The Comedy Store in L.A. is a family affair, founded by Sammy and Mitzi Shore, the parents of comedians Pauly Shore and Sandi Shore. In Secrets to Standup Success, Sandi offers valuable insider instruction on how to shape a comic persona and develop a personal delivery style, plus secrets on timing, pacing, and creating characters.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

Using surfing as a metaphor for motivational and self-improvement concepts and written in accessible, everyday language peppered with surfer slang, Staying on Top proves that the good life is available right now. Making these essential lessons fun, cartoon character Surf Master Alva appears throughout the book to dispense nuggets of wisdom that point the way to the good life, illustrating in a humorous and wise way that experts and gurus are not needed to understand and make the most of life. In other words, we don't have to learn how to achieve the good life through retreats, pills, hospitals or programs, nor do we have to wait until we find the "perfect time". In surfer parlance, "Surfz up, dude! Get your board and get to the beach." Assessing their understanding of prevailing societal values portrayed through surfing metaphors and Surf Master Alva's quirky wisdom, Staying on Top will awaken people to the reality that living life to the fullest requires living in the present. Life right now is all anyone can truly be sure of: The secret to achieving and maintaining balance and serenity lies in accepting and embracing that truth. For long-term devotees of self-help literature and newcomers to the genre, everyone will delight in this wise yet whimsical journey to enlightenment.

The wildly popular YouTube star behind Clean My Space presents the breakthrough solution to cleaning better with less effort Melissa Maker is beloved by fans all over the world for her completely re-engineered approach to cleaning. As the dynamic new authority on home and living, Melissa knows that to invest any of our precious time in cleaning, we need to see big, long-lasting results. So, she developed her method to help us get the most out of our effort and keep our homes fresh and welcoming every day. In her long-awaited debut book, she shares her revolutionary 3-step solution: • Identify the most important areas (MIAs) in your home that need attention • Select the proper products, tools, and techniques (PTT) for the job • Implement these new cleaning routines so that they stick Clean My Space takes the chore out of cleaning with Melissa’s incredible tips and cleaning hacks (the power of pretreating!) her lightning fast 5-10 minute “express clean” routines for every room when time is tightest, and her techniques for cleaning even the most daunting places and spaces. And a big bonus: Melissa gives guidance on the best non-toxic, eco-conscious cleaning products and offers natural cleaning solution recipes you can make at home using essential oils to soothe and refresh. With Melissa’s simple groundbreaking method you can truly live in a cleaner, more cheerful, and calming home all the time.

An accident… Amnesia…. A chance to fall in love again! David Adams is going to have to let his wife back into his life. He'd been about to divorce Joanna, when she had the accident. True, she's undergone a complete personality change since then, and has turned back into the lovely girl he married. But does that mean he's going to fall right back in love with her? David is convinced that what he feels for Joanna right now is lust. But he must resist their reborn attraction…because, once Joanna's memory has returned, this pretense of a real marriage must surely be over…?

Have you ever wondered what left behind those prints and tracks on the seashore, or what made those marks or dug those holes in the dunes? Life Traces of the Georgia Coast is an up-close look at these traces of life and the animals and plants that made them. It tells about how the tracemakers lived and how they interacted with their environments. This is a book about ichnology (the study of such traces) and a wonderful way to learn about the behavior of organisms, living and long extinct. Life Traces presents an overview of the traces left by modern animals and plants in this biologically rich region; shows how life traces relate to the environments, natural history, and behaviors of their tracemakers; and applies that knowledge toward a better understanding of the fossilized traces that ancient life left in the geologic record. Augmented by illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically grounded book that will serve as source both for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast.

Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva’s term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one’s sense of identity but that are nevertheless—like blood, feces, or urine—impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian’s life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense. Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s—Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May—when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the “comedification” of America—stand-up comedy’s escape from its narrow origins—involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon’s formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction—at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.