Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors…. The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche object-only for old fashioned cigarette smokers-in t...

These stories are linked by humor, setting, themes and recurring characters-cat lovers, murderers, gamblers, ghosts and fools-but mostly by the movie stars, gods and goddesses who look down on us struggling mortals with a mixture of benevolence and wrath. From Scarlett Johansson to Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood to Jerry Lewis, they represent the impossible ideals to which lesser beings turn for hope in an otherwise baffling world.

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It’s so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they’ve spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.Cornbread Nation 7, edited ...

A new collection of stories from the Pushcart Prize-winning author of The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure.Glittering with mischief and perversity, Jack Pendarvis’s latest collection of short fiction introduces readers to a world of losers poised on the brink of all sorts of disaster – a world only a wink and a nod away from our own.In the title novella a fundamentalist teenager must single-handedly confront the horrors of a spiritual quest filled...

This debut collection of stories holds a fun house mirror to the everyday lives of characters as empathetic as they are absurd.You’ve met the characters in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure. They’re the quirky visionaries and misguided dreamers we all know. . .and might even be. These characters are absurd, hilarious, and completely believable.From the self-appointed historian of the title piece to the frustrated wage slaves of "Our Spring Cata...

Winner of the Man Booker PrizeWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalA biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the...

The Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon is the longest running cartoon strip in the world. It has been published since 1918, when Robert Ripley himself was the cartoonist.By 1933, the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Cartoon was read daily by millions of people in 17 languages across 300 publications around the world. Selections from this rich treasure trove of unbelievable stories make up our compilation of cartoon ebooks, each guaranteed to astound, amuse and entertai...

Discover a more lighthearted side of the funeral industry in this collection of real-life stories from the authors of Mortuary Confidential.Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . . I Had Lost The Hearse!Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker...

“A true populist, as interested in celebrating the most humble wok-slinger as he is in extolling the superchef. If his sharp eye and his wicked tongue have brought him acclaim, what has kept him in the spotlight is his heart. Like Oscar Wilde, he is a moralist in the guise of a libertine.” —Denver PostThe instant New York Times bestseller and follow-up to Anthony Bourdain’s blockbuster classic on the cooking life, Kitchen Confidential

From the author of the wildly controversial books Liar and Paul's Case comes one of the most anticipated — and perhaps, in some quarters, feared — books of the year. This is author Lynn Crosbie at her most honest, most cutting, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking. The stories told here are at once a cache, a repository, of a seven-year period in the author's life; and, too, a gymnasium, a place where she can flex her prodigious wit and her dazzling stash of literary tricks Deft with mat...

New York Times BestsellerThe good, the bad, and the ugly, served up Bourdain-style.Bestselling chef and Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain has never been one to pull punches. In The Nasty Bits, he serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more ung...

Pick your next movie to watch with this collection of four decades of 4-star reviews from the Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic.Spanning the length of Roger Ebert's career as the leading American movie critic, this book contains all of his four-star reviews written during that time from About Last Night . . . to You Can Count on Me. A great guide for movie watching.