Curious Things by Hope Silver reveals the hidden lives and innermost thoughts of inanimate objects, giving the gift of emotion and meaning to even the most mundane items people use every day. Among the colorful cast of characters in this collection of flash fiction are a doll with a broken heart, an elevator who acts as a matchmaker, and a video-camera who thinks she was Alfred Hitchcock in a past life. At times poignant, at times silly, but always quirky and clever, Curious Things may cause you to think differently about the sponges in your sink, the sneakers on the telephone line, or the plastic bags drifting across the highway. Like Thomas M. Disch's The Brave Little Toaster, Curious Things lends humanity and dignity to inhuman things that are so often taken for granted. - Amy Fontaine, author of MIST

Curious Things. Stories about a black cat, superstition and strange events. Friday is a black cat with a lucky habit of being present when curious things take place. He's highly intelligent, fiercely loyal and devilishly handsome. If you've ever wished for karma to move a little faster, indulged in uncharitable thoughts about certain annoying people, or suspected that having a black cat cross your path was not quite as unlucky as people seem to think, these stories are for you.

For more than one hundred years, tourists and residents alike have flocked to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, located on Seattle's waterfront. Here a mummy nicknamed Sylvester, a collection of shrunken heads from Ecuador, a two-headed calf, and a mermaid preside over walls and cases crammed with an incredible jumble of souvenirs and trinkets, intermixed with authentic Northwest Coast and Alaskan Eskimo carvings, baskets, blankets, and other artworks. The guestbook records visits by Theodore Roosevelt, Will Rogers, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, and Queen Marie of Rumania, among many others. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop was founded in 1899 by Joseph E. "Daddy" Standley, an Ohio-born curio collector who came to Seattle in the late 1890s during the Yukon gold rush. Although Native American material vied for space with exotica from all corners of the globe, it soon grew to be the mainstay of the shop, which became identified with the whalebones displayed outside and the "piles of old Eskimo relics" within. Also to be found were baskets, moccasins, ivory carving from Alaska, Tlingit spruce root baskets, Haida "jadeite" totem poles, masks, paddles, and other curiosities from the Northwest Coast. Indians from the Olympic Peninsula brought baskets, coming up to the back door of the shop in their canoes. Others, originally from British Columbia but now living on the flats not far from the shop, carved miniature totem poles by the hundreds and full-size poles on commission. Trading companies supplied Indian curios from the Plains, Southwest, and California. An art historian trained in the classic arts of the Northwest Coast, Kate Duncan became interested in the history of the shop when she learned that it had not only been an active participant in Seattle's 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition but had also been a major source of important Northwest Coast collections in many museums, including, among others, the Royal Ontario Museum, the George G. Heye Collection (now in the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian), the Washington State Museum, the Newark Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History. Granted full access by the present owners - grandson and great-grandson of "Daddy" Standley - to the remarkably complete archives maintained from the time the shop opened, Duncan has provided a fascinating chapter in the history of Seattle, especially in its early years, as well as a significant contribution to the literature on tourist arts and collecting. Kate Duncan, professor of art at Arizona State University, is also the author of Northern Athapaskan Art: A Beadwork Tradition, and coauthor of A Special Gift: The Kutchin Beadwork Tradition and Out of the North: The Subarctic Collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.

In Speck, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Art Director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, asks artists, designers, lawyers, writers, collectors, and photographers to explore our obsessions with the small objects that loom large in our everyday lives.To wit: Maira Kalman empties people's pocketbooks; Nicholas Blechman and Jesse Gordon trace the history of the oldest piece of dust; David Horrowitz catalogs manhole covers; and Peter Buchanan-Smith unearths a 1966 high school yearbook and transcribes the inscriptions ("To a real sweet and cute guy with a great personality. Remember English III").Speck also shows how "ordinary" people can fascinate as much as "ordinary" objects: an interview with shoe shiner Harry Kitt, Manhattan's last practitioner of the dry-shine, photographs taken by a blind man on a sight-seeing tour, and a barber's extensive collection of earth, water, and air from around the world ask us to re-think our assumptions about the commonplace.

From the duo behind the massively successful and award-winning podcast Stuff You Should Know comes an unexpected look at things you thought you knew. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant started the podcast Stuff You Should Know back in 2008 because they were curious—curious about the world around them, curious about what they might have missed in their formal educations, and curious to dig deeper on stuff they thought they understood. As it turns out, they aren't the only curious ones. They've since amassed a rabid fan base, making Stuff You Should Know one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Armed with their inquisitive natures and a passion for sharing, they uncover the weird, fascinating, delightful, or unexpected elements of a wide variety of topics. The pair have now taken their near-boundless "whys" and "hows" from your earbuds to the pages of a book for the first time—featuring a completely new array of subjects that they’ve long wondered about and wanted to explore. Each chapter is further embellished with snappy visual material to allow for rabbit-hole tangents and digressions—including charts, illustrations, sidebars, and footnotes. Follow along as the two dig into the underlying stories of everything from the origin of Murphy beds, to the history of facial hair, to the psychology of being lost. Have you ever wondered about the world around you, and wished to see the magic in everyday things? Come get curious with Stuff You Should Know. With Josh and Chuck as your guide, there’s something interesting about everything (...except maybe jackhammers).

'Curious Things' is diverse, dark-humored, and deliciously bite-sized. This compelling collection of 23 short stories are just the remedy for a lazy weekend or a drizzly rainy day that begs for excitement. Spine-tingling and truly weird short tales of terrifying paranormal encounters, life after death, the devil calling, a dispute with a closet, a crazy neighbor, and the horror of history being doomed to repeat itself are only a few among the eerie imagining's that will keep you up at night. All have been crafted by the writers of the California Writers Club to thrill and terrify you to the last page. Imagine, if you will, which stories are fact and which are fiction-you decide!

Brian Grazer knows the one thing that can instantly connect you with anyone: Curiosity. A Curious mind offers a brilliantly entertaining and inspiring account of how his courage and enthusiasm for talking with complete strangers have been the secret of his success as a leading Hollywood producer.

Curious kids and their curious grown-up will love discovering fascinating things from the Smithsonian and the natural world.

"This sparkling book romps over the range of science and anti-science." --Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Revised and Expanded Edition. In this age of supposed scientific enlightenment, many people still believe in mind reading, past-life regression theory, New Age hokum, and alien abduction. A no-holds-barred assault on popular superstitions and prejudices, with more than 80,000 copies in print, Why People Believe Weird Things debunks these nonsensical claims and explores the very human reasons people find otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing. In an entirely new chapter, "Why Smart People Believe in Weird Things," Michael Shermer takes on science luminaries like physicist Frank Tippler and others, who hide their spiritual beliefs behind the trappings of science. Shermer, science historian and true crusader, also reveals the more dangerous side of such illogical thinking, including Holocaust denial, the recovered-memory movement, the satanic ritual abuse scare, and other modern crazes. Why People Believe Strange Things is an eye-opening resource for the most gullible among us and those who want to protect them.

From keys and handkerchiefs to sweets and rubber bands, the curious objects we surround ourselves with, though often seemingly mundane, have a magical quality. Their surprising power to disturb, soothe, seduce or absorb give these quirky objects histories and meanings we rarely ponder. Yet we would be lost without them. Take bags, for example. Why do most women carry handbags, while men rely on pockets? Why do so many houses have bags of bags? And why do we 'let the cat out the bag' or 'give someone the sack'? What significance do our bags hold for us? In this highly imaginative and entertaining book, Steven Connor embarks on a historical, philosophical and linguistic journey that explores our relationships with the curious things with which we have a forgotten but daily intimacy.