Matthue Roth's inspired and insightful tale of a punk-rock Orthodox Jew who goes to Hollywood to find her place. Don't think for a second that you know Hava or her place in the world. Yes, she's an Orthodox Jew. But that doesn't mean she can't rock out. And yes, she has opinions about everything around her. But her opinions about herself can be twice as harsh. Now Hava's just been asked to be the token Jew on a TV show about a Jewish family, trading one insular community for another. As in Tanuja Desai Hidier's BORN CONFUSED, there is soon a collision of both cultures and desires -- with one headstrong heroine caught in the middle.

Runaway children who meet up with monsters. A giant talking bug. A secret world of mouse-people. The stories of Franz Kafka are wondrous and nightmarish, miraculous and scary. In My First Kafka, storyteller Matthue Roth and artist Rohan Daniel Eason adapt three Kafka stories into startling, creepy, fun stories for all ages. With My First Kafka, the master storyteller takes his rightful place alongside Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, and Lemony Snicket as a literary giant for all ages.

Step inside a fascinating world of Jews who relate to their Jewishness through the vehicle of punk—from prominent figures in the history of punk to musicians who proudly put their Jewish identity front and center. Why did punk—a subculture and music style characterized by a rejection of established norms—appeal to Jews? How did Jews who were genuinely struggling with their Jewish identity find ways to express it through punk rock? Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk explores the cultural connections between Jews and punk in music and beyond, documenting how Jews were involved in the punk movement in its origins in the 1970s through the present day. Author Michael Croland begins by broadly defining what the terms "Jewish" and "punk" mean. This introduction is followed by an exploration of the various ways these ostensibly incompatible identities can gel together, addressing topics such as Jewish humor, New York City, the Holocaust, individualism, "tough Jews," outsider identity, tikkun olam ("healing the world"), and radicalism. The following chapters discuss prominent Jews in punk, punk rock bands that overtly put their Jewishness on display, and punk influences on other types of Jewish music—for example, klezmer and Hasidic simcha (celebration) music. The book also explores ways that Jewish and punk culture intersect beyond music, including documentaries, young adult novels, zines, cooking, and rabbis.

Herbie is lonely. His parents moved to a space station in the middle of nowhere, and there's nothing to do. He spends a lot of time wandering in the ship's ventilator shafts, and if he wants to have any friends, he has to build them out of spare parts. Deep inside the ship, Herbie discovers that a herd of gobblings have landed--monsters who float through space and love to eat metal. And the closest and biggest hunk of metal is the space station they live on. The gobblings are crawling throughout the ship, ready to make it their dinner, and Herbie's the only one who can stop them! The Gobblings is a loose retelling of an old Hasidic folktale, "The Alef Bet." A boy is wandering through a strange town where he doesn't know anybody. It's Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but nobody's prayers in the entire town are working. The boy only knows the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Alef-Bet. So he says the letters, and the honesty and simplicity of his prayer go through the Gates of Heaven (okay, in our story, it's the landing bay on the space station) and save everybody.

Compiles and annotates YALSA's "Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults" and "Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers." Includes theme lists.

Born in Russia and seeing things in a different way than his American-born peers, Jupiter struggles to figure out where he belongs in the social structure at school while dealing with the torment of a bully in an unusual way in this humorous coming-of-age story.

The author draws on her teaching background to share new writing guidelines and outline the steps for a personal or group writing retreat, providing coverage of such topics as working in silence and writing without criticism.