One cranky squirrel + one happy dog = a lesson in emotional intelligence your kids will love! When Joey bumps into Ralphy at the park, he can tell right away that Joey is a squirrel that needs to hear all about "Ralphy's Rules for Living the Good Life." Joey learns the value of kindness, not taking things personally, and being brave. It's never too early to practice these important skills, and this duo is the perfect pair to help you open the door to those conversations.

A heartstopping, poignant, epic adventure story about a boy destined to live forever, who only wants to grow up. Without death, life is just existence. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live forever? Well, Alfie Monk can tell you. He may seem like an ordinary eleven-year-old boy, but he's actually more than a thousand years old--and remembers the last Viking invasion of England, not to mention the French Revolution and both World Wars. Way back in the tenth century, he and his mother were given the alchemical secret to eternal life. But when everything Alfie knows is destroyed in a fire, and the modern world intrudes, he must embark on a mission--along with friends Aidan and Roxy--to find a way to reverse the process and grow up like a regular boy. This astonishing new novel from the author of Time Traveling with a Hamster, told in alternating perspectives by Alfie and Aidan, is a tour de force--a sweeping epic that takes you on an unforgettable, breathtaking adventure and asks big questions about the meaning of life.

Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to Little Britches. So do adventures, wonderfully told, that equip Ralph to take his father's place when it becomes necessary. Little Britches was the literary debut of Ralph Moody, who wrote about the adventures of his family in eight glorious books, all available as Bison Books.

Inner city communities in the US have become junkyards of dreams, to quote Mike Daviswastelands where gangs package narcotics to stimulate the local economy, gunshots occur multiple times on any given day, and dreams of a better life can fade into the realities of poverty and disability. Laurence Ralph lived in such a community in Chicago for three years, conducting interviews and participating in meetings with members of the local gang which has been central to the community since the 1950s. Ralph discovered that the experience of injury, whether physical or social, doesn t always crush dreams into oblivion; it can transform them into something productive: renegade dreams. The first part of this book moves from a critique of the way government officials, as opposed to grandmothers, have been handling the situation, to a study of the history of the historic Divine Knights gang, to a portrait of a duo of gang members who want to be recognized as authentic rappers (they call their musical style crack music ) and the difficulties they face in exiting the gang. The second part is on physical disability, including being wheelchair bound, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among heroin users, and the experience of brutality at the hands of Chicago police officers. In a final chapter, The Frame, Or How to Get Out of an Isolated Space, Ralph offers a fresh perspective on how to understand urban violence. The upshot is a total portrait of the interlocking complexities, symbols, and vicissitudes of gang life in one of the most dangerous inner city neighborhoods in the US. We expect this study will enjoy considerable readership, among anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars interested in disability, urban crime, and race."

Considers the moral and social costs of today's sophisticated technology, arguing that the benefits of a cyberculture can be better appreciated by refocusing on the traditional Judeo-Christian values of discernment, moderation, wisdom, humility, authenticity, and diversity.

When I started my literary agency in 1998, my chances of becoming successful were equal to my chances of starring in Sex and The City. I didn't know a single editor, didn't have a single writer, lived 3000 miles away from the heart of the publishing business in New York and was in such dire financial straits that becoming homeless was a real possibility. During sleepless nights I envisioned the headlines: PUBLISHING WORLD STUNNED - WRITERS DEVASTATED. It has been discovered that the Jodie Rhodes Literary Agency, believed to be a legitimate business, actually operates out of a shopping cart and its founder is a bag lady. Of course I never had the slightest intention of becoming an agent, since I hadn't lost my mind, only all my money. To keep from starving, I cleaned people's houses, scrubbing floors and toilets, baked muffins and cookies that I sold at my bridge club, took care of a 93 year old woman with Alzheimer's, became a guinea pig for pharmaceutical research studies and started a writers' workshop. Since I had the unfortunate habit of telling writers just how terrible their writing was, I had a lot of turnover. Then the inspiration struck me. I would claim to be a literary agent and my workshops would be flooded with eager writers! You need to know there is nothing illegal in claiming to be a literary agent because there are no rules or requirements for becoming one except claiming to be one. However, I'm cursed with a fairly strong streak of ethical behavior so I wrote the publishers of Guide To Literary Agents and Literary Market Place that I was a new agent based in La Jolla and gave them basic information about me. I never heard back from them, which was no surprise. But then one day, to my horror, a manuscript arrived in my mail. Guide To Literary Agents had actually listed me. Soon more came. But the writing in those submissions was so unbelievably terrible that it transcended revulsion and left me in a state of awe. I recall, in particular, the following: "Dear Jodie: Enclosed find a query, synopsis and the first three chapters of my completed novel which is at once a gay love story, a plea for handicapped liberation and a sanguine tale of greed, murder and revenge. It is necessary for me to use a pen name because the narrative's explicit depictions of incontinence management and gay sex could arouse the interest of the culture police." Keep in mind that was just the query letter. I am sparing you the chapters. One thing I learned quickly was the more modest the writer, the better the writing and vice versa. Example: "Dear Ms. Rhodes: I have just finished my first novel titled Kabuki in a G-String which, to be both honest and bold, is exceptional." I cannot begin to tell you how excruciatingly awful that novel was. After six months of these submissions, I stared into the mirror and had a long talk with myself. "This is hopeless, isn't it?" "Well, it's only been six months." "But we still haven't found one single writer we could represent." "Look on the bright side. We wouldn't know what to do with one, if we did offer representation. Think of all the embarrassment we've saved ourselves." "I am not amused." "So what do you want to do? Quit?" "I hate to be a quitter." "I know. You've made our life miserable because of that." In 2008, one of my authors forced me into creating a website and Google reported 430,000,000 hits. Btw, this memoir is the story of two very different lives and you've just read about my second life. My first life takes up much of the memoir and its opening chapter below will give you an idea of what to expect. I was a late bloomer, resigned at 15 to being an old maid. If anyone had told me I'd end up with more men in my life than Elizabeth Taylor, I would have assumed they were either so high on drugs that they couldn't see straight or wanted to borrow money from me.

A crime would bring them together, grief would bind them and love would make them famous. Parish “Pain” Wells is a man freshly reintroduced to society, after serving time in state prison. Prior to his fall, Pain had been a heist man who showed the promise of someone who could go on to be a legend. His trajectory changed on the night he had made the mistake of accepting a ride from a friend, and found himself behind bars for the one crime he hadn’t committed. Several years later, Pain returns home to a world that wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. The only one who still remains in his corner is his ailing grandmother. It’s for her sake that Pain tries to stay on the straight and narrow. He’s tired of breaking her heart and vows to be a good grandson, but when her medical bills start mounting he finds himself backed into a corner. He needs money, fast, and there’s only one way he knows how to get it. Since her parents died and Passion Adams found herself a ward of her estranged uncle, a gangster who everyone calls Uncle Joe, her life has been on a constant downward spiral. She moves like a ghost from one day to the next, numbing her pain with drugs and alcohol, while seeking thrills in unsavory places. One morning Passion finds herself the victim of a robbery and the thieves snatch from her the only thing of value that she has left in the world, a locket containing the ashes of her deceased parents. Passion is devastated, fearing she would never see the locket again until it shows up later in the hands of a handsome stranger, who brings something into Passion’s life that has eluded her since the death of her parents... hope. The two broken souls find themselves inescapably drawn into each other’s orbits, and begin their journey of finding lives outside the ones of poverty and sorrow that their worlds had condemned them to. But when shadows from both their pasts threaten their happiness, Passion and Pain set out on an adventure that would make them hunted by law enforcement and celebrated by the underworld. What initially starts out as a mission of vindication quickly turns into a fight for survival. "K'wan delivered another classic." -Mark Anthony, Essence bestselling author of Paper Chasers "Make way for the Donald Goines/Iceberg Slim of our era." -Tracy Brown, author of Black, Dime Piece and Criminal Minded “Wait until you read this! K'wan is raising the stakes." - Kashamba Williams, author of Blinded and Grimey At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.