Do you enjoy playing with language? Wordplay is an art-form savored by many. If you are in that rather select group, then this is the book for you! Each of these stories has a surprise ending, a modified cliché or adage, a perverted pun or some other amusing twist. ENJOY! WHAT SOME READERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS BOOK! "The brain-dead who do not enjoy puns, word play, and a good groan need not read this book!" -Dean Swift, Student "These are the Shaggy Dog Days of our lives." Jerry Blessinger, Teacher

At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book is a funny, erudite, and provocative exploration of puns, the people who make them, and this derided wordplay's remarkable impact on human history.

Storytelling is an ancient practice known in all civilizations throughout history. Characters, tales, techniques, oral traditions, motifs, and tale types transcend individual cultures - elements and names change, but the stories are remarkably similar with each rendition, highlighting the values and concerns of the host culture. Examining the stories and the oral traditions associated with different cultures offers a unique view of practices and traditions."Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore" brings past and present cultures of the world to life through their stories, oral traditions, and performance styles. It combines folklore and mythology, traditional arts, history, literature, and festivals to present an overview of world cultures through their liveliest and most fascinating mode of expression. This appealing resource includes specific storytelling techniques as well as retellings of stories from various cultures and traditions.

A collection of thirty-one fairy tales and folktales from around the world. Includes activities.

Do you enjoy playing with language? Wordplay is an art-form savored by many. If you are in that rather select group, then this is the book for you! Each of these stories has a surprise ending, a modified clich or adage, a perverted pun or some other amusing twist. ENJOY! WHAT SOME READERS HAVE SAID ABOUT THIS BOOK! The brain-dead who do not enjoy puns, word play, and a good groan need not read this book! Dean Swift, Student These are the Shaggy Dog Days of our lives. Jerry Blessinger, Teacher

If you like word play and puns, you will love this book. Relying on a lifetime of collecting Shaggy Dog Stories, Spoonerisms, and other attacks on the English language, the author has produced a book that is becoming a reference for punsters. This book has over 310 of the best 'Groaners' ever told. Each one is contained on a single page and features an illustration and title relevant to the story. These set-up puns comprise a goldmine of tales that can be stretched in the act of telling, thus making the listener's 'Groan' more significant. Included is a foreword by Stan Kegel, International Punster of the Year and O. Henry Pun-Off Championships Judge. Also included are 6 pages of simple pun statements and many links to pun sites on the web.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar meets...

Yes, it’s true: you can learn how to be a verbal wizard! Ever hear someone utter an unforgettable phrase and feel yourself reacting with with…well, awe? Ever read a great quote and think I could never come up with anything that clever? Daunting as it may seem, there’s nothing mystical about witcraft. Crafting memorable lines doesn’t require DNA-encoded brilliance. What it does require is some knowledge of the tricks and techniques that make words stick. In Word Hero, Jay Heinrichs rescues the how-to of verbal artistry from cobwebbed textbooks and makes it entirely fresh– even a little mischievous. Fear not: on offer here are not dry, abstract ideas couched in academic jargon. Rather, Heinrichs takes you on an amusing – and amazingly helpful – tour of the mechanisms that make powerful language work. You’ll learn how to slyly plant your words in people’s heads and draw indelible verbal pictures by employing such tools as “crashing symbols,” “rapid repeaters,” “Russian Dolls” and even the powers of Mr. Potato Head. With those tools and others tucked in your utility belt, you might not immediately achieve “wordsmith immortality” but you will become a better speaker, writer, and raconteur…and long after people have forgotten everything else, they’ll remember your priceless lines.

Put some juice into your library programs with these lively, thematic, book-based activities for children in grades 4-8. In each chapter, one pgoram is suited to the needs of school libraries and the other is targeted at public libraries, although both can be adapted to either environment.

A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion. At once a love letter to literature and a charming guide to the books most worth reading, A Reader's Book of Days features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. Here is Marcel Proust starting In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, "Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?" Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included: the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy, the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s Carrie. A Reader's Book of Days is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of Martin Amis, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, the Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk, George Plimpton, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Dr. Seuss, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and many more. The book also notes the days on which famous authors were born and died; it includes lists of recommended reading for every month of the year as well as snippets from book reviews as they appeared across literary history; and throughout there are wry illustrations by acclaimed artist Joanna Neborsky. Brimming with nearly 2,000 stories, A Reader's Book of Days will have readers of every stripe reaching for their favorite books and discovering new ones.