Front cover: A book of rhymes, games, jokes, stories, secret languages, beliefs and camp legends, for parents, grandparents, teachers, counselors and all adults who were once children.
'I was having lunch with Dexter DeWitt. This in itself was a questionable activity on my part.' So begins Code Green, by Greg Jenkins, whose anti-hero Chip Stone engages in quite a few questionable activities. Stone is a male nurse who works in a psychiatric hospital and has almost as many behavioral issues as the residents he cares for. Those residents include DeWitt, a one-time cultural critic gone bonkers; Tim Valentine, who snacks on light bulbs; Philip Nolan, who contends (correctly) that he's actually a character in a novel; and Glinda Moon, an anorexic witch. As the violence at his workplace intensifies, the confused Stone lights out on a desperate but comical odyssey to find his estranged wife'and himself. His wanderings take him through the netherworld of western Maryland, where he meets old friends, new enemies and on ehighly unusual sister-in-law. In the end, he discovers that the line between the sane and the not-so-sane is more gassamer than even he had suspected. With its over-the-top characters and gaudy, entertaining prose, Code Green offers a bumptious blend of humor and pathos well-suited to the uncertainties of a new millennium.
Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.
Named a Best Book of the Year by the Seattle Times and Kirkus Review The final novel from a great American storyteller. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way. Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers.
Thirteen-year-old Falcon Quinn and his neighbors, Max and Megan, board bus number 13 for school on an ordinary day in Cold River, Maine. Only the bus doesn't take its ordinary route, and Falcon and his friends soon find themselves in an extraordinary place-on Shadow Island, at the Academy for Monsters. With a student body stranger than the cast of any monster movie Falcon has ever seen, the academy is home to creatures and oddities of all kinds. Once at the academy, Falcon's friends begin to unleash their monster natures. Falcon has always felt different, with his one bright blue eye and one shadow black eye, but is he really a monster? The first book in this tween series will leave readers clamoring for more monsters and more Falcon Quinn!
While the study of children's poetry has always had a place in the realm of children's literature, scholars have not typically considered it in relation to the larger scope of contemporary poetry. In this volume, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., explores the "playground" of children's poetry within the world of contemporary adult poetic discourse, bringing the complex social relations of play and games, cliques and fashions, and drama and humor in children's poetry to light for the first time. Poetry's Playground considers children's poetry published in the United States from the mid-twentieth century onward, a time when many established adult poets began writing for young audiences. Through the work of major figures like Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Shel Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky, Thomas explores children's poems within the critical and historical conversations surrounding adult texts, arguing at the same time that children's poetry is an oft-neglected but crucial part of the American poetic tradition. Canonical issues are central to Poetry's Playground. The volume begins by tracing Robert Frost's emergence as the United States' official school poet, exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of his canonization and considering which other poets were pushed aside as a result. The study also includes a look at eight major anthologies of children's poems in the United States, offering a descriptive canon that will be invaluable to future scholarship. Additionally, Poetry's Playground addresses poetry actually written and performed by children, exploring the connections between folk poetry produced both on playgrounds and in the classroom. Poetry's Playground is a groundbreaking study that makes bold connections between children's and adult poetry. This book will be of interest to poets, scholars of poetry and children's literature, as well as students and teachers of literary history, cultural anthropology, and contemporary poetry.
When's the last time you got to pick a folklorist's brain? Did you know memes count as folklore? Or that folklorists assign numbers to fairy tales to keep track of them all? The field of folklore studies is over two centuries old, and it's full of amazing insights about human behavior, creativity, and community. Folklore studies is as interdisciplinary as it gets, squished somewhere between anthropology and linguistics and religious studies and comparative literature and more. It’s all about the informal human interactions, the million tiny acts and stories and beliefs and arts that function as social glue even if they seem beneath notice. Do traditional holiday foods have a deeper meaning? Yep. Same with folk music, ballads, proverbs, jokes, urban legends, body art, and a ton more genres covered in this book. Is the whole book as easy to read and irreverent as this description? Yep. This fun, accessible guide to the academic study of folklore packs in a college class's worth of material, from basic concepts and major folklore genres to special topics based on identity, fancy theories, and more. If you've always wanted to take a folklore class, or you're a writer or artist using folklore in your work, or you're just generally interested in the topic, this is the book for you! “This wonderfully insightful book introduces the reader to folklore with warmth and good humor. Students and others interested in folklore will love it!” - Libby Tucker, Distinguished Service Professor of English, Binghamton University and author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses “Dr. Jeana Jorgensen knows her stuff and, just as importantly, knows how to communicate it. Folklore 101 is a treasure trove of knowledge, the kind it would take years of college courses to accumulate yourself. If you're curious about academic folklore, this clear, engaging book is where you want to start." – Dr. Sara Cleto, co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic
What happens when the nightmares have whiskers? This anthology is all about the monsters. Stories by Jennifer Elliott J. Milton Case II Dr. Raz T. Slasher Ray Ayles Ronald W Gillespie Jr Serena Mossgraves Sergio Palumbo Art and poetry by Patricia Harris Ruan Bradford Wright Sophie Elliott Jennifer Elliott Tish MacWebber
101 Ways to Gross Out Your Friends shows kids how to use science and activities to make slimy snot, gorilla poop, and more to, well, gross out their friends!
In this collection of a novella and stories, Anndee Hochman examines loss, faith, and love, and explores the complex anatomies of human relationships. Her tales are peopled by a brilliant assortment of characters, many of them adolescent girls and young women, all on the verge of discovering their roles in the world. Smart, fresh, and vivid, Anatomies marks the fiction debut of a gifted writer.