James Thurber was the most original, influential and, less we should forget, funniest American humorist of the last century. Writing and drawing cartoons for the New Yorker magazine from it's beginnings in the 1930s, he steadily shaped his own unique comic universe: a world governed by absurd logic where the trivial anxieties of everyday life slowly grind down its resigned citizens. Thurber's tales, alternately related in bemused deadpan and bewildered rage and are always excruciatingly funny and occasionally quietly disturbing too. This brand new selection, the first in over 50 years, reassembles his finest work for a new generation brought up on David Lynch and Jerry Seinfeld and features all his famous obsessions: the battle of the sexes, animals, travel, the delusional and certifiably insane. His 'casuals', as he liked to call his short pieces, drift between out and out fiction and surreal memoir. Spanning his whole career, this collection includes all his classic writings and cartoons, 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', 'The Catbird Seat', 'The Seal in the Bedroom', and half-forgotten gems that may be new even to fully qualified Thurber fans.

Laveder the Purple Cat girl is the owner of a small magic potion shop with problems...many problems. Aside from her store being overrun by poisonous, pygmy elephants, the occasional alien abduction and the devil, a giant magic store chain has decided to move in next door and crush her hopes of ever making a sale. Not to mention that her only employee and faster than the speed of light bunny, Saiko, has the attention span of a chickpea and a disturbing affection for Lavender's enchanted car. Now Lavender must think fast before an over-zealous ex-superhero health inspector shuts her down for good. Will Lavender meet the inspector's demands on time? Where are the poisonous vermin coming from? Will Saiko's love for cars go too far? This publisher is a new client to Diamond Book Distributors!

Such modern technology as desktop publishing allows people with diverse passions to share their views through small magazines--or "zines". This handy guide to "zines" includes a 400-entry directory, a history of zine publishing, and more. The ultimate creative resource for both readers and publishers alike.

After Caravaggio -- Elegies. Room 406; Mama's shroud; Four elegies; two elegies; A letter ot John Berger; A quartet for Edward Said -- Shadows. Gossamer world : on Santu Mofokeng; An incantation for Marie Cosindas; Pictures in the aftermath; Shattered glass; What does it mean to look at this?; A crime scene at the border; Shadow cabinet : on Kerry James Marshall; Nighted color : on Lorna Simpson; The blackness of the panther; Restoring the darkness -- Coming to our senses. Experience; Epiphany; Ethics -- In a dark time. A time for refusal; Resist, refuse; Through the door; Passages north; On carrying and being carried -- Epilogue. Black paper.

This adventurous work records Robert Edison Fulton's solo round-the-world tour on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July, 1932 and December, 1933. First published in 1937.

""Blue in Green"is a book that is equal parts subtle intelligence and generosity of heart. In it, Chiyuma Elliott creates a unique voice that returns again and again to the question of what we expect from one another, and how that question is transformed instead into a question of what we owe each other. This notion of reversal plays out in the construction of the poems where, unlike so many of her contemporaries who come to poetry through prose techniques, Elliott's voice emerges through a complex shifting of phrase and syntax between lines or in mid-phrase. We don't, for example, get a straight-forward story of what caused the trauma of, say, cancer or abuse; rather, we hear impressions, half-formed ideas that rise and fall in the speaker's voice as it moves through the nature of the trauma, and experience the effects of the disorder that is the center of our everyday relationships through speech. Put another way: when a crisis overshadows the ordinary, disrupting the collective labor that we pursue together in love, friendship, and work, the hardship itself, in a kind of role-reversal, becomes a collaborator, necessitating new conceptions of relationships and proposing new modes of engagement, different rules of exchange. The book's forms also reflect this transformed idea of reciprocity: ekphrastic poems, normally reserved for visual artworks, instead describe modern jazz songs (including the title poem); letters and letter fragments are written to no one in particular, to the planet, to the universe; and highly allusive free verse poems defy convention with troubled, wildly variable line lengths. The phrase "When I was a wave" recurs throughout the book in unpredictable places, sometimes as a title, sometimes in the middle of a poem, each time telling a different story about expectation, intimacy, and the risk inherent in any relationship. "Blue in Green" is a graceful, tough-minded, beautifully crafted collection, full of wit and elegance"--

New poems from a National Book Award winner