With its unparalleled coverage of English slang of all types (from 18th-century cant to contemporary gay slang), and its uncluttered editorial apparatus, Cassell's Dictionary of Slang was warmly received when its first edition appeared in 1998. 'Brilliant.' said Mark Lawson on BBC2's The Late Review; 'This is a terrific piece of work - learned, entertaining, funny, stimulating' said Jonathan Meades in The Evening Standard.But now the world's best single-volume dictionary of English slang is about to get even better. Jonathon Green has spent the last seven years on a vast project: to research in depth the English slang vocabulary and to hunt down and record written instances of the use of as many slang words as possible. This has entailed trawling through more than 4000 books - plus song lyrics, TV and movie scripts, and many newspapers and magazines - for relevant material. The research has thrown up some fascinating results

A portrait of the Asian-American experience from the perspective of a mother and son traces the author's childhood in the 1960s housing projects of San Francisco's Chinatown and the disparate views held by both son and mother about such topics as survival, tradition, and culture. 30,000 first printing.

Another perfect recipe for quirky, funny and original romance from one of LBD's original stars, A.M. Goldsher. Chef Anna Rowan is living her personal dream, running chi-chi restaurant TART with her boyfriend (and general manager) Byron Smith. It seems like being the stars of a reality-TV show about a restaurant can only be a good thing - they've got nothing to hide, right? Unfortunately, while the restaurant may not have any secret problems, maybe Anna and Byron do - and under the hot glare of the TV cameras, there's really nowhere to hide...

This carefully annotated bibliography lists sources of criticism for thirty-nine Southern male authors, each of whom has published at least one significant book of fiction between 1970 and 1994.

In Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier takes us on a glorious guided tour of American animation in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, to meet the legendary artists and entrepreneurs who created Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote, Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, and many other cartoon favorites. Beginning with black-and-white silent cartoons, Barrier offers an insightful account, taking us inside early New York studios and such Hollywood giants as Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM. Barrier excels at illuminating the creative side of animation--revealing how stories are put together, how animators develop a character, how technical innovations enhance the "realism" of cartoons. Here too are colorful portraits of the giants of the field, from Walt and Roy Disney and their animators, to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Based on hundreds of interviews with veteran animators, Hollywood Cartoons gives us the definitive inside look at this colorful era and at the creative process behind these marvelous cartoons.

If you are a famous-enough author long presumed dead and you keep sending notes to your Publisher through some far-off precocious teenage girl who says she’s never heard of you – and the frightening predictions in those notes keep coming true -- then you can’t be dead. Can you? For one, the mother of Jimmy Massey knew nothing of you walking into the sea off southern Sri Lanka, or your predictions of the murders of all sorts of priests across Asia and Australasia – nor a thing about the woman-child making them. Nor did she have a clue as to why her little Jimmy, a simple taxi-driver, got slaughtered along with the priest in Cairns Cathedral that Easter. But she did know Dr Valentino Sebastian kept coming and literally sniffing around her tribe people’s little chapel, even if she couldn’t know what he could do with birthings, seemingly at will. The mother of Jimmy Massey knew that, no matter how much sniffing around her and hers went on, or what all the police and all the nosey-parkers in the world might say, she could see in her mind that-there black shore your notes kept going on about. She could hear the nearing howling. She sensed the coming. But not one thing ever was going to come anywhere near what she held enclosed unto herself as dearly as life itself. Nuh huh. You and all the others can take your prophecies and predictions and shove them all.

Righteous jive for all you weedheads, moochers, b-girls, gassers, bandrats, triggermen, grifters, snowbirds, and long-gone daddies. Much of the slang popularly associated with the hippie generation of the 1960s actually dates back to before World War II, hijacked in the main from jazz and blues street expressions, mostly relating to drugs, sex, and drinking. Why talk when you can beat your chops, why eat when you can line your flue, and why snore when you can call some hogs? You’re not drunk–you’re just plumb full of stagger juice, and your skin isn’t pasty, it’s just caf? sunburn. Need a black coffee? That’s a shot of java, nix on the moo juice. Containing thousands of examples of hipster slang drawn from pulp novels, classic noir and exploitation films, blues, country, and rock ’n’ roll lyrics, and other related sources from the 1920s to the 1960s, Straight from the Fridge, Dad is the perfect guide for all hep cats and kittens. Think of it as a sort of Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary for the beret-wearing, bongo-banging set. Solid, Jackson.

Max, a compassionate boy, solves problems through reason and daring. Sacha, understanding the language of animals, takes their part against skeptical adults. Their stories are told in a magical reality.

Once upon a time there was an innocent lad from West Texas who wrote a novel and fell in with a rabble of Texas writers as they were bridging the literary gap between J. Frank Dobie and his paisanos and the current bumper crop of Texas writers who seem to be everywhere writing about everything. This rowdy rabble of gap bridgers bonded in a sort of literary and social club they called Maddog Inc. (Motto: Doing indefinable services to mankind.) But our hero managed to live through it all anyway. This is his story. Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group comprised Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris, among others. From the musical scene there were the "picker poets" such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings. Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, King's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.

In this rip-roaring retrospective, Basil Wolverton’s often warped imagination combines with his outlandishly wacky visual humor to fascinate and delight It collects the ultra-rare treasures Scoop Scuttle, Mystic Moot, Bingbang Buster, and Jumpin’ Jupiter — as they’ve never been seen before! Due to the rock-bottom printing methods of 10¢ comic books, Wolverton’s intricate line work was routinely obscured, and often obliterated. In this collection, every effort has been made to restore the art to its original splendor, and to at last present the uniquely detailed graphics of this justly revered comic book master.