Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture, including oddball curiosities, local legends, crazy characters, and peculiar roadside attractions.
Arizona, land of rugged, starkly beautiful scenery, teeming with fascinating history; now learn of the terrors which lurk therein! Noted author of the weird Jeffery Scott Sims, himself a resident, presents Eerie Arizona, a collection of sixteen tales of the strange and macabre set in the Grand Canyon State. Ghost towns and their denizens, haunted houses and their occupants, alien entities and creatures of nightmare; they're all here, plus picture postcard views! In addition, popular character Professor Anton Vorchek, investigator of weird mysteries, returns to confront horrors amidst exotic or lurid settings. Contents: The Ghost Town, At the End of a Dusty Road, A Detour to Skull Valley, The Shack on Escudilla Mountain, The Witch's Cave, Sedona, My War Against the Invisibles, The Diary of Philip Wyler, Among the Hoodoos, A Chance Result, The Mystery of the Inner Basin Lodge, The Legend of the Vulture Mine, The Revenge of the Past, The House on Anderson Mesa, The House on the Hill of Stars, Into the Vortex.
In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it. Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.
Each fun and intriguing volume offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture. These unique travel guides are chock-full of information about oddball curiosities, ghostly places, local legends, and peculiar roadside attractions.
THE WEIRD SERIES What’s weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the best-selling phenomenon, Weird N.J. But why should they stop at New Jersey when there’s so much that’s peculiar, odd, and utterly nutty across the whole U.S.? So the two Marks—along with several other writers with a taste for the strange—have focused on some key locales, giving each of them the full “New Jersey” treatment. Spanning the breadth of the country, from New York to California, these are travel guides of a sort, but to the kind of places voyagers will never find on their everyday maps. Instead, they’re chock-full of local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and bizarre roadside attractions. So come along and join the fun: Some of what’s out there is disturbing, some hilarious, but all of it is unforgettably…weird. Praise for WEIRD N.J.: “They are the chroniclers of the creepy, bards of the bizarre…From abandoned asylums to colorful real-life characters past and present, to folk stories of ghosts, monsters, and aliens, Mr. Sceurman and Mr. Moran have created a journal of New Jersey’s unwritten history.”—The New York Times. “Enough with the head-severing mobsters of Jersey. The state is packed with far more evil than TV could ever invent—from satanic Klan rallies to time-traveling tree farmers. And Weird N.J. has the pictures to prove it.”—Rolling Stone. “Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran see their native state as others do not. For them, it is a demented Disneyland of worldly, and otherworldly, delights.”—The Boston Globe. “If it’s the offbeat, paranormal or downright weird that you crave…there could be no better place”—USA Today. Praise for Weird U.S. “Weird U.S. is delicious armchair reading. Who can resist an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit, a home shaped like a giant shoe, cannibal albino villages, midget colonies, passages to hell or close relations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?”—San Francisco Chronicle. “Weird U.S. is a marvelous work of entertainment and the basis for a truly unique vacation.”—Library Journal. “Kudos to Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman…This is the book by which future explorers will chart their road trips in pursuit of the meaning of this nation.”—New York Press.
Whether you are exploring the rabbit warren of rooms that comprise Mystery Castle, hiking the steep, jagged face of Piestewa Peak named after the country's first female Native American killed in combat, or standing among the towering saguaro cacti found only in the Sonoran Desert, it is hard to avoid adventure with a copy of Secret Phoenix: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure in your backpack. This book traverses the historical, geographical and cultural landscape of an unlikely city that has risen from the dust of an ancient civilization to be the sixth largest city in the U.S. From the native peoples who first established the vital canals of yore to the lungers plagued with tuberculosis who flocked to the dry, dry desert to find some relief to the builders, engineers and architects who created the highways and skyline you see today, the city's story is one of survival, innovation and rugged determination. A new and eager city bent on growth, Phoenix has often eschewed history for the sake of progress and over time has lost too much of its heritage; however, for those who look closely, ask the probing questions and choose to explore, there is a history (and a future) to be found. From Glendale to Tempe, Scottsdale to Goodyear, Chandler to Carefree, this book is an examination of metropolitan Phoenix through the bits and pieces left behind and the new spaces and places just beginning to take shape.
Whether it's Andre the aardvark or Zena the zorilla, each of these twenty-six unusual animals are part of a colorful A-Z adventure. Let the journey begin!