From the author of The Oranging of America comes this inspiring true story about an American family. Rocky takes over a family, at the age of 103, and shows them how to survive.“In the end, it is Apple's affecting writing about his deepest loss that carries this book.”—Kirkus Reviews

Howard Johnson and Walt Disney are determined to acquire land near Orlando, Florida from Margery Post Merriweather, heiress of the family cereal fortune.“Reading this book is like peeling an artichoke. The outer leaves are big belly laughs at tried-and-true themes such as boosterism and oversanitized motels, but as we get below the surface we come upon ever smaller and more delicate morsels of human frailty until we wonder how much more of ourselves we can take.”—Florence King, The...

“Shows just how well comedy and criticism can mix with understanding. The story parodies the form and language”--Bookforum

This is the first collection to appear in twenty years from one of America's best short story writers. His thirteen stories are marvelous—funny, heartbreaking, and wise by turns, and on occasion all three at once.Praise for The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories:"Thank you, Mr. Apple! There's an art to writing a sad story that's also fun to read... Many of Apple's stories are heartbreaking, but there's hardly a page that doesn't yield a smile at one line or anothe...

So what's a nice Jewish boy like Ira Goldstein doing managing a flashy Puerto Rican boxer named Jésus? What is his mother doing in the arms of Solomon, the scrap-metal king of Detroit? And what, for toppers, is J. Edgar Hoover doing in a chair suspended over a boxing ring in Havana, Cuba? Charge it all to zip—that elusive form of human energy that makes hearts leap, cash flow, ideologies tremble, the world go round. Ira could sure use some zip, so he tries to find it.

It was my fascination itself with the English language that made me a writer," Apple wrote in an essay for the New York Times Book Review. Its endless suggestiveness has carried me through many a plot, entertained me when nothing else could." Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking family, Apple writes a prose that is remarkably attuned to America's cultural and linguistic With the 1976 publication of The Oranging of America, and Other Stories, Apple established himself as one of America's most a...

Taking the beloved symbol of merriment out of his conventional trappings and into the world of imaginative folklore, Baum gives Santa Claus an exciting life that evokes all the charm, warmth, and fantasy that made his Oz stories American classics.

The beloved bathroom reader series returns with this twenty-sixth edition that's flush with weird facts on a wide array of topics.The twenty-sixth annual edition of Uncle John's wildly successful series is all-new and jam-packed with the BRI's patented mix of fun and information. Open to any page and you may find an interesting origin (like the origin of the snow globe) or a piece of obscure history (like the true story of the man who tried to repeal the law of gra...

In this true crime memoir, a former member of the Irish mob under Whitey Bulger details his criminal exploits in 1980s and '90s Boston.An ice-cold enforcer with a red-hot temper, John "Red" Shea was already a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob at the young age of twenty-one, a protégé of the notorious Irish godfather James "Whitey" Bulger. Brutal and ruthlessly ambitious—a loan shark, money launderer, and multimillion-dollar narcotics kingpin—Shea was at t...

It's safe to say that world-famed speaker and author Og Mandino has as many friends as any man alive, thanks to his inspiring motivational lectures and his bestselling books. This new book is a special gift to all his friends, old and new, a book they may cherish above all the rest. Secrets for Success and Happiness is Og's beautifully written journal, an intimate record of his innermost thoughts and feelings, the heartwarming events of his day-to-day life.Whether he's writing in hi...

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New JournalismThe phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between milit...

Chosen by Paul Auster out of the four thousand stories submitted to his radio programme on National Public Radio, these 180 stories provide a wonderful portrait of America in the twentieth century. The requirement for selection was that each of the stories should be true, and each of the writers should not have been previously published. The collection that has emerged provides a richly varied and authentic voice for the American people, whose lives, loves, griefs, regrets, joys and sense ...