Can the broad truths of aphorisms be visually explained? Dive into the pages of this interactive book to find out!

"An entertaining memoir that reads like a sitcom." "Made me laugh until tears were coming down my face." In Growing up Greenpoint, Tommy Carbone captures what it was like to be a kid during the 1970s and 80s in Brooklyn, New York. This funny, and sometimes emotional, memoir follows the years Tommy was educated not only in the classrooms of St. Stan's, but on the streets of Greenpoint. It was there, playing street games with friends, being cornered by muggers, playing kissing games with the girls, spending time with family, and constantly seeking out the best snack foods in the neighborhood, where Tommy learned a lot about life; although he may not have known it at the time. A simple conversation, years later, about the New York City Blackout of 1977 sparks Tommy to recall his youth in the city he loved. His stories will bring you into the action of what it was like to dodge cars during a ballgame, to take a hike to another borough in search of a particular burger, to the hours spent playing pinball in a corner candy store, and how special it was to build traditions with three generations of Polish and Italian relatives in Brooklyn's garden spot. The vivid descriptions of his antics of what it was like to grow up during those years will transport you to the sounds and smells of living in the city during those trying years. Reading this book, you'll be entertained, and at the same time, you may shake your head wondering how Tommy ever survived - Growing up in Greenpoint.

New York Times Bestseller Living in New York City for five years as a transplant from Ohio, illustrator and T-shirt designer Nathan Pyle was fascinated by the unique habits and unspoken customs New Yorkers follow to make life bearable in a city with 8 million people (and seemingly twice the number of tourists). In NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette, Pyle reveals the secrets and unwritten rules for living in and visiting New York including the answers to such burning questions as, how do I hail a cab? What is a bodega? Which way is Uptown? Why are there so many doors in the sidewalk? How do I walk on an escalator? Do we need be touching right now? Where should I inhale or exhale while passing sidewalk garbage? How long should I honk my horn? If New York were a game show, how would I win? What happens when I stand in the bike lane? Who should get the empty subway seats? How do I stay safe during a trash tornado? Each tip is a little story illustrated in simple black and white drawings.

In Growing up Greenpoint, Tommy Carbone captures what it was like to be a kid during the 1970s and 80s in Brooklyn. This funny, and sometimes emotional, memoir follows the years Tommy was educated not only in the classrooms of St. Stan's, but on the streets of Greenpoint. It was there, playing street games with friends, being cornered by muggers, playing kissing games with the girls, spending time with family, and constantly seeking out the best snack foods in the neighborhood, where Tommy learned a lot about life; although he may not have known it at the time. A simple conversation, years later, about the New York City Blackout of 1977 sparks Tommy to recall his youth in the city he loved. His stories will bring you into the action of what it was like to dodge cars during a ballgame, to take a hike to another borough in search of a particular burger, to the hours spent playing pinball in a corner candy store, and how special it was to build traditions with three generations of Polish and Italian relatives in Brooklyn's garden spot. The vivid descriptions of his antics of what it was like to grow up during those years will transport you to the sounds and smells of living in the city during those trying years. Reading this book, you'll be entertained, and at the same time, you may shake your head wondering how Tommy ever survived - Growing up in Greenpoint.

Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of America’s leading China expert. The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth—Pearl Buck’s novel about a Chinese peasant family—spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with “four hundred million customers,” as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins—in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos—a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place. A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. His “floating Chinaman,” unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars—and today, as well.

In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry’s floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz’s arms—and back to his better self—in a novel that is funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving.

PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.