Frank At Home On The Farm is an unsettling and engrossing, psychological horror, mystery set in the early 1920s. Part Lynchian nightmare, part Cronenbergian body horror, written by Jordan Thomas and Illustrated by Clark Bint, published by Scout Comics. Frank Cross returns from World War 1 badly damaged by his experiences and wanting nothing more than to settle back down with his family at their farm. However, upon arrival he discovers his family missing. Frank’s search for answers only heightens his fear and anxiety as townspeople struggle to remember anything about his parents or brother and he’s confronted with nothing but dead ends. All the while Frank’s desperation grows he becomes more and more aware of the bizarre behavior of the farm’s animals. They seem to be watching his every move, gathering at night and sometimes Frank can swear he even hears them speak. Frank feels crazy just thinking it…but could they have something to do with his family’s disappearance?

After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place—amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a “mostly medical” marijuana farm in California. Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. There is also Lady Wanda, the massive, elusive, wealthy, and heavily armed businesswoman who owns the farm and runs it from beneath a housedress and a hat of peacock feathers. Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work—from field pickers to tractor drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, managers to snipers, illegal immigrants to legal revisionists, and the delivery crew to the hospice workers on the other end. His book also looks at the blurry legislation regulating the marijuana industry as well as the day-to-day logistics of running such an operation and all the relationships that brings into play. Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farm’s cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.

Frank the farmer is always busy doing chores on the farm while his wife runs a bed-and-breakfast, and his job gets harder when he has to find the child of a couple staying on the farm and a missing chicken.

The story of Free Frank is not only a testament to human courage and resourcefulness but affords new insight into the American frontier. Born a slave in the South Carolina piedmont in 1777, Frank died a free man in 1854 in a town he had founded in western Illinois. His accomplishments, creditable for any frontiersman, were for a black man extraordinary. We first learn details of Frank's life when in 1795 his owner moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky. We know that he married Lucy, a slave on a neighboring farm, in 1799. Later he was allowed to hire out his time, and when his owner moved to Tennessee, Frank was left in charge of the Kentucky farm. During the War of 1812, he set up his own saltpeter works, an enterprise he maintained until he left Kentucky. In 1817 he purchased his wife's freedom for $800; two years later he bought his own liberty for the same price. Now free, he expanded his activities, purchasing land and dealing in livestock. With his wife and four of his children, Free Frank left Kentucky in 1830 to settle on a new frontier. In Pike County, Illinois, he purchased a farm and later, in 1836, platted and successfully promoted the town of New Philadelphia. The desire for freedom was an obvious spur to his commercial efforts. Through his lifetime of work he purchased the liberty of sixteen members of his family at a cost of nearly $14,000. Goods and services commanded a premium in the life of the frontier. Free Frank's career shows what an exceptional man, through working against great odds, could accomplish through industry, acumen, and aggressiveness. His story suggests a great deal about business activity and legal practices, as well as racial conditions, on the frontier. Juliet Walker has performed a task of historical detection in recreating the life of Free Frank from family traditions, limited personal papers, public documents, and secondary sources. In doing so, she has added a significant chapter to the history of African Americans.

From July to December in 1945, ten German scientists, Bagge, Diebner, Gerlach, Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg, Korsching, von Laue, von Weizsacker, and Wirtz, were held and clandestinely recorded by the British. The scientists discuss their progress and react to the bombing of Hiroshima.

A portrait equal parts hope and cruelty, this searing, compelling book is an enduring fan favorite by Philadelphia-based poet CAConrad.

In Ant Farm, former Harvard Lampoon president Simon Rich finds humor in some very surprising places. Armed with a sharp eye for the absurd and an overwhelming sense of doom, Rich explores the ridiculousness of our everyday lives. The world, he concludes, is a hopelessly terrifying place–with endless comic potential. –If your girlfriend gives you some “love coupons” and then breaks up with you, are the coupons still valid? –What kind of performance pressure does an endangered male panda feel when his captors bring the last remaining female panda to his cage? –If murderers can get into heaven by accepting Jesus, just how awkward is it when they run into their victims? Join Simon Rich as he explores the extraordinary and hilarious desperation that resides in ordinary life, from cradle to grave. "Hilarious." –Jon Stewart

AN AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION ADULT DEBUT HONOR BOOK WINNER OF THE AUDIE AWARD FOR BEST FEMALE NARRATOR LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER A sparkling talent makes her fiction debut with this infectious novel that combines the charming pluck of Eloise, the poignant psychological quirks of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the page-turning spirit of Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Reclusive literary legend M. M. “Mimi” Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she’s flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies—with a few stipulations: No Ivy-Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids. Quiet, discreet, sane. When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put to work right away—as a full-time companion to Frank, the writer’s eccentric nine-year-old, a boy with the wit of Noel Coward, the wardrobe of a 1930s movie star, and very little in common with his fellow fourth-graders. As she slowly gets to know Frank, Alice becomes consumed with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and itinerant male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and whether Mimi will ever finish that book. Full of heart and countless “only-in-Hollywood” moments, Be Frank with Me is a captivating and unconventional story of an unusual mother and son, and the intrepid young woman who finds herself irresistibly pulled into their unforgettable world.

"Peggy Marxen grew up in the somewhat isolated environment of northwestern Wisconsin's Sawyer County, yet was surrounded by close-knit extended family. In 1916, after a lengthy search conducted by train and bicycle, her grandparents settled a forty next to Badger Creek, in the hilly cutover land that remained after lumberjacks harvested thousands of acres of pines. They arrived just before the creation of the Township of Meteor in 1919. In the 1920s and 1930s her parents and an uncle and aunt built homes near her grandparents and began to raise their small families. Multiple generations of her family witnessed the changes to rural Wisconsin, which changed the fabric of their lives and the lives of all in their community: new farming techniques, education, transportation, and technology, among others. Peggy's traditional farm family supplemented their subsistence herd of dairy cows by hunting and fishing and selling timber and maple syrup. Her home, like those of the neighbors, for a time lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, and a telephone. Until statewide school consolidation (when Peggy was in 5th grade), she attended a one-room schoolhouse and walked, biked, or sledded the three miles to school and back, no matter the weather. Through her girlhood eyes, Peggy Marxen traces her family's story through the best and worst of times, examining the strength of Wisconsin's small communities. Her book is a fitting tribute to her settler ancestors and a way of life now gone-and a celebration of the hardy people of northwestern Wisconsin"--