To Teacher, with Love, is about the correspondence I have received during my teaching career. I have received letters from parents, presidents, and entrepreneurs. I have also enclosed love notes from my students and letters about them. Class pictures and classroom pictures are also featured. At this time when so many negative things are written about education teachers I wanted to share some "Rays of sunshine," that have come to me during my teaching career.

Lost love haunts many as they age, but ; in Staten Island Memoirs, Paris. Polanski creates a ficticious love affair with a beautiful face from the past; he cannot forget; Paris has led a full life that lacks only one thing - the love of a beautiful woman he met 43 years ago. The woman in question is the real life equivalent to Helen, the central character in the novel, modeled after the Greek Goddess Helen of Troy. The story opens with Paris Polanski in his home in Grant City, Staten Island. Not being able to find his long lost love, Paris creates a work of fiction in which he recreates his life by falling in love with, marrying and becoming part of Helen’s life, thus showing just how far one man's obsession will go to remove the sorrow of lost love. The story then goes back in time and continues Paris Polanski as a young man, secretly in love with a nameless, beautiful young woman. Shy and lacking self esteem, he is unable to express his feelings for her, and loses her to another man. After serving in the US Navy, Paris attends a New York City college and during one of his classes, he dreams of his ideal woman in the image and likeness of Helen of Troy. A year later, Paris sees the same young woman, Helen Jones, a student at Wilson College. She is smart, beautiful, and popular, and comes from a wealthy family. Paris on the other hand comes from a middle class family, dresses poorly, and is not blessed with the social graces; Engaged to a handsome young Ivy League attorney, Helen learns he has been cheating, and ends the relationship.

Were there really four airports here? Was the Staten Island Airport shut down each night to ensure no peril to the patrons of the drive-in theater? Is there truly a 150 foot dormant tunnel under the harbor between Staten Island and Brooklyn with the entrance capped in Brooklyn? In the 1930's, Which of Staten Island's best known restaurateurs, bought a house across the street from his famous restaurant and built a 200-foot tunnel between the house and the restaurant so that he could safely carry the day's receipts from the restaurant to his home. Did President John Kennedy, sip coffee at the St. George ferry terminal? Can you believe that a famous Island milk company resorted to rowboats to delivery milk to areas from Oakwood to Midland Beach during some of the worst storms to every hit that area? Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley have a Wild West show in 1886 down at Erastina (Mariners Harbor)? In what year was a bomb actually exploded on a Staten Island Ferry?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In these hilarious essays, the Saturday Night Live head writer and Weekend Update co-anchor learns how to take a beating. “I always wanted to punch his face before I read this book. Now I just want to kick him in the balls.”—Larry David NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Cosmopolitan • Vulture • Parade If there’s one trait that makes someone well suited to comedy, it’s being able to take a punch—metaphorically and, occasionally, physically. From growing up in a family of firefighters on Staten Island to commuting three hours a day to high school and “seeing the sights” (like watching a Russian woman throw a stroller off the back of a ferry), to attending Harvard while Facebook was created, Jost shares how he has navigated the world like a slightly smarter Forrest Gump. You’ll also discover things about Jost that will surprise and confuse you, like how Jimmy Buffett saved his life, how Czech teenagers attacked him with potato salad, how an insect laid eggs inside his legs, and how he competed in a twenty-five-man match at WrestleMania (and almost won). You'll go behind the scenes at SNL and Weekend Update (where he's written some of the most memorable sketches and jokes of the past fifteen years). And you’ll experience the life of a touring stand-up comedian—from performing in rural college cafeterias at noon to opening for Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall. For every accomplishment (hosting the Emmys), there is a setback (hosting the Emmys). And for every absurd moment (watching paramedics give CPR to a raccoon), there is an honest, emotional one (recounting his mother’s experience on the scene of the Twin Towers’ collapse on 9/11). Told with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, A Very Punchable Face reveals the brilliant mind behind some of the dumbest sketches on television, and lays bare the heart and humor of a hardworking guy—with a face you can’t help but want to punch.

Tanya is a typical teenager living with her bookish professor mother in a cramped Soviet apartment. She is obsessed with Dostoyevksy, and noticing that he always portrays his mistress and muse in his novels–never his wife–she determines to become a companion to a great writer. Her opportunity comes when, as a college graduate newly emigrated to America, she attends a Manhattan bookstore reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist. Tanya quickly moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing. But as she struggles to better understand her role as Muse, Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself. A touching and very funny novel in the great tradition of Russian realism, Memoirs of a Muse is also a lively meditation on the mysteries and absurdities of artistic inspiration.

The critically acclaimed debut from Alex Gilvarry, a darkly comic love letter to New York, told through the eyes of Boy Hernandez: Filipino immigrant, glamour junkie, Guantánamo detainee. Alex Gilvarry's widely acclaimed first novel is the story of designer Boy Hernandez: Filipino immigrant, New York glamour junkie, Guantánamo detainee. Locked away indefinitely and accused of being linked to a terrorist plot, Boy prepares for the tribunal of his life with this intimate confession, a dazzling swirl of soirees, runways, and hipster romance that charts one small man's undying love for New York City and his pursuit of the big American dream—even as the present nightmare of detainment chisels away at his vital wit and chutzpah. A New York Times Editor's Choice, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant unveils two of America's most illusory realms—high fashion and Homeland Security—in a funny, wise, and beguiling, and Kafkaesque tale for our strange times.

When my sister and brother and I were growing up on Staten Island, Dad told us very little about his Vermont boyhood, and nothing at all about his father. We respected his silence. We figured he had good reason for it. But long after Dad's death, my sister and I started to look more closely at our family history. Soon we were connected to a world of New England striving and struggle that we came to see as part of our own Vermont heritage. So this is the story of Dad and his mother and brother, and his unreliable father, and his father's five sisters, whom we'd known nothing about before we began our research. It pays tribute to an everyday heroine, Dad's mother, who took her sons to Staten Island to begin a new life when her marriage failed. It also traces earlier Wrights (and forebears with other surnames, like Little, Bailey, Hadley, Hathaway, Shattuck, Blanchard, and Burt) in towns all over Vermont (and New Hampshire and Massachusetts), some of them with their own compelling stories -- farmers, soldiers, railroad men, miners, housewives, and keepers of inns and hotels. These are my Wrights of Vermont.

“Nersesian’s extravagantly imagined dystopia relies—as did those in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union—on an alternate, counterfactual history.”—The New York Times Book Review “Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip. . . . A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Brilliant.”—Time Out New York Arthur Nersesian’s six previous novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Here, in his boldest novel to date, Nersesian has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. He lives in New York City.