This revised edition of the original reference standard for urban legends provides an updated anthology of common myths and stories, and presents expanded coverage of international legends and tales shared and popularized online. From roasted babies to vanishing hitchhikers to housewives in football helmets, this exhaustive and highly readable encyclopedia provides descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, examines legend themes, and explains scholarly approaches to the genre. Revised and expanded to include updated versions of the entries from the award-winning first edition, this work provides additional entries on a wide range of new topics that include terrorism, recent political events, and Hurricane Katrina. Entries in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Updated and Expanded Edition discuss the presence of urban legends in comic books, literature, film, music, and many other areas of popular culture, as well as the existence of "too good to be true" stories in Argentina, China, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and several other countries. Serving as both an anthology of stories as well as a reference work, this encyclopedia will serve as a valuable resource for students and a source book for journalists, professional folklorists, and others who are researching or interested in urban legends.

Land of carpools and cul-de-sacs! Home to good schools and green lawns! An idyllic place where nothing bad ever happens--right? Right?Wrong. As David Lynch and Desperate Housewives have taught us, life in the 'burbs has a dark side--and Surburban Legends shows the worst of it. Here are 75 spooky tales of corpses buried in back yards, ghosts in department stores, UFO sightings, vanishing persons, and much more!

Rick Warren famously wrote, "It's not about you." But much of the Western church seems to disagree, having settled for a self-centered message of personal fulfillment. With incisiveness and a passionate love for the church, pastor and author Byron Forrest Yawn offers a compelling call away from narcissism and back to the powerful and transforming gospel of Jesus. He shows the difference between... Sunday-morning life coaches selling self-help seminars, and preachers proclaiming God's redemptive work through Christ promises of prosperity and comfort, and a realistic and helpful perspective on suffering escape from unbelievers and their godless world, and redemptive engagement with people As Byron exposes the false gospel of "suburbianity," he offers readers a better alternative: to look beyond themselves and embrace God's call to be His image-bearers and ambassadors, partnering with Him as He restores people and all creation to His original design.

"From her humble beginnings as a teenage country singer to her record-breaking Eras Tour, Taylor Swift's career is incomparable both in her mastery over multiple genres and the pure scale of her fan base and success. By weaving effortlessly through country, rock, pop, indie, and folk music, Swift has created a style of her own. [This book provides] a comprehensive review of her entire songbook to date, covering all eleven studio albums and more than 200 songs that tell a dramatic story of life, love, and triumph"--

Mobsters. Big hair. The smelly Turnpike. The poor cousin of its glittering neighbor Manhattan. Could that really be all there is to New Jersey? In Living on the Edge of the World, the best and brightest young writers from the much maligned state answer back with edgy, irreverent pieces of nonfiction paying tribute to New Jersey's unique place in the cultural consciousness. Like a drive along the Garden State Parkway, their stories travel to just about every corner of the state, from Princeton and Hillside to Camden and Hoboken. In "Straight Outta Garwood," Tom Perrotta writes of the near inescapability of returning to his home state again and again in his novels; in "Exit 15W," Joshua Braff tells how all roads led back to the Jersey Girl he'd fallen for as a seventh-grader; Kathleen DeMarco takes a nostalgic look at her grandfather's cranberry bog in "The Family Farm"; Jonathan Ames recounts a failed attempt to consummate his flirtation with a boardwalk beauty in "Rose of the Jersey Shore"; and Frederick Reiken offers an elegy to a high-rise in Fort Lee that opens his eyes to a new, dangerous world. A celebration of all that's weird and wonderful about the Garden State -- including Bruce Springsteen, the Nets, the Jersey Devil, the films of Kevin Smith, and Great Adventure -- Living on the Edge of the World will have New Jerseyans everywhere ready to stand and be counted.

A newly married woman discusses the adjustments and observations made since she married.

The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of "local," "hemispheric," and "globalized" power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies. Contributors include Norma AlarcÃ3n, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Alejandra Elenes, RamÃ3n Garcia, MarÃa Herrera-Sobek, Patricia Penn Hilden, Gaye T. M. Johnson, Alberto Ledesma, Pancho McFarland, Amelia MarÃa de la Luz Montes, Laura Elisa Pérez, Naomi Quiñonez, Sarah Ramirez, Rolando J. Romero, Delberto Dario Ruiz, Vicki Ruiz, José David SaldÃvar, Anna Sandoval, and Jonathan Xavier Inda.