The son of writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp Friedman, wrote a memoir about growing up and getting into hi-jinx on both coasts with his brothers Drew and Josh Friedman (both famous in their own right): with appearances by mobster Joe Gallo, Groucho Marx, and others. Whether shooting pool with the mobster Crazy Joey Gallo, attending a dinner party hosted by an aged but remarkably spry Groucho Marx, or simply playing doctor with a classmate in the former estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kipp Friedman led a colorful childhood. The youngest son of celebrated writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp looks back fondly on the amusing and sometimes confusing events and encounters that helped shape his early life in this moving tribute to growing up among a family of creative artists―swept up in the whirlwind of the New York arts scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Follow Kipp’s exploits as bystander and willing participant as he joins older brothers Josh (writer and musician) and Drew (renowned cartoonist and illustrator) as three musketeers on a youthful quest to discover the scariest low-budget horror movies along 42nd Street and Times Square. Delight in their search for classic comic books, monster magazines (and the occasional “nudie” magazine) at their beloved, dingy “Back-Issue Store” in midtown Manhattan. Encounter his family’s bizarre Cold War-like relationship with their new neighbors in an updated suburban Jewish version of the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. Witness their Marx Brothers-like antics while on an all-expenses-paid junket at the Beverly Hills Hotel courtesy of CBS. The stage shifts from New York City to the Caribbean to the suburbs of Long Island, and from the South of France to Broadway and Hollywood as Kipp retraces his family’s defining moments―with the backdrop of his father’s meteoric rise from editor of men’s adventure magazines to successful novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Through it all, Kipp paints a loving portrait of a childhood and family life that is both magical and yet familiar and real. Barracuda in the Attic is truly a family affair, written by Kipp, with a cover illustration by Drew Friedman, an introduction by paterfamilias Bruce Jay Friedman, and an afterword by Josh Friedman, and is copiously illustrated with photos of the family and their literati friends and hangers-on.

In 1976, a fledgling magazine held forth the the idea that comics could be art. In 2016, comics intended for an adult readership are reviewed favorably in the New York Times, enjoy panels devoted to them at Book Expo America, and sell in bookstores comparable to prose efforts of similar weight and intent. We Told You So: Comics as Art is an oral history about Fantagraphics Books’ key role in helping build and shape an art movement around a discredited, ignored and fading expression of Americana. It includes appearances by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Harlan Ellison, Stan Lee, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and more.

DIVOn the eve of a White House run, Sidel cleans up a mess in his old backyard/divDIV/divDIVTired of being led by weaklings, the American people have fallen in love with J. Michael Storm and Isaac Sidel, the lawyer and the New York mayor who saved the country from the worst baseball strike in history. The Democratic National Convention is at Madison Square Garden, and when Storm is nominated for the presidency, he’s going to put the eccentric, gun-toting Sidel at the bottom of the ticket. But before Sidel can take his shot at the White House, he has a few loose ends to tie up./divDIV /divDIVHe’s most preoccupied with a father-and-son detective team suspected of running a murder-for-hire operation that went south, resulting in the father shooting his son. Sidel suspects there’s more to the story, and until he’s gotten to the bottom of it, the vice presidency will have to wait./div

A 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarter-Finalist. The Paranormal Romance Guild say - "Georgiana Derwent has managed to merge the world of Oxford University, with its rich history and very British traditions with a totally entertaining and plausible vampire story. This is going to be a favourite series." A Tale of the Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal... The Cavaliers are the most elite society at Oxford University - rich, powerful, and beautiful. No one realises that they are no ordinary students, but a group of aristocratic vampires from the English Civil War. For four hundred years they have groomed the most promising students to run the government, police, and finance in the way the vampires wish, granting them eternal life in return for absolute obedience. When Harriet French arrives at Oxford University from her working class northern state school, she's prepared for a culture shock, but not to become embroiled in the Cavaliers' scheming and bloodlust. Harriet thought she'd be busy enough juggling her demanding tutor, new friends, and the murky world of student politics. But now, she must find the rebel vampire who is killing off the members, stop the Cavaliers from orchestrating a massacre of the year's most beautiful and successful students, and defy the Society to be with the man of her dreams. Oxford Blood is a British, adult, paranormal romance. It's a tale with vampires that aren't afraid to kill and a heroine who's not afraid of sex or her own ambition. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Georgiana Derwent read History at Oxford University. Aside from the vampires, The Cavaliers Series is an exaggerated but fairly accurate portrayal of her time there. She now works in London and lives with her fiance. He's been very supportive throughout the writing of her books, mainly because he likes to claim that all the most attractive characters are based on him. Georgiana fell in love with vampire novels after reading "The Vampire Diaries" back in 2000. At the time it was a struggle to find any similar paranormal romances, a situation that it's fair to say seems to have been rectified in the last few years. She now loves paranormal series such as True Blood, fantasy novels, and modern literary works in roughly equal measure. Ever since her teens, she wanted to write a vampire series. Ever since going to Oxford she wanted to write a book about her experiences there. During a dull few months between finishing university and starting her graduate job, she had the idea of combining the two and "The Cavaliers Series" was born.

This book is the third in a series based on conferences sponsored by the Metroplex Institute for Neural Dynamics, an interdisciplinary organization of neural network professionals in academia and industry. The topics selected are of broad interest to both those interested in designing machines to perform intelligent functions and those interested in studying how these functions are actually performed by living organisms and generate discussion of basic and controversial issues in the study of mind. The topic of optimality was chosen because it has provoked considerable discussion and controversy in many different academic fields. There are several aspects to the issue of optimality. First, is it true that actual behavior and cognitive functions of living animals, including humans, can be considered as optimal in some sense? Second, what is the utility function for biological organisms, if any, and can it be described mathematically? Rather than organize the chapters on a "biological versus artificial" basis or by what stance they took on optimality, it seemed more natural to organize them either by what level of questions they posed or by what intelligent functions they dealt with. The book begins with some general frameworks for discussing optimality, or the lack of it, in biological or artificial systems. The next set of chapters deals with some general mathematical and computational theories that help to clarify what the notion of optimality might entail in specific classes of networks. The final section deals with optimality in the context of many different high-level issues, including exploring one's environment, understanding mental illness, linguistic communication, and social organization. The diversity of topics covered in this book is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary thinking and speculation about deep problems in intelligent system organization.

Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals July - December)

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During the late 1950s, David Meltzer was an active poet in the San Francisco North Beach scene often reading with jazz musicians at various bars and coffeehouses. Beat Thing is part poetry and part exposé, both tribute to the down in the street wildness and rant against the romantic commodification which surrounds the Beat Generation. Invoking real people as real history, Meltzer takes aim at the fantasy which Beat has become and juxtaposes simultaneously its still-needed legacy. He brings forth the original spirit of Beat in an encyclopedic cascade of details whose dense, deep, fierce, funny, raucous, free-associative jazz energy infuses every line. This is a grizzled hipster vision looking back at a period where the beast of war from Auschwitz to H-bomb to Joe McCarthy prevailed side-by-side with a cultural complacency while a wide-ranging constellation of writers and artists refused its numbing protocol. Beat Thing rises up as an ecstatic chant of defiance and celebration. David Meltzer is the author of many volumes of poetry, including The Clown, The Process, Yesod, Arrows: Selected Poetry, 1957-1992, and No Eyes: Lester Young. He has also published fiction, including The Agency Trilogy, Orf, Under, and book-length essays, including Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook. He has edited numerous anthologies and collections of interviews, including The Secret Garden: An Anthology in the Kabbalah; Birth: Anthology of Ancients Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories; Death: Anthology of Texts, Songs, Charms, Prayers, and Tales; Reading Jazz; Writing Jazz; and San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets. His musical recordings include Serpent Power and Poet Song "How easily narrative falls into place, realizes itself through a story-telling historian who sets out to frame a tangled constantly permutating chaos into a familiar & repeatable story w/out shadows or dead-ends; how impulsively memory organizes into a choir to tell a story of what it remembers symphonically, i.e., formally; even experimentalists practice w/in or against forms that have formed their relationship to writing & telling stories; history is the story of writing"--Epilogue from Beat Thing