Jason recommends: What a pleasure to travel in time and land in an alternate universe where a novel can deliver playful humor, raw emotion and concepts that will blow your mind.

Gruen's Water for Elephants has become one of the most beloved and bestselling novels of our time. Now the author has moved from a circus elephant to a family of bonobo apes kidnapped from a language laboratory and their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show.

America's most-read, most-watched, and most-beloved serial killer--Dexter Morgan--is back. Family bliss is cut short when Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl who has been running with a bizarre group of goths who fancy themselves to be vampires, but more resemble cannibals.

Frequently perceptive, and at points ruefully sinister, the 14 never-before-published short stories featured in Vonnegut's Look at the Birdie date from the years before this American master began his accent to international stardom. Line drawings throughout.

Three friends descend upon an art auction in search of some excitement. As enterprising girlfriends, clever detectives, seductive auctioneers, and a Hell's Angel named Hate enter the picture, this fast-paced story of second guesses keeps changing the picture.

Award-winning historian Dray shows the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in social, political, economic, and cultural evolution.

The founder of the groundbreaking site The Huffington Post tracks the gradual demise of America as an industrial, political, and economic leader in this hard-hitting polemic, and explains how our politicians are abandoning the middle class and betraying the American dream.

One of America's finest historians shows how Bob Dylan, one of the country's greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves people after all these years. The text is a unique blend of fact, interpretation, and affinity--a work that, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion warrants. Show Less

In this impassioned and absorbing debut, historian Whitelock offers a modern perspective on Mary Tudor and sets the record straight for one and for all on one of history's most compelling and maligned rulers.

These remarkable chess sets span civilizations, chronicling the game and its design beginning with the earliest known pieces and coming up to the surprising present. Considering chess through the perspectives of art and history, the engaging text touches upon the influences of local cultures and available materials, as well as the battles, rulers, and political factions that often inspired thematic sets.

This authoritative volume is the most complete publication to date on the first phase of the Caravaggesque movement.

Focusing especially on Christianity but including other religions, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion during a time when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith.

A visually dynamic homage to the paperback. In 1968, John Leonard, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, listed the many merits of mass-market paperbacks: "They can be stuffed in purses, left in buses, dropped in toilets, used as coasters, eaten and thrown away. Their covers can be ripped off! Their spines can be broken! To buy a paperback today is to buy the means of revenging oneself on Western culture." Fast-forward forty years. Leonard's affectionately flippant assessment may need to be revised as the explosion of digital media threatens the livelihood of the printed word. More than an act of revenge on Western culture, to buy a paperback may be a means of preserving one of its more charismatic--and socially, politically, and aesthetically influential--species. Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants celebrates the mass-market paperback and gives it its due. A vibrant tour that starts with books from the late nineteenth century up to today, examining the most popular genres--mystery, romance, Westerns, how-to, cooking, and diet, and highbrow literature packaged for the broader audience--it focuses on the history of the art and design of the format and how it is inseparable from the history of American literacy, tastes, and mores of the twentieth century.

Balancing past and present, Hazelton shows how 7th-century events are alive in Middle Eastern hearts and minds today as though they had just happened, shaping modern headlines from Iran's Islamic Revolution to the civil war in Iraq.

Celebrated writer and performer Martin and artist Payne team up to tell a story of the adventure, danger, and laughs of the journey to school. Enclosed is a CD of Martin on banjo and vocals, singing the book's story with a bluegrass twist. Full color.

A three-time Caldecott Medalist delivers a mixed-media picture book about friendship and art. Arthur is an accomplished painter; Max is a beginner. Max's first attempt at using a paintbrush sends the two friends on a whirlwind trip through various artistic media. Full color.

Cass's mom has been kidnapped by the evil dessert chef and chocolatier, Seor Hugo! The ransom--the legendary tuning fork. Can Cass and Max-Ernest find the magical instrument before it's too late?