thinks.Which is all we'll say for now.What exactly does the maiden encounter?Does Son Worm learn a lesson?More important, does he eat his plate of fresh dirt?Well, you'll have to read to find out, but let's just say the answers are right under your feet.Written and illustrated in a children's storybook style, There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story is a twisted take on the difference between our idealized view of Nature and the sometimes cold, hard reality of life for the birds and the bees and the worms (not to mention our own species).Told with his trademark off-kilter humor, this first original non--Far Side book is the unique work of a comic master.Now Larson can finally sleep at night.Question is, will you?(from the back cover)

    isn't it?'A John Cleese Twitter question ['What is your pet peeve?'], first sparked the 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller's collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor. From 'Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?' to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year's weather; and from 'I've forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter' to 'Excuse me... is this book edible?: here is a book for heroic booksellers and booklovers everywhere.This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top 'Weird Things' from bookshops around the world.