Part of chapter 16 signed by the author using her married name, A. M. Rodgers, with an unidentified sheet of text and a typed description of the manuscript.

Last year Stephen Pile attempted to deliver a daring blow to the success ethic that so pervades Western culture. To his dismay, The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures sold many copies and even became the Sunday Times 'Humour Book of the Year.' Nothing daunted, Stephen returns with a new selection which brings together the very best of his original classic titles - The Book of Heroic Failures and The Return of Heroic Failures. The heartwarming news that stays news is that there really is no limit to what humanity can achieve, as we move onwards and downwards to ever more immortal and breathtaking feats of incompetence. The Not Terribly Good Book of Heroic Failures lovingly chronicles the all-time heroes who have been so bad at things that they shine as beacons for future generations. It is hard not to feel boundless admiration, for example, for the fifty Mexican convicts who dug an escape tunnel out of their jail and came up in the courtroom where many of them had been sentenced. Or for the world's worst tourist, who spent three days in New York believing he was in Rome.

Language lovers rejoice at the best wordplay articles in the history of Uncle John! We asked Roget himself what he thought of Talk Wordy To Me, and he gushed that it’s “incredible, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, spectacular, astonishing, awe-inspiring, tremen…” Then we cut him off because there’s only so much room to tell you about all the great articles you’ll find in this e-book about word and phrase origins, anagrams, palindromes, puns, jargon, tongue twisters, and the (unintentionally) naughtiest typos ever typed. What else is in here? Lots! A smorgasbord! A cornucopia! A plethora! Myriad! So expand your vocabulary with… • How txting b changin langage lol • The epic story of epic words that are losing their luster (like “epic”) • A pop music anagram quiz • The world's wordiest novelist • Presidential misspeaks that spawned new words • Hilarious headstones from around the world • Words and phrases that are much older than you’d think (like “politically correct” and “truthiness”) • Peter Mark Roget’s obsessive-compulsive quest to create his famous thesaurus • What irony isn’t • Trivia, with a catch—all answers contain poo And much, much more!

Grab some quiet time for yourself and enjoy hundreds of pages of the world’s most twisted trivia! The crackpot staff at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has scoured the worlds of pop culture, politics, sports, history, and more to bring you Slightly Irregular, the seventeenth all-new edition in the best-selling series. As always, the articles are divided by length for your sitting convenience. So turn thine eyes away from the shampoo bottle, O bathroom reader, and let Uncle John pepper your brain with these absorbing articles . . . * Women in space * The origin of Kung Fu * The CIA’s secret coup * The great windshield epidemic * Spider eggs in the brain, and other urban legends * What went down at Woodstock * Freedom of McSpeech * How to kill a zombie, and much more!

Austin Clarke is widely regarded as one of 20th-century Ireland's most important poets. In this selection of nearly fifty essays and reviews written over Clarke's long career, he demonstrates that he is an astute and provocative literary critic as well. Having grown up in Dublin when the excitement of the Irish Literary Revival was still running high, Clarke knew many of the principal figures of that movement personally, and his readings of Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and others enjoy the advantages of an insider's point of view. A selection of Clarke's writings on Yeats is followed by his writings on other Irish writers and the Irish Literary Revival, and on Modern English and American literature. Included as an appendix is an exhaustive list of Clarke's literary criticism published in periodicals.