It’s coming . . . the pleasure state! In this biting and satiric novel, a major American writer looks forward to the day - surely not far away - when machines have taken over all productive work, the government consists of a battery of Thinking Machines, and the people are turned loose on a perpetual spree. Visit Atomic Amusement Park (and don’t miss the Proton-Neutron Tunnel of Love!) . . . try Russo-Playo, the spy game played with real bullets! . . . See Paris and Tokyo, the exotic “fun cities” built in Miami, Florida. For this is the America of the Future, a whole country transformed into one gigantic playland. Everybody calls it “The Funhouse” - and why not? It’s Heaven on Earth . . . Isn’t it?
The Fun House by Tom Bissinger is a rollicking tale of coming of age in the sixties and seventies. Based on the childhood thrills he experiences at the fun house at Playland in San Francisco, Tom comes to understand that making fun houses and exploring those of others would become the defining quest of his life. He’s brought up in privilege, and like his father who had at one time performed on Broadway, Tom’s drawn to the theater. After boarding school and his immersion into a repertory theater company while attending Stanford, he lives in Paris then enlists in the army then moves to New York, and we are at the birth of the sixties, erupting like a bombshell, and Tom is there to celebrate and be open to the Golden Age of New York theater while simultaneously weaving the momentous events of that era into his story: assassinations, civil rights marches, and the Vietnam War. Sexual experimentation and drugs follow Tom as he ricochets through love affairs, directs plays, and marches in Selma. He moves to Philadelphia in 1969 to become the artistic director of the Theatre of Living Arts. In 1970, Tom abandons the legitimate theater and reinvents himself on Philly’s South Street. Tom paints emotionally vivid portraits of neighborhood characters who hang out in Tom’s new fun house: eccentric old-timers, newly minted hippies, artists, dopers, and a murderer. In 1977, Tom, his wife, Kristen, and their two-year-old travel for nine months as nomads: they live with Samoan families, spend two months on a fifty-foot trimaran in Fiji, live at Papunya Aborigine settlement in Australia, fall into a drug smuggler’s den in Bali, and end up in an ashram in Sri Lanka before returning home as the book ends.
Greg and Carl's field trip is spoiled by rain. They take shelter in the fun house, but then strange things start to happen. The lights go out. Is something hairy following them around in the dark? The Fun House is a level 5 book in the Sound Out Phonics Based Chapter Books series, which feature six levels of phonics progression that gives students multiple opportunities to practice specific phonics skills. Level 5 focuses on one-syllable spelling patterns, word endings, and compound words.
Evil comes in frightening and familiar forms in this terrifying novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz. Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival. She married a man she grew to hate—and gave birth to a child she could never love. A child so monstrous that she killed it with her own hands... Twenty-five years later, Ellen Harper has a new life, a new husband, and two normal children—Joey loves monster movies and Amy is about to graduate from high school. But their mother drowns her secret guilt in alcohol and prayer. The time has come for Amy and Joey to pay for her sins, because the carnival is coming back to town...
Reality TV can be murder in the Jersey Shore mysteries from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the Mr. Lemoncello’s Library series. What if a reality TV show like Jersey Shore set up production in the fictional seaside resort Sea Haven? What if hitting the gym, tanning, and doing a little laundry aren’t the only things the contestants get into. By-the-book officer John Ceepak and his wisecracking young partner, Danny Boyle, have to babysit the buff and boozy kids partying it up in a Jersey shore rental house for TV’s summertime hit Fun House while simultaneously trying to stop the rowdy kids from breaking the law up and down the beach. But even Ceepak and Danny can’t stop one young cast member from being murdered - and others from being threatened with the same fate.
The Funhouse is a surrealistic vision of American society and politics during the era of the Vietnam War. The protagonist, recently emigrated from Latin-America to the United States, experiences the Vietnam-tainted culture through the warped lens of an amusement park funhouse. Relationships are subjected to the Chamber of Horrors which perverts love, sex and family into random acts of corruption, violence and inhumanity. All who seek love and companionship must pass through the Hall of Mirrors which reveals the truth about the often distorted and obscured self-image. AlegrÕa captures the spirit and ideology of the sixties and reignites its guiding light of salvation: uncompromising, all-embracing love.
In Riverdale, even the toys are terrifying in this anthology one-shot set in the universe of last year’s Fear the Funhouse comic. Three tales of dolls, robots, and puppets gone awry all thanks to the work of a shadowy toymaker and a young girl intent on revenge, in the vein of the widely successful M3GAN movie and Child’s Play franchise
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-wthin-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad,' and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidescope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.
From renowned journalist Bill Zehme, author of the New York Times bestselling The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin', comes the first full-fledged biography and the only complete story of the late comic genius Andy Kaufman. Based on six years of research, Andy's own unpublished, never-before-seen writings, and hundreds of interviews with family members, friends, and key players in Andy's endless charades, many of whom have become icons in their own right, Lost in the Funhouse takes us through the maze of Kaufman's mind and lets us sit deep behind his mad, dazzling blue eyes to see, firsthand, the fanciful landscape that was his life. Controversial, chaotic, splendidly surreal, and tragically brief--what a life it was. Andy Kaufman was often a mystery even to his closest friends. Remote, aloof, impossible to know, his internal world was a kaleidoscope of characters fighting for time on the outside. He was as much Andy Kaufman as he was Foreign Man (dank you veddy much), who became the lovably bashful Latka on the hit TV series Taxi. He was as much Elvis Presley as he was the repugnant Tony Clifton, a lounge singer from Vegas who hated any audience that came to see him and who seemed to hate Andy Kaufman even more. He was a contradiction, a paradox on every level, an artist in every sense of the word. During the comic boom of the seventies, when the world had begun to discover the prodigious talents of Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and so many others, Andy was simply doing what he had always done in his boyhood reveries. On the debut of Saturday Night Live, he stood nervously next to a phonograph that scratchily played the theme from Mighty Mouse. He fussed and fidgeted, waiting for his moment. When it came, he raised his hand and moved his mouth to the words "Here I come to save the day!" In that beautiful deliverance of pantomime before the millions of people for whom he had always dreamed about performing, Andy triumphed. He changed the face of comedy forever by lurching across boundaries that no one knew existed. He was the boy who made life his playground and never stopped playing, even when the games proved too dangerous for others. And in the end he would play alone, just as he had when it was all only beginning. In Lost in the Funhouse, Bill Zehme sorts through a life of disinformation put forth by a master of deception to uncover the motivation behind the manipulation. Magically entertaining, it is a singular biography matched only by its singular subject.
