PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to live. “Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”—The Washington Post Book World Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live. The geographical locale is divided between Brewer, in southestern Pennyslvania, and Deleon, in southwestern Florida.

Draws on such fields as neuoscience, economics, and evolutionary psychology to address the question of how to find a more satisfying way to live, arguing that the key to satisfaction lies in the complexity and challenge in one's life.

Keep the fascinating magical creatures of the wizarding world close at hand with this miniature art book featuring concept art from the Harry Potter films. The magical world of the Harry Potter film series is filled with captivating and curious creatures, from the fearsome dragons of the Triwizard Tournament to the crafty goblins of Gringotts Bank to the owls who carry the wizarding post. To bring these creatures to life onscreen, an extraordinary team of artists created a huge collection of sketches, drawings, paintings, and digital renders, drawing some creatures from established mythology and others from the depths of their imagination. One of a new line of palm-sized art books, The Art of Harry Potter: Mini Book of Creatures presents an incredible treasure trove of Harry Potter creature art in a unique miniature format. Filled with behind-the-scenes facts and insights, it’s the perfect way to keep the magic and mystery of the Harry Potter films close to your heart.

An exploration of how humans respond to novelty from the New York Times–bestselling author of Rapt Why are we attuned to the latest headline, diet craze, smartphone, and fashion statement? Why do we relish a change of scene, eye attractive strangers, and develop new interests? Follow a crawling baby around and you’ll see that right from the beginning, nothing excites us more than something new and different. Our unique human brains are biologically primed to engage with and even generate novelty. This “neophilia” has enabled us to thrive in a world of cataclysmic change, but now we confront an unprecedented deluge of new things—one that shows no sign of slowing. In New acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher, using cutting-edge research and interviews with countless experts, shows us how we can use our adaptive gift to navigate more skillfully through our rapidly changing world by focusing on the new things that really matter.

Flexibility, specialization, and niche marketing are buzzwords in the business literature these days, yet few realize that it was these elements that helped the United States first emerge as a global manufacturing leader between the Civil War and World War I. The huge mass production-based businesses--steel, oil, and autos--have long been given sole credit for this emergence. In Endless Novelty, Philip Scranton boldly recasts the history of this vital episode in the development of American business, known as the nation's second industrial revolution, by considering the crucial impact of trades featuring specialty, not standardized, production. Scranton takes us on a grand tour through American specialty firms and districts, where, for example, we meet printers and jewelry makers in New York and Providence, furniture builders in Grand Rapids, and tool specialists in Cincinnati. Throughout he highlights the benevolent as well as the strained relationships between workers and proprietors, the lively interactions among entrepreneurs and city leaders, and the personal achievements of industrial engineers like Frederic W. Taylor. Scranton shows that in sectors producing goods such as furniture, jewelry, machine tools, and electrical equipment, firms made goods to order or in batches, and industrial districts and networks flourished, creating millions of jobs. These enterprises relied on flexibility, skilled labor, close interactions with clients, suppliers, and rivals, and opportunistic pricing to generate profit streams. They built interfirm alliances to manage markets and fashioned specialized institutions--trade schools, industrial banks, labor bureaus, and sales consortia. In creating regional synergies and economies of scope and diversity, the approaches of these industrial firms represent the inverse of mass production. Challenging views of company organization that have come to dominate the business world in the United States, Endless Novelty will appeal to historians, business leaders, and to anyone curious about the structure of American industry.

If art and science have one thing in common, it’s a hunger for the new—new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible? In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and ’70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were established before Plato, and have changed very little since: novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature’s cycles of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of language, between them have accounted for nearly all the ways in which novelty has been conceived in Western history, taking in reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer different ways of grappling with the idea of originality. Novelty, North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary science and literature—an ever-receding target that, in its complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, Novelty is rich with insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis.

A cute kitten with a very twitchy tail is looking for a friend to trick-or-treat with in this purr-fect Halloween novelty book from award-winning creator Salina Yoon. Will Kitty find someone to play with on her favorite night of the year? Help Kitty wag her furry orange tail whenever she meets a new friend. With a sturdy pull-tab that wags Kitty’s tail, this interactive novelty book is perfect for Halloween.

The question of causality has haunted the history of Western metaphysics since the time of the Pre-Socratic philosophy. Hand-in-hand with attempts to address this question is the promise of unlocking larger and more complicated questions pertaining to human freedom. But what of novelty? In this brilliant extended essay Donald A. Crosby contends that though novelty can't be comprehended without efficient causality, causality requires a concept of novelty; without it cause and effect relations are unintelligible and, indeed, impossible. Crosby, in an excellent, strong, and controversial way makes the claim that freedom is consciously directed novelty. In this way, novelty is distinctive; it is not to be mistaken with either unexpected intersections of causal chains or chaos. Crosby exposes the reality of novelty throughout the book and how it applies to time, possibility, forms of materiality and embodiment, the emergence of life from nonlife, the evloution and nature of consciousness, the methods and goals of education, the character of human history and the task of historians, and also the traits of a good society. In situating novelty so firmly in the crevices of daily life, Crosby connects it to our concept of ourself, our freedom, and how we understand our relationship to the world. Through masterful readings of Isaiah Berlin, Buber, Descartes, Plato, Smart, Whitehead, and especially Henri Bergson Donald Crosby sheds new light on an elusive yet foundational concept in the history of Western thought. This book is essential to process philosophy, humanism, existentialism, philosophy of mind and consciousness, and continental thought in general.

The book offers a new approach to information theory that is more general then the classical approach by Shannon. The classical definition of information is given for an alphabet of symbols or for a set of mutually exclusive propositions (a partition of the probability space Ω) with corresponding probabilities adding up to 1. The new definition is given for an arbitrary cover of Ω, i.e. for a set of possibly overlapping propositions. The generalized information concept is called novelty and it is accompanied by two new concepts derived from it, designated as information and surprise, which describe "opposite" versions of novelty, information being related more to classical information theory and surprise being related more to the classical concept of statistical significance. In the discussion of these three concepts and their interrelations several properties or classes of covers are defined, which turn out to be lattices. The book also presents applications of these new concepts, mostly in statistics and in neuroscience.

The King of Novelty is Jon Goodmans revisionist epic for posterity of his father, legendary novelty record producer and music sampling pioneer Dickie Goodman, a man contending with internal conflict and familial obligations while entertaining the world; foreword by Dr. Demento, and epigraph from "Weird Al" Yankovic. Chuck Miller, Goldmine. Visit The Official Dickie Goodman Web Site: www.dickiegoodman.com/ At www.dickiegoodman.com you can also get signed by his original record label to publish your own music or almost any other type of audio recording as well as music video all over the world! Special Bulletin: Pick your favorite online music download store and do a search under the Artist category for Dickie Goodman; he is there on all of them; here is one popular site listed: www.itunes.com/dickiegoodman Its a great way to get any one of your favorite Dickie Goodman recordings, or all of them! Plus Ringtones and an App! Amazon.com is a great place to get all the digital release albums on CD with the CD on demand feature! You can email the Dickie Goodman fan club at: [email protected] NOW! Larson Lane Entertainment has announced the option for movie rights to The King of Novelty Dickie Goodman! THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS certified Dickie Goodman for the most charted novelty/comedy records! (17) And they used this book in their research! Varese Sarabande released a CD dedicated to Dickie Goodman. And it has liner notes by Jon Goodman! The title is 25 All Time Novelty Hits and you can get it in stores or go right to the Varese Sarabande web site. For the fist time ever, a Dickie Goodman record is on a GRAMMY winning CD! RHINOs, BRAIN IN A BOX-The Science Fiction Collection was nominated for a GRAMMY at the 44th annual GRAMMY Awards; and it won. This fabulous CD box set contains Dickie Goodmans original hit record from 1956, THE FLYING SAUCER (parts 1 and 2).The reasons for this achievement being so significant cannot be emphasized enough... in 1956 there was no NARAS, hence no GRAMMY for Dickie Goodman. Nearly twenty years later (1975) when Dickie Goodmans MR. JAWS went gold, there was no qualifying category, hence once again no GRAMMY for Dickie Goodman. Yet now, decades later, this international icon of American creativity took a ride on a RHINOs back and for the first time ever got his foot in the back door of the prestigious GRAMMY Awards. The folks at NARAS have also awarded Dickie Goodman with a posthumous GRAMMY Award certification! Profound, is the only word to describe THE KING OF NOVELTY, because the manuscript is symbolic of the life it represents. Not just a biography, but a metaphor. The King of Novelty is about a famous record producer whose esoteric comedy created more than a genre; Dickie Goodman created an entire subculture. Dickie Goodman, THE KING OF NOVELTY, invented the break-in record; a comedy recording that used samples of previously published hit songs to satirize and make parody of current events. In other words Dickie Goodman began what is now known as mixing and sampling by summarizing an era in two hysterical minutes. Today, sampling is the music industrys largest source of reinvention, and Dickie Goodmans novelty/comedy records started it all. THE KING OF NOVELTY describes the impact these eclectic records had on shaping American pop culture. Dickie Goodman is listed by Billboard as the #1 novelty/comedy recording artist of all time. Over four decades he sold millions of copies of a multitude of charted hits worldwide. To this day Dickie Goodman sells over 100,000 tracks a year in the US alone! THE KING OF NOVELTY is the biography of Dickie Goodman.