Sh*t Rough Drafts collects imagined misguided early drafts of classic books, screenplays, and contemporary literature, creating visions of alternate works that would exist had the authors not come to their senses. What if F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone with the title The Coolest Gatsby? How would The Hunger Games change if Peeta were armed only with blueberry muffins? And how would the Star Wars films play out if Darth Vader is Luke's father, but Chewbacca is also his cousin? Harry Potter, MacBeth, Jaws, The Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick, and many more are each presented as if they were the actual typed or handwritten pages by the authors themselves, revealing the funny and frightful works they might have been with a little less capable judgment.

In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker. The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes--political democratization, market change, and westward expansion--that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

“A guidebook to the world of professional humoring . . . Randazzo pulls off the rare trick of being funny while discussing comedy.” —Michael Ian Black, The New York Times Book Review It takes guts to be a comedian, and it takes smarts to make a living off it. In this insider’s guide, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo delivers a funny and insightful blueprint for those looking to turn their sense of humor into a vocation, and solicits advice and stories from the likes of Judd Apatow, Jack Handey, Weird Al Yankovic, Rob Delaney, Joan Rivers, Tim & Eric, Nick Kroll, Lisa Hanawalt, and more. Explaining how it works and how to break in, Joe provides tips and guidance, outlines successful career paths, and gives readers the knowledge and inspiration to launch a career in comedy with confidence. “Covers an impressive range of comedy formats including standup, improv, sketch, TV, writing, directing, animation, and YouTube . . . includes tons of little details (reviews of websites that accept submissions, tips on how to create funny characters), any one of which might be the thing to jumpstart a comedian’s success.” —Publishers Weekly

Covers translations of scientific and technical interest from non-Western languages into Western languages.