Say this ten times fast: Big bedbugs bite pet pugs’ butts! Featuring the funniest things in life––like barf, drool, mucus, pus, and gas––Twisted Tongues is an excellent collection of more than 150 tongue twisters, all sure to gross out your parents. Use the Twist Level meters to gauge your skill and challenge others in mouth-mangling twister games. Then enjoy riddles told by two talking boogers! There’s loads to learn, too: Did you know that ancient Romans scraped off their skin’s oil and sweat and sold it as medicine? Ewwwww.
Cultural creolization, métissage, hybridity, and the in-between spaces of postcolonial thought are now fundamental terms of reference within contemporary critical thought. Entwisted Tongues explores the sociohistorical and cultural basis for writing in creole languages from a comparative framework. The rise of self-defining literatures in Atlantic creoles offers parallels with the development of national literatures elsewhere, but the status of creole languages imposes particular conditions for literary creation. After an introduction to the history of the term creole, Entwisted Tongues surveys the history of the languages which are its focus: the Crioulo of Cape Verde, Sierra Leone Krio, Surinamese Sranan, Papiamentu (spoken in the Netherlands Antilles), and the varieties of French-based Kreyol in the Caribbean. The chapter Deep Speech turns around a trope ubiquitous in creoles, one conveying the sense that their authentic registers are at the furthest remove from the high cultures with which they are in contact; Diglossic Dilemma explores the contradictions inherent in this trope. The remaining analysis explores numerous nooks and crannies of these marginal but fascinating literatures, submitting that creoles and literature in them are prima facie evidence of the human will to articulate speech and verbal art, even in the face of slavery, oppression and penury.
Two award-winning and bestselling novelists--and authors of "This Scepter'd Isle"--collaborate once again for another enticing new fantasy set in pre-Elizabethan England.
Gordon K. Tseng and his daughter Sharon H. Tseng both love to play with words. One day, Gordon proposed, "Why don't we write down everything that we have been playing with?" Sharon soon collected all the rhymes they had made. Later, they got quite a few funny rhymes that really twist. After these rhymes were edited, this book-with 60 cool tongue twisters-came to be. Let's play English! But Gordon and Sharon have declared that they are not responsible for any possible damage to your twisted tongue or brain. Please see a doctor if anything happens. Just don't blame them or this book, because it's you who want to play. So, take it easy! Show time!
*A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of the Year* From John Edgar Wideman, a modern “master of language” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a stunning story collection that spans a range of topics from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell. In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that—despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division—encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior. Never content merely to tell a story, Wideman seeks once again to create language that delivers passages like jazz solos, and virtuosic manipulations of time to entangle past and present. The story “Separation” begins with a boy afraid to stand alone beside his grandfather’s coffin, then wends its way back and forth from Pittsburgh to ancient Sumer. “Atlanta Murders” starts with two chickens crossing a road and becomes a dark riff, contemplating “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” James Baldwin’s report on the 1979–1981 child murders in Atlanta, Georgia. Comprised of fictions of the highest caliber and relevancy by a writer whose imagination and intellect “prove his continued vitality...with vigor and soul” (Entertainment Weekly), Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone will entrance and surprise committed Wideman fans and newcomers alike.
Salt City Prayers is a collection of Sunday morning prayers offered between 1985 and 1995 at Erwin United Methodist Church in Syracuse, New York. The prayers include themes such as comfort, deliverance, faith, grace, growth, meaning, presence, and restoration.
This poetry book implores ways to recognize contemporary circumstances in an unorthodox and nostalgic manner so as to draw attention to lifes raw deal. There is contempt but with a noble motive: the desire to bring change in the thinking of the reader. Its principle reason over the long range is to bring about change through peace, hope and inspiration. One might say that it seeks to give us a fresh viewpoint on the incongruities and evils we live among, the evil we ignore or the evil that we, ourselves are. Faith, Unity and Discipline is a collection of thoughts, a compilation of memories, a basket of hope, and a plea for humanity. Some pieces question the accepted norms of everyday life and some pieces try to put together the puzzles of faith and sincerity of effort. Each poem should be read under individual light as they were written in a spirit of independent thinking. If found and read after the life of the poet, the reader is urged to try to imagine the thoughts that must have affected the poet. After all, imagination is the most spectacular sense we, the humans possess.
