Better to Have Loafed and Lost


Book Description

James Thurber was the most original, influential and, less we should forget, funniest American humorist of the last century. Writing and drawing cartoons for the New Yorker magazine from it's beginnings in the 1930s, he steadily shaped his own unique comic universe: a world governed by absurd logic where the trivial anxieties of everyday life slowly grind down its resigned citizens. Thurber's tales, alternately related in bemused deadpan and bewildered rage and are always excruciatingly funny and occasionally quietly disturbing too. This brand new selection, the first in over 50 years, reassembles his finest work for a new generation brought up on David Lynch and Jerry Seinfeld and features all his famous obsessions: the battle of the sexes, animals, travel, the delusional and certifiably insane. His 'casuals', as he liked to call his short pieces, drift between out and out fiction and surreal memoir. Spanning his whole career, this collection includes all his classic writings and cartoons, 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', 'The Catbird Seat', 'The Seal in the Bedroom', and half-forgotten gems that may be new even to fully qualified Thurber fans.




El Conservador


Book Description

George H. Rodriguez has dedicated his life to sharing conservative values with fellow Hispanics and all Americans. As a Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush appointee, he worked with the Department of Justice in community relations and immigration outreach, going on to work with the White House and on President Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. In recent years, Rodriguez has served with the GOP and was one of the first Hispanics to be president of a major Tea Party group. Now in El Conservador: Conservative Opinions, George H. Rodriguez shares a hard-hitting collection of his political essays and commentaries. As a nationally known blogger and political commenter, George Rodriguez is a constitutional conservative Texan of Mexican descent, also known as a Tejano. His essays reflect his belief in personal freedom, and they support the idea that all Texans and Americans should live life as they wish, as long as it does not harm others or infringe on another person's rights. With a commitment to conservative values--and in some cases with a little bit of a chile picoso attitude--Rodriguez focuses on critical political topics that all Americans should be informed about: from the basics of constitutional government, personal property ownership, and states' rights to contemporary issues like the debt, immigration, and so-called diversity. Because liberal misinformation and a growing government can be dangerous to the freedom and liberty of citizens, Rodriguez believes it is important to remember why America is the greatest nation on earth and protect its God-given destiny.




On the Farm


Book Description

See farm machinery like tractors, trucks, and trailers as they harvest the field and sow the next crop, and the tanker as it collects the cows' milk.




The Human Journalist


Book Description

Willis examines the many orientations and perspectives of reporters that gather and present the news of the day. Debunking the notion that there are limited perspectives journalists may use, Willis examines up to 15 different orientations that reporters bring to their work. These perspectives run the gamut, from the traditional approach of distancing oneself completely from events and people involved to becoming part of the story's fabric to ascertain the story's true essence. Willis also suggests that, for many stories, it is wholly appropriate for journalists to feel what a non-professional would experience at such an event, and to allow those emotions to fuel the reporting and writing of the story. Several examples are discussed in detail, including the coverage of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.




Academonia


Book Description

Fiction. Cultural Writing. Essays. A series of essays, ACADEMONIA is also an epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides. Here Bellamy, "explores the prickly intersection among these [institutional] spaces as it moves through institutions such as the academy, the experimental writing communities of the Bay Area, feminist and sexual identities, and group therapy. Continuing the work that she began in The Letters of Mina Harker pushing memoir and confession out of its safety zones and into its difficulties, this book provokes as it critiques and it critiques and yet at the same time manages to delight with its hope"-Juliana Spahr.




Vexos Invasion


Book Description

Bakugan Battle Brawlers . . . ready to save this world . . . and the next! Welcome to New Vestroia! The Bakugan Battle Brawlers have faced some tough opponents before, but now they face the toughest yet: the Vexos Organization, who are determined to wreak havoc in the very heart of Bakugan: Vestroia. Dan isn't about to let them succeed. With Marucho, Shun, Ace, Mira, and Baron to defend New Vestroia and Bakugan everywhere, Vexos doesn't stand a chance!




Letters from Aldenderry


Book Description

Poetry has no precedent for the voice in Letters from Aldenderry. Colloquial and demotic, it takes pride and pleasure in the sound of American, but it is emphatically "from elsewhere" in its joyful symmetries. What astounds is the multiplicity of Nikolayev's registers and his command of perfect verbal pitch. This is cosmopolitan one-man theater at its best. Life is all there, its whole nine yards from birth to shock to recovery, from thoughtful conversation and intimacies of the soul to standup guffaws and punning provocation. Filled with an organic fusion of extremes, with healthy experimentation and a history of poetic forms that looms behind every line, this book is an apotheosis of freedom that shuts the gaping gulf between lyric and avant-garde. The poems are about what has been lost and found and is worth keeping: creative solitude, empathy, love, pain and laughter, the poetic experience itself. Words do not swallow the reader in an avalanche of consciousness, they flow to a varied musical rhythm and make sense. The overall impression is integral and wholesome. The work succeeds at modeling a persuasive modern hero--a far-flung, uprooted émigré intellectual who makes his home in diverse languages and cultures and stares at the world through a unique pair of eyes. This type is among the most interesting in current literature, fraught as it is with multiple biography, dialectics, contradictions. A poet can cultivate compassion to the point of sheer self-transformation. Nikolayev is crazy in the best possible sense of the word.




Our National Defences


Book Description




One Man Caravan


Book Description

This adventurous work records Robert Edison Fulton's solo round-the-world tour on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July, 1932 and December, 1933. First published in 1937.