Ultra-snobby Clara Frankofile has everything an eleven-year-old girl could want. She’s fabulously wealthy, she lives alone in a penthouse apartment with its own roller coaster, and all of New York City is afraid of her! Each night at the Pish Posh restaurant, she watches the glittery movie actresses and princesses, and decides who is important enough to stay and who she will kick to the sidewalk in disgrace. But Clara’s world is turned upside down when she discovers that a peculiar mystery is happening in the restaurant, right under her upturned nose.With the help of a whip-smart twelveyear- old jewel thief, Clara embarks on a wildly dangerous mission through the streets of New York to solve a 200-hundred-year-old secret.

An imaginative poem about the fifteenth-century painter filled with medieval beasts and other images from Bosch's world.

Pompous Posh, a llama resident of the majestic mountains of Machew Peeshoo, spends his life searching for a creature who is his equal or better, never seeing the beauty and purpose in the other animals.

Twelve-year-old Olivia explores her new apartment building and finds a psychic, talking lizards, a shrunken ex-pirate, an exiled princess, ghosts, and other unusual characters. Ages 9+.

On the billionth birthnight of the full moon, the moon finally gets what she's really wanted--a nightgown such as people on Earth wear.

An irreverent lexicon of the seemingly infinite ways we call bullshit, written by a McSweeney's columnist and etymologist, illustrated by a New Yorker-contributing cartoonist. What's the difference between "balderdash" and "drivel"? Where did "mumbo-jumbo" come from? How should you use "meadow mayonnaise"? What's "felgercarb" and which popular TV show coined it? There are hundreds of common and rare terms for bullshit in English, including borrowings from German, turn-of-the-century sailors, The Simpsons, and beyond. Bullshit is everywhere, but not all of it is created equal. Mark Peters's Bullshit: A Lexicon is the handy guide to identifying and calling BS in all of its many forms, from "bunk" and "claptrap" to "applesauce" and "gobbledygook." Packed with historical facts, pop culture tidbits, and definitions for each term, Bullshit is perfect for humor readers, language lovers, and anyone looking to describe life's everyday annoyances.

Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

It’s spring in Ivyland . . . Debut novelist Miles Klee takes a landscape of drugs, decay, loss and, perhaps, hope, and manages to make the ensemble wryly funny: something only a few notable contemporaries such as Jeff Vandermeer and Michael Chabon have been able to do. Post-urban New Jersey is instantly recognizable in this interlinked series of short vignettes. . . . and Lev’s living room is puddles of water and sun, and a bunch of those furry caterpillars are hauling themselves from surface to surface. Populated by a bumbling, murderous citizenry of corrupt cops, innocents, ravenous addicts, lovesick geniuses, and cynical adventurers, Ivyland operates in the shadow of a giant pharmaceutical corporation that thrives on people’s weaknesses . . . and may have an even more sinister agenda. It’s our world, only a bit more extreme, and lovingly, precisely depicted with the adept skills native to a master of dark humor.

This pocket-sized book covers the back beat and its circulation through the world and traces its innovators. Hundreds of recommendations and reviews are included. Photos.