(Book). If you attended public school in the United States between 1973 and today, odds are you've heard Dave Frishberg's songs just see if any of these Schoolhouse Rock classics ring a bell: "The Number Cruncher," "Seven Fifty Once a Week," "Dollars and Sense," "Walking on Wall Street," "Hardware," and, of course, the classic "I'm Just a Bill." Of, course, Frishberg is much more than the writer of beloved civics-minded ditties he's also the brilliant lyricist and composer behind well-known songs including "Peel Me a Grape," "I'm Hip," "My Attorney Bernie," "Blizzard of Lies," and "Van Lingle Mungo," a top-flight jazz pianist, and, sardonic wit in tow, an exemplar of American ideals. From his boyhood and university days in St. Paul, Minnesota, to his Air Force service in Salt Lake City, and then on to his life as a pianist and songwriter in New York City and Los Angeles, My Dear Departed Past is a pointed, poignant, sagacious look back on a fascinating career in music at the height of the jazz scene and a storied life flush with wit, imagination, and good humor. For Frishberg, an internationally-known jazz pianist, songwriter, and lyricist, it all began in his WWII elementary school days. Mentored by his brother, Mort, seven years his senior, Dave discovered the music of Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bing Crosby while listening to Mort's 78-rpm records. For good measure, Mort also taught Dave how to play boogie-woogie and blues on the piano a musical indoctrination that perfectly sharpened the younger Frishberg's musical tastes and laid the foundation for a lifelong love of music and the camaraderie of musicians. In this book populated with colorful characters especially the brilliant jazzmen and women he played with in iconic clubs and studios during the scene's heyday Dave brings his stories of being on the road and his experiences in the music business vividly to life. While My Dear Departed Past is a must-read for jazz aficionados, it's just as suitable for anybody who ever wondered about the composer behind those classic tunes singing the praises of active citizenship and financial security. This book includes online access to recordings of 20 Frishberg classics.

It's Detective Inspector Bill Slider's day off and he had hoped to have some quiet time with Joanna, his pregnant fiancée. But a woman's body is found in the park and he finds himself back to work sooner than he expected. At first glance, it looks as though the woman is the latest victim of the "Park Killer." But it doesn't take Slider and his partner Atherton long to establish that someone else was trying to pass the killing off as the handiwork of the notorious serial killer. This murder doesn't fit the pattern; this one was personal. The woman's modest income and outlandish lifestyle don't match up. Turning to the two most popular motives---money and passion---Slider and his team turn up some puzzling anomalies in her life, not the least of which is the number of men she took as lovers and the tangled relationships of her family. In Slider's latest adventure, the prolific and masterful Cynthia Harrod-Eagles draws from her great store of wit and warmth. The good-hearted and delightfully flawed Slider charms readers into accompanying him down any path, no matter how dangerous.

YA. FANTASY & MAGICAL REALISM. This is a sharp, slick, blisteringly paced debut novel, with an unconventional but tender love story at its heart. I parted the curtains. A skeletal face peered back at me, blackened eyes rolling in sockets seemingly unsupported by flesh. It smiled ... It should be game over for Nora Dearly when she is ambushed and dragged off into the night by the living dead. But this crack unit of teen zombies are the good guys, sent to protect Nora from the real monsters roaming the country and zeroing in on cities to swell their ranks. Can Nora find a way to kill off the evil undead once and for all? Can she trust her protectors to resist their hunger for human flesh? And can she stop herself falling for the noble, sweet, surprisingly attractive, definitely-no-longer-breathing Bram ...? Ages 12+.

THE STORY: In the Baptist backwoods of the Bible Belt, the beleaguered Turpin family proves that living and dying in the South are seldom tidy and always hilarious. Despite their earnest efforts to pull themselves together for their father's funera

From a USA Today–bestselling author: First in the mystery series filled with “pure southern lunacy of the best possible kind” (Laurien Berenson). They say you can’t get to Heaven without passing through the Eternal Rest Funeral Home. And no one gets into Eternal Rest without passing muster with Elvis—the basset hound who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Brewing up a big ol’ pitcher of Mississippi mystery, Peggy Webb’s delightful new series is as intoxicating as the Delta breeze. Normally, Callie Valentine Jones spends her days fixing up the hairdos of the dead, but when the corpse of prominent local physician Dr. Leonard Laton goes missing, it’s bad for business. So Callie and her cousin Lovie (Eternal Rest’s resident wake caterer) have no choice but to go in hot pursuit of the recently embalmed, last seen bound for Vegas by way of downtown Tupelo. In Vegas, Callie and Lovie hit the jackpot when they find the dearly departed inside a freezer owned by his showgirl mistress, Bubble Malone. But their luck runs out when Bubble decides to join her man in the afterlife. With the poisonous Laton family tree providing plenty of rotten suspects, Callie, along with some help from her basset hound, Elvis, is determined to crack this case—and have a killer singing “Jailhouse Rock” in time for her next haircutting appointment . . .

Grace Frick introduced English-language readers all over the world to the distinguished French author Marguerite Yourcenar with her award-winning translation of Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian in 1954. European biographies of Yourcenar have often disparaged Frick and her relationship with Yourcenar, however. This work shows Frick as a person of substance in her own right, and paints a portrait of both women that is at once intimate and scrupulously documented. It contains a great deal of new information that will disrupt long-held beliefs about Yourcenar and may even shock some of her scholars and fans.