I wrote Kids Jingle Bell Boogie because I wanted to give families more than just another holiday story — I wanted to create a movement of joy.A story that dances off the page, fills living rooms with laughter, and reminds every child that the magic of Christmas lives in their own heartbeat.At the North Pole, everything is ready for Santa’s big Christmas celebration — the Jingle Bell Boogie, a tradition that brings elves, reindeer, and children together for one unforgettable ...

Discover how one remarkable purple yam can transform everyday drinks, baked treats, creamy desserts, and celebration recipes. In The Authentic Ube Cookbook, Michael Fink presents 60 approachable recipes created for home cooks who want to explore the distinctive color, gentle sweetness, nutty depth, and vanilla-like character of authentic ube powder. More than a collection of beautiful purple desserts, this practical cookbook explains how to select, hydrate, store, and use ube powder succes...

Readers have been schooled to see nineteenth-century Russian literature as the summit of social and psychological realism. But in the work of writers from Pushkin to Chekhov, Michael C. Finke discloses a pervasive self-referentiality, a running commentary on the literary conventions these texts seem so wholly to embody. Metapoesis examines how—and more importantly, why—a series of major Russian authors spanning the nineteenth century inscribed commentary on their own poet...

Chekhov's works are unflinching in the face of human frailty. With their emphasis on the dignity and value of individuals during unique moments, they help us better understand how to exist with others when we are fundamentally alone. Written in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, when the country began to move fitfully toward industrialization and grappled with the influence of Western liberalism even as it remained an autocracy, Chekhov's plays and stories continue to influence c...

USS Intrepid’s Fighting Squadron 18 (VF-18) was one of the U.S. Navy’s highest-scoring carrier units of World War II. Despite having only one combat veteran in its roster, its aviators—including Cecil “Speedball” Harris, the Navy’s second-ranking ace—were credited with shooting down more than 170 planes during their 81-day tour of duty, earning the squadron the nickname “Two-a-Day 18” in newspapers nationwide. How did a novice unit with a comparatively short time in theater accomp...

Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays endure as outstanding modern literary works, and his life was no less dramatic, rising from poor beginnings to become a writer, physician and philanthropist.In this new biography Michael C. Finke analyses Chekhov’s major stories, plays, and non-fiction in the context of his life, fleshing out the key features of Chekhov’s poetics of prose and drama, and revealing key continuities across genres as well as between the lesser-known early writings and t...

Of the thirty volumes in the authoritative Academy edition of Chekhov's collected works, fully twelve are devoted to the writer's letters. This is the first book in English or Russian addressing this substantial—though until now neglected—epistolary corpus. The majority of the essays gathered here represent new contributions by the world's major Chekhov scholars, written especially for this volume, or classics of Russian criticism appearing in English for the first time. The introduction a...

Leading for Instructional ImprovementEducational experts agree that quality teaching is the single most important factor in improving educational outcomes for all students. Teaching is a highly sophisticated and complex endeavor requiring deep expertise on the part of teachers and school leaders. This book shows how teacher, school, and district leaders can cultivate the expertise of teachers to deliver high quality instruction for all students. Leading for Ins...

This is the first book to explore the phenomenon of glamour and celebrity in contemporary Russian culture, ranging across media forms, disciplinary boundaries and modes of inquiry, with particular emphasis on the media personality.The book demonstrates how the process of ‘celebrification’ in Russia coincides with the dizzying pace of social change and economic transformation, the latter enabling an unprecedented fascination with glamour and its requisite extravagance; how in the 19...

The Goalkeeper is a new scholarly almanac devoted to the art of Vladimir Nabokov. Himself an ardent goalkeeper, the author of Lolita viewed soccer as more than a game: I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret (Speak, Memory). The inaugural collection features contributions from two dozen leading Nabokov scholars worldwide, including academic articles (Neil Cornwell, Gerard de Vries, Samuel Schuman, and others); roundtable discussions (Brian Boyd, Jeff Edmunds, Prisci...

The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York.Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entir...

Words that Change Minds is based on the Language and Behaviour Profile (LAB Profile™); an easy to learn tool which illustrates how each person is unique. The LAB Profile™ will enable you to understand and predict from someone's language in everyday conversation, how he or she will behave in a given situation. You will learn how to customize your language for specific people and groups to trigger motivation and even change people's minds.