Barry the Penguin’s Black and White Christmas is a Christmas musical adventure complete with fantastic songs and beautiful illustrations by Matt Rowe. Barry is a penguin detective with enough gumption to carry him from one end of the earth to the other and back again, with Kung Fu skills to boot! When Father Christmas is kidnapped by the evil Bedbug Queen on Christmas Eve, it looks like Christmas will be destroyed forever. Only the chosen one, a girl called Phoebe, can save him, and it’s up to Barry to find her and whisk her away on a quest involving penguin prophecies, cryptic elves, and crazy nuns that live in the centre of the earth. But Phoebe hates Christmas. Will Barry convince her to help him? Will they reach Father Christmas before midnight strikes? Will they have the power to stop the evil Bedbug Queen? Featuring unforgettable new songs, this is a superbly original, comical story about the importance of friendship, trust and believing in yourself. The book is accompanied by an audio CD with word-for-word narration, sound effects, and character voices and songs performed by a fantastic West End cast. Children can follow the story and sing along to the irresistible music. Based on the musical by Lesley Ross and John-Victor, Perfect Pitch bring you this alternative Christmas tale narrated by Dr Who’s Christopher Eccleston, a musical in a book like no other.

When a boy finally gets exactly what he wants from Santa, he learns that owning a real penguin may not have been a good idea after all.

Selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short story writers, and novelists, this revised and updated second edition features fifty remarkable stories written by a wide spectrum of stylistically and culturally diverse authors. Russell Banks - Donald Barthelme - Rick Bass - Richard Bausch - Charles Baxter - Amy Bloom - T. C. Boyle - Kevin Brockmeier - Robert Olen Butler - Sandra Cisneros - Peter Ho Davies - Janet Desaulniers - Junot Diaz - Anthony Doerr - Stuart Dybek - Deborah Eisenberg - Richard Ford - Mary Gaitskill - Dagoberto Gilb - Ron Hansen - A. M. Homes - Mary Hood - Denis Johnson - Edward P. Jones - Thom Jones - Jamaica Kincaid - Jhumpa Lahiri - David Leavitt - Kelly Link - Reginald McKnight - David Means - Susan Minot - Rick Moody - Bharati Mukherjee - Antonya Nelson - Joyce Carol Oates - Tim O'Brien - Daniel Orozco - Julie Orringer - ZZ Packer - E. Annie Proulx - Stacey Richter - George Saunders - Joan Silber - Leslie Marmon Silko - Susan Sontag - Amy Tan - Melanie Rae Thon - Alice Walker - Steve Yarbrough

Grdankl the Strong, president of Kprshtskan, is plotting to take over the American government. His plan is to infiltrate the science fair at Hubble Middle School, located in a Maryland suburb just outside Washington. The rich kids at Hubble cheat by buying their projects every year, and Grdankl's cronies should have no problem selling them his government-corrupting software. But this year, Toby Harbinger, a regular kid with Discount Warehouse shoes, is determined to win the $5,000 prize-even if he has to go up against terrorists to do it. With the help of his best friends, Tamara and Micah, Toby takes on Assistant Principal Paul Parmit, aka "The Armpit", a laser-eyed stuffed owl, and two eBay buyers named Darth and the Wookiee who seem to think that the Harrison-Ford-signed BlasTech DL-44 blaster Toby sold them is a counterfeit. What transpires is a hilarious adventure filled with mystery, suspense, and levitating frogs.

A collection of Penguin covers from Britain and around the world, Seven Hundred Penguinsis a celebration of jackets that remain visually distinctive and addictive to us today, from the beautiful to the garish, design classics to design oddities. A full-colour, sensuous delight, with one jacket on every page, the featured jackets represent the personal favourites of Penguin staff from offices all over the world, and run from Penguin's birth in 1935 to the end of the twentieth century. Throughout there are jackets that bring back a flood of memories of the first time a book was read; there is beautiful typography from Jan Tschicold; arresting illustrations; visual witticisms from Derek Birdsall; countless mutations of the much-loved Penguin grid. There are also, with no formula at all, jackets that just make sense. Featuring old favourites and plenty of surprises, Seven Hundred Penguinsis a unique and inspiring collection of the most impactful and well-loved Penguin covers of the twentieth century.

Los Angeles magazine is a regional magazine of national stature. Our combination of award-winning feature writing, investigative reporting, service journalism, and design covers the people, lifestyle, culture, entertainment, fashion, art and architecture, and news that define Southern California. Started in the spring of 1961, Los Angeles magazine has been addressing the needs and interests of our region for 48 years. The magazine continues to be the definitive resource for an affluent population that is intensely interested in a lifestyle that is uniquely Southern Californian.