“Chasing the Albino Pygmy Giraffe” is a laugh aloud yet insightful parody about how little Chinese and Americans understand one another. The story unfolds as a college professor leads a group of American and Chinese students 3,500 miles across the heart of Western China down the fabled Silk Road. Along the way, the travelers brave everything from squat toilets and donkey meat to insurrection and the Red Army. Author Charles Haddad is eminently qualified to spoof Chinese and Americans alike. Not only has he seen more of China than most Chinese themselves. Haddad speaks Chinese and is well versed in Chinese history and culture. While fiction, Haddad’s tale rings true. It offers great insight for those worrying about the future of Sino-American relations. And worry they should, suggests this humorous adventure story.

Consider “Pity the Poor Reader” as an un-textbook, an irreverent “Elements of style.” Like Elements, it’s designed to compliment textbooks. Pity is concise, memorable and portable. Under 300 pages, Pity serves as an aspiring writer’s keepsake. Concision lies at the heart of Pity. The key concepts of writing well are distilled into irreverent, memorable lines and axioms. Many of them are organized as lists that are easily printed and taped to a wall or a computer. Indeed, in testing the book with my university students, I’ve found that many of them did print out its list of axioms to keep handy while writing. I’ve also overheard students quoting Pity’s axioms to their friends. While similar to “Elements” in spirit, Pity differs greatly in style, material and organization. My book draws on current events, history, student anecdotes and my own 30 years of experience as a writer - anything to make its lessons real and relevant. It’s written in a style that skewers all pretense and officiousness when it comes to the teaching of writing. The opening chapter about craft is titled “The Tao of Writing Poorly.” It parodies the poor way that writing is taught in many high schools and colleges. Pity tries to teach whenever possible through humor. It helps to make any lesson memorable.

Chasing the Albino Pygmy Giraffe is a laugh aloud yet insightful parody about how little Chinese and Americans understand one another. Written by a leading social satirist, the story unfolds as a professor leads a group of American and Chinese students 3,500 miles across the heart of Western China along the fabled Silk Road. Along the way, the travelers brave everything from squat toilets and donkey meat to insurrection and the Red Army. Author Charles Haddad is eminently qualified to spoof Chinese and Americans alike. Not only has he seen more of China than most Chinese themselves. Haddad speaks Chinese and is well versed in Chinese history and culture. While fiction, Haddad's tale rings true. It offers great insight for those worrying about the future of Sino-American relations. And worry they should, suggests this humorous adventure story.

When Martine’s home in England burns down, killing her parents, she must go to South Africa to live on a wildlife game preserve, called Sawubona, with the grandmother she didn’t know she had. Almost as soon as she arrives, Martine hears stories about a white giraffe living in the preserve. But her grandmother and others working at Sawubona insist that the giraffe is just a myth. Martine is not so sure, until one stormy night when she looks out her window and locks eyes with Jemmy, a young silvery-white giraffe. Why is everyone keeping Jemmy’s existence a secret? Does it have anything to do with the rash of poaching going on at Sawubona? Martine needs all of the courage and smarts she has, not to mention a little African magic, to find out. First-time children’s author Lauren St. John brings us deep into the African world, where myths become reality and a young girl with a healing gift has the power to save her home and her one true friend.

Established in 1911, The Rotarian is the official magazine of Rotary International and is circulated worldwide. Each issue contains feature articles, columns, and departments about, or of interest to, Rotarians. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 19 Pulitzer Prize winners – from Mahatma Ghandi to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – have written for the magazine.

"A stunning vibrant maximalist whirlwind of a novel. Oloixarac’s wit and ambition are evident on every page. By comparison, most other contemporary fiction seems a little dull and simple-minded." —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears and Gods Without Men A debut novel of seduction and madness, hate and love, set in the world of Argentine academia and animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov and Bolaño Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel’s beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desperation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games, and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors—animals, who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey. Savage Theories wryly explores fear and violence, war and sex, eroticism and philosophy. Its complex and flawed characters grapple with a mess of impossible, visionary theories, searching for their place in our fragmented digital world.

First published in 1927.