Stick Out Like a Sore Thumb


Book Description

Win by a nose. Pulling your leg. Turn a blind eye. Have you ever heard these crazy expressions? People use them even when noses, legs, and eyes have nothing to do with whatever they're discussing! That's because these sayings are idioms—phrases that mean something different than what the words in them actually say. But don't let idioms give you a chip on your shoulder! Let's explore a variety of idioms related to body parts and figure out what people really mean when they use them.




Granny's Old Sayings


Book Description




Sticking Out


Book Description

I need a favor, and there’s only one guy I’d dare ask. Conner Birch. Boston Buck’s right winger. Not only is he my best friend, he’s my brother-in-law…and the man I’ve always loved. The problem is, he never loved me back. What I want might make things more awkward, and I can’t risk our friendship, but…after losing my husband—Conner’s brother—this is my only chance at the life I’ve dreamed of. Everything about our arrangement is risky, and when things heat up, it becomes harder and harder to hide what I feel. Soon enough, playing house becomes all too real, I begin to think we might have a chance at a future. Until I find out the man I’m in love with might not be the man I thought he was…




How Popular Musicians Learn


Book Description

Popular musicians acquire some or all of their skills and knowledge informally, outside school or university, and with little help from trained instrumental teachers. How do they go about this process? Despite the fact that popular music has recently entered formal music education, we have as yet a limited understanding of the learning practices adopted by its musicians. Nor do we know why so many popular musicians in the past turned away from music education, or how young popular musicians today are responding to it. Drawing on a series of interviews with musicians aged between fifteen and fifty, Lucy Green explores the nature of pop musicians' informal learning practices, attitudes and values, the extent to which these altered over the last forty years, and the experiences of the musicians in formal music education. Through a comparison of the characteristics of informal pop music learning with those of more formal music education, the book offers insights into how we might re-invigorate the musical involvement of the population. Could the creation of a teaching culture that recognizes and rewards aural imitation, improvisation and experimentation, as well as commitment and passion, encourage more people to make music? Since the hardback publication of this book in 2001, the author has explored many of its themes through practical work in school classrooms. Her follow-up book, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (2008) appears in the same Ashgate series.




Defiance


Book Description

In an atmosphere of extreme civil unrest, a scientist makes a significant breakthrough which could bankrupt global businesses and decimate the economies of several nations. Threatened by governments, mega-corporations and organized crime, Dr. Ann Ford finds unexpected allies in her quest to bring her technology into the free market.




Love & Tea Bags


Book Description

Fate can be written in a tea bag too. Mark Johnson is hitting his forties and is stuck in a rut. He's had the same boring office job for ten years, with no motivation or inclination to change it. The same crumbling house for ten years, with no cash or know-how to fix it. And the same Facebook status for five years—it's complicated. It isn't. He's single. He just doesn't want to correct it. That would be admitting defeat. The day a tea bag splats onto his face whilst he's emptying the dregs of his morning cuppa at Macy's Tea Shoppe is the one that makes him question each of his current life choices...the tea bag and that the shop is currently being run by one rather friendly, rather hunky, but rather young Australian named Bradley Summers. Tea has never tasted so good.




Deviant Hollers


Book Description

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.




Disorder


Book Description

On the ninth hour of the day that a citizen of Bestellen turns eighteen years of age, the pledge in question will be fully admitted into their selected career. They never thought that this meant being abandoned. After being drafted for the military, three eighteen-year-olds are kicked outside of their country’s wall. There’s no way to get back in, and after finding out why they were stranded, returning is the last thing they want to do.




Harrow the Ninth


Book Description

Harrow the Ninth, an Amazon pick for Best SFF of 2020 and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling sequel to Gideon the Ninth, turns a galaxy inside out as one necromancer struggles to survive the wreckage of herself aboard the Emperor's haunted space station. The Locked Tomb is a 2023 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Series! “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!” —Charles Stross on Gideon the Ninth “Unlike anything I've ever read.” —V.E. Schwab on Gideon the Ninth “Deft, tense and atmospheric, compellingly immersive and wildly original.” —The New York Times on Gideon the Ninth She answered the Emperor's call. She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend. In victory, her world has turned to ash. After rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman's shoulders. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath — but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her. Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor's Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off? THE LOCKED TOMB SERIES BOOK 1: Gideon the Ninth BOOK 2: Harrow the Ninth BOOK 3: Nona the Ninth BOOK 4: Alecto the Ninth At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Bibi's Rainbow: Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation


Book Description

Bibi's Rainbow is a delightfully narrated novel centered around a large Iranian immigrant family and their old, wise and faithful nanny, Bibi, a talented cook armed with inexhaustible secret recipes, who is resolutely determined to ease the transition of four generations of her "family" into American society. Using her wits and miraculous recipes as weapons, she ultimately manages to avert a "Clash of Civilizations" in their Beverly Hills neighborhood, winning over the hearts and souls of her extended family and their neighbors during the tumultuous period between 1979-2008. It is a tale of the long, sometimes tragic, often-hilarious, journey to assimilation.