Once you find yourself in Oysterback, you may never want to leave. Nothing beats Desiree Grinch's corn soup at the Blue Crab Tavern. There's never a wait at The Curl Up 'N Dye Salon de Beaute. In season, you can buy your produce (as you pay your respects) at Dreedle's Funeral Parlor. There's bingo every Tuesday at the V.E.D.

A vacation destination and a historic small town: two places that make Maryland great—and ghostly. More chills from the author of Haunted Eastern Shore. A ghostly sea captain, an ill-fated lover and jazz musicians who go on playing long after their last songs—these are the spirits that make their presence known from Ocean City’s Boardwalk to the picturesque town square of Berlin. The phantom scent of a woman’s perfume floats from Trimper’s carousel, while the Ocean City Life-Saving Station is haunted by the ghost of a drowned sailor. In Berlin, some guests never check out of the Atlantic Hotel, and strange happenings have been reported at the Rackliffe House, where legend has it that a cruel plantation owner was murdered by his slaves. Author and guide Mindie Burgoyne takes a chilling journey through the haunted history and lore of Ocean City and Berlin. Includes photos!

This collection surveys madness in drama. It includes articles on "The Duchess of Malfi"; virginity and hysteria in "The Changeling"; the confined spectacle of madness in Beys's "The Illustrious Madmen"; The male gaze in "Woyzeck" - representing Marie and madness; and other drama examples.

Naturally high in essential vitamins and minerals, oysters are one of the oldest known foods consumed by humans. Varying in size from as small as a grape to as large as a dinner plate, the humble oyster has played an outsized role in the building of empires and the discovery of new lands. Consumed by both rich and poor, the oyster has inspired writers, poets, painters, and even lovers—Casanova was said to have started each day with a breakfast of fifty oysters. In Oysters: A Global History Carolyn Tillie delves into the culinary, artistic, sexual, historical, and scientific history of the humble bivalve. She shows how the oyster encouraged immigration and industry in the newly established United States, how it perpetuated slavery among those working in the oyster beds, and how Japan unexpectedly became the savior of the world’s oyster industry. Packed with colorful anecdotes, recipes, and more than fifty illustrations, this little book is a delightful introduction to the lore of the oyster.

In the tradition of Fannie Flagg, veteran storyteller Helen Chappell, acclaimed author of Giving Up the Ghost, presents a wry, funny, and poignant novel about two sisters, their dead mother, and a Chesapeake Bay town where anything can happen and frequently does. Sometimes you have to go home again, even if you know the trip is going to be one from hell. When Carrie points her van in the direction of Oysterback, Maryland, her old hometown, she does it only because she has no choice. Her momma, the indomitable Audrey, has done the unthinkable: she's died. And it wasn't a neat little Oysterback death either. No, it happened in Florida and involved an alligator. But, then again, there was nothing conventional about Audrey, even in life. The same could be said for her daughter Carrie -- single, perpetually searching, and professionally adrift, she has become an expert at yard sales, sifting through the detritus of other folks' lives, then reselling it to shops that sell antiques and assorted "collectibles." Her sister, Earlene, considers Carrie a junk collector, but then Earlene has devoted her life to being conventional. Married with two boys, she has remained in Oysterback where she and her husband run the View 'n' Chew, a combination video store-sandwich shop. Momma had lived by the notion that a woman is incomplete without a man and spent the years following her husband's death trying to be as complete as humanly possible -- in the process working her way through a whole parade of men. As best Carrie can figure, her momma's last two flames were Alonzo Deaver, the town's resident miscreant and a current resident of the state penitentiary, and Jack Shepherd, a college professor on the run from failure and boredom. Both had been granted carte blanche to crash at Momma's house whenever the occasion should arise (be it Alonzo's planned escape from prison or Jack's escape from his ratty little boat). Once back in Oysterback, Carrie finds herself unwittingly caught up in a family drama of epic proportions -- including Earlene's resentment (which leads to a classic -- and very messy -- confrontation), a now-married ex-boyfriend's attempt to rekindle an old flame, her own attraction to Professor Jack, and a roiling stew of anger and grief over Momma's poorly timed passing. For while Carrie never expected to go home again, she naively believed it always would be there. A Whole World of Trouble is a delightfully authentic comedy of Southern manners and an antic, frequently hilarious, pointed, and moving novel by a writer who knows the people and the world she writes about.

"Really so stories" by Elizabeth Gordon. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level. The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

A comprehensive anthology bringing together more than one thousand of the best American and English song lyrics of the twentieth century; an extraordinary celebration of a unique art form and an indispensable reference work and history that celebrates one of the twentieth century’s most enduring and cherished legacies. Reading Lyrics begins with the first masters of the colloquial phrase, including George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway”), P. G. Wodehouse (“Till the Clouds Roll By”), and Irving Berlin, whose versatility and career span the period from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Annie Get Your Gun” and beyond. The Broadway musical emerges as a distinct dramatic form in the 1920s and 1930s, its evolution propelled by a trio of lyricists—Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart—whose explorations of the psychological and emotional nuances of falling in and out of love have lost none of their wit and sophistication. Their songs, including “Night and Day,” “The Man I Love,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” have become standards performed and recorded by generation after generation of singers. The lure of Broadway and Hollywood and the performing genius of such artists as Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, Ethel Waters, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ethel Merman inspired a remarkable array of talented writers, including Dorothy Fields (“A Fine Romance,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls”), Oscar Hammerstein II (from the groundbreaking “Show Boat” of 1927 through his extraordinary collaboration with Richard Rodgers), Johnny Mercer, Yip Harburg, Andy Razaf, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim. Reading Lyrics also celebrates the work of dozens of superb craftsmen whose songs remain known, but who today are themselves less known—writers like Haven Gillespie (whose “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” may be the most widely recorded song of its era); Herman Hupfeld (not only the composer/lyricist of “As Time Goes By” but also of “Are You Makin’ Any Money?” and “When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba”); the great light versifier Ogden Nash (“Speak Low,” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and, yes, “The Sea-Gull and the Ea-Gull”); Don Raye (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Mister Five by Five,” and, of course, “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet”); Bobby Troup (“Route 66”); Billy Strayhorn (not only for the omnipresent “Lush Life” but for “Something to Live For” and “A Lonely Coed”); Peggy Lee (not only a superb singer but also an original and appealing lyricist); and the unique Dave Frishberg (“I’m Hip,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Van Lingo Mungo”). The lyricists are presented chronologically, each introduced by a succinct biography and the incisive commentary of Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball.

Cole Porter possessed to a singular degree the art of expressing depth through apparent frivolity. The effervescent wit and technical bravura of his songs are matched by their unguarded revelations of feeling. In the words of editor Robert Kimball, “Porter wrote tellingly of the pain and evanescence of emotional relationships. He gently mocked propriety and said that few things were simple or lasting or free from ambiguity.” Of the masters of twentieth-century American songwriting, Porter was one of the few who wrote both music and lyrics, and, even in the absence of his melodies, his words distill an unmistakable mixture of poignancy and wit that marks him as a genius of light verse. Selected from over eight hundred songs, here are Porter’s finest flights of invention, lyrics that are an indelible part of 20th-century culture: “Let’s Do It,” “Love for Sale,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Anything Goes,” “In the Still of the Night,” “I Concentrate on You,” and dozens more. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Stories capturing “the vibrancy of Harlem life, the passions of ordinary black people, and the indignities of everyday racism” by “a great American writer” (Kirkus Reviews). This collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963—the most comprehensive available—showcases Langston Hughes’s literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns in the decades that preceded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes’s uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general. “[Hughes’s fiction] manifests his ‘wonder at the world.’ As these stories reveal, that wonder has lost little of its shine.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer