Cruise down the inner-city streets of Detroit and your eyes take in an array of familiar images of poverty and decay. In Talking Shops, Clements captures mural facades that transform what might have been a typical urban landscape into a canvas for some of the city's most vibrant folk art.

Describing everything from bread and cappuccinos to mass-market furnishings, a language of the "artisanal" saturates our culture today. That language, Peter Betjemann proposes, has a rich and specifiable history. Between 1840 and 1920, the cultural appetite for handmade chairs, tables, cabinets, and other material odds and ends flowed through narrative and texts as much as through dusty workshops or the physical surfaces of clay, wood, or metal. Judged by classic axioms about labor’s virtue—axioms originating with Plato and foundational to modern theories of workmanship—the vigorous life of craft as represented in these texts might seem a secondhand version of an ideal and purposeful activity. But Talking Shop celebrates these texts as a cultural phenomenon of their own. In the first book to consider the literary representation of craft rather than of labor in general, Peter Betjemann asks how nineteenth and early twentieth-century craftspeople, writers, and consumers managed craft’s traditional attachment to physical objects and activities while also celebrating craft in iconic, emblematic, preeminently textual terms. The durable model of workmanship that was created around correlations of craft and narrative, physical process and representation, and body and text blurred the boundaries between craft and its consumption. Discussing a wide range of material from fiction and essays to artifacts, the book explores how the era paved the way for the vitality and the viability of a language of craft in much later decades.

Behind every great television show is a group of professionals working at the top of their games—but no one is more important than the writers. And while writing comedy, especially good comedy, is serious business—fraught with actor egos, demanding producers, and sleepless nights—it also can result in classic lines of dialogue. Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy is a collection of conversations with the writers responsible for some of the most memorable shows in television comedy. The men and women interviewed here include series creators, show runners, and staff writers whose talent and hard work have generated literally millions of laughs. In addition to Reiner (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and Lear (All in the Family), this book features in-depth interviews with: James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Simpsons) Al Jean (The Simpsons, The Critic) Leonard Stern (The Honeymooners, Get Smart) Treva Silverman (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) Ken Estin (Cheers) Matt Williams (Roseanne, Home Improvement) Dava Savel (Ellen) Larry Charles (Seinfeld) David Lee (Frasier) Phil Rosenthal (Everybody Loves Raymond) Mike Reiss (The Simpsons) From these conversations, readers will learn that the business of writing funny has never been all laughs. Writers discuss the creative process, how they get unstuck, the backstories of iconic episodes, and how they cope with ridiculous censors, outrageous actors, and their own demons and fears. Sitcom Writers Talk Shop will appeal to fans of all of these shows and may serve as inspiration to anyone considering a life in comedy.

Instructions and patterns for twenty-five quilted and applique pillow covers to liven up your interior decor.

This is a set of stories about how something as simple-sounding as ordinary talk among teachers can become a powerful medium for teacher learning and professional development. The chapters of the book draw from the work of eight groups of teachers in the US and Israel who have met in conversation for the past 4 to 5 years. The chapter authors use the teachers' own words to document their learning and describe the ways in which readers could begin their own sustainable teacher conversation group, both with experienced teachers and with teacher education students.

Will Eisner is a master of the comics medium, and when he got together to chat with other masters of the medium, what came of it was a collection of information vital to everyone working in the industry, and indispensable to anyone looking to get into it. Featuring interviews with Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Jack Davis, Neal Adams, C.C. Beck, Milton Caniff, Gill Fox, Harvey Kurtzman, and distribution guru Phil Seuling, Will Eisner's Shop Talk is chock full of golden tidbits of comics knowledge.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An incredible, revolutionary true story and surprisingly simple guide to teaching your dog to talk from speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger, who has taught her dog, Stella, to communicate using simple paw-sized buttons associated with different words. When speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger first came home with her puppy, Stella, it didn’t take long for her to start drawing connections between her job and her new pet. During the day, she worked with toddlers with significant delays in language development and used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices to help them communicate. At night, she wondered: If dogs can understand words we say to them, shouldn’t they be able to say words to us? Can dogs use AAC to communicate with humans? Christina decided to put her theory to the test with Stella and started using a paw-sized button programmed with her voice to say the word “outside” when clicked, whenever she took Stella out of the house. A few years later, Stella now has a bank of more than thirty word buttons, and uses them daily either individually or together to create near-complete sentences. How Stella Learned to Talk is part memoir and part how-to guide. It chronicles the journey Christina and Stella have taken together, from the day they met, to the day Stella “spoke” her first word, and the other breakthroughs they’ve had since. It also reveals the techniques Christina used to teach Stella, broken down into simple stages and actionable steps any dog owner can use to start communicating with their pets. Filled with conversations that Stella and Christina have had, as well as the attention to developmental detail that only a speech-language pathologist could know, How Stella Learned to Talk will be the indispensable dog book for the new decade.