Fifteen year old Aggie has a special bond with her father, an English professor, who shares with her the wonders of Shakespeare's plays. Her world changes suddenly when her father dies of a heart attack. Her mother remarries--too quickly--and takes Aggie to live in her new husband's home. Bitter and confused, Aggie tries to find friends in her new school. She feels lucky to be accepted by the most popular group but soon discovers that to be part of the group means playing cruel jokes on people, and worse. She feels guilty but cannot give up her popularity. When she is alone, she buries herself in her father's copy of Shakespeare's plays, hoping to find her father's voice in Shakespeare's words. On a school trip to England, her father's favorite haunt, Aggie is transported to Shakespeare's time and meets Catherine, the daughter of a Stratford glove maker. Together the girls face the dangers and wonders of England in the year 1605. The dangers include being accused of witchcraft and complicity in the Gunpowder Plot; the wonders take them to Shakespeare's theatre and a discovery that helps Aggie start a new life.

Together with the Olympics, world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political, urban/architectural, anthropological/ sociological, technological, commercial, popular, and representational. Contributors come from eight different countries and represent affiliations in academia, museums and libraries, professional and architectural firms, non-profit organizations, and government regulatory agencies. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs, the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, geographical locales, media, and messages, mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.

Internationally popular food savant and blogger Simon Majumdar has an “irrepressible humor [that] sparkles through every bite” (Booklist) of this “ballsy, often hilarious foodie travelogue” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) that chronicles a yearlong journey around the world in search of everything delicious, odd, and oddly delicious. When Simon Majumdar hit forty, he realized there had to be more to life than his stable but uninspiring desk job. As he wondered how to escape his career, he rediscovered a list of goals he had scrawled out years before, the last of which said: Go everywhere, eat everything. With that, he had found his mission—a yearlong search for the delicious, and curious, and the curiously delicious, which he names Eat My Globe and memorably chronicles in these pages. In Majumdar's world, food is everything. Like every member of his family, he has a savant's memory for meals, with instant recall of dishes eaten decades before. Simon's unstoppable wit and passion for all things edible (especially those things that once had eyes, and a face, and a mom and a pop) makes this an armchair traveler's and foodie's delight—Majumdar does all the heavy lifting, eats the heavy foods (and suffers the weighty consequences), so you don't have to. He jets to thirty countries in just over twelve months, diving mouth-first into local cuisines and cultures as different as those of Japan and Iceland. His journey takes him from China, where he consumes one of his "Top Ten Worst Eats," stir-fried rat, to the United States, where he glories in our greatest sandwiches: the delectable treasures of Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan, BBQ in Kansas and Texas, the still-rich po' boys of post-Katrina New Orleans. The meat of the story—besides the peerless ham in Spain, the celebrated steaks of Argentina, the best of Münich's wursts as well as their descendants, the famous hot dogs of Chicago—is the friends that Simon makes as he eats. They are as passionate about food as he is and are eager to welcome him to their homes and tables, share their choicest meals, and reveal their local secrets. Also a poignant memoir, Eat My Globe is a life told through food and spiced with Majumdar's remembrances of foods past, including those from his colorful childhood. A captivating look at one man's passion for food, family, and unique life experiences, Eat My Globe will make you laugh while it makes you hungry. It is sure to satiate any gastronome obsessed with globetrotting—for now.

A dragon firebombs a freeway. Shape-shifters stalk the commercial district. The deadly Wild Hunt wreaks havoc on the highway. The Age of Misrule has dawned. When Jack Churchill and Ruth Gallagher encounter a terrifying, misshapen giant beneath a London bridge, they are plunged into a mystery that portends the end of the world as we know it. All over the country, the ancient gods of Celtic myth are returning to the land from which they were banished millennia ago. Following in their footsteps are creatures of folklore: fabulous beasts, wonders and dark terrors. As technology starts to fail, Jack and Ruth are forced to embark on a desperate quest for four magical items—the last chance for humanity in the face of powers barely comprehended. A pedal-to-the-floor, high-octane fantasy thriller that pitches magic and wonder into a pop culture mash-up of the modern world. Described as "One part Lord of the Rings, one part Illuminatus!, one part Arthurian romance, one part Harry Potter—100 % original!" From the Trade Paperback edition.