Meet Roanne Chappell -- definitely not your ordinary teenage girl. A product of the loving but decidedly unorthodox guardianship of her mother, Del, Roanne is a fascinating study in contrasts. Equal parts bold seductress and wide-eyed innocent, smart-ass teenager and wizened sage, she is an outlandish, charismatic, and wholly inspired creation. Unabashedly outspoken (and an increasingly accomplished flirt), Roanne quietly longs for escape -- particularly from her mother's overwhelming and over-powering shadow. Her chance comes after she discovers, much to her horror, that the professor she had slept with is also bedding her mother. "I just can't seem to stop feeling like one of those air-sucking dogs people leave in cars with the windows open just a tiny bit. I need to put my whole face, my whole self, in the air for a while to try and figure out who I am when I'm not standing next to my amazing mum." To clear her head, Roanne begins a journey and goes from feeling like an outsider to being embraced by a very special group of people -- people whom most others have found strange or different but with whom Roanne feels right at home. From a marriage proposal by the teenage son of the founders of the Christian Rebirth Center, to her relationship with new best friend Gilbey Tarr -- the sixteen-year-old "Teenage Goddess from Outer Space" -- to a reunion with Dickie Siggins -- international pop star and her mother's life-long friend -- to a bittersweet reconciliation with Del, Roanne soars headfirst into a world of tragedy and comedy, and in the process learns about life, love, and death -- and everything in between. With this richly satisfying debut novel, Gale Zoë Garnett has channeled Roanne's outsized passions into a tightly crafted and powerfully moving narrative, charting a journey to lands unknown, emotions untapped, and experience unforeseen. Visible Amazement injects contemporary fiction with welcome jolts of crackling humor and unexpected drama. Written in a totally original and unique voice, the novel, like its heroine, is delightful, disturbing, and utterly unforgettable.

Twentieth century science completely revolutionized human understanding of the world, rewriting the story of the universe with exciting discoveries and theories—the big bang, the relativity of space and time, the accelerating expansion of the universe, along with increasingly refined ideas of evolution and the origin of life. Radical Amazement unifies the worlds of science and religion, weaving profound spiritual lessons from our new knowledge. Through thoughtful and practical reflections, enhanced by prayers and meditations, Judy Cannato reveals the connectedness of all creation and invites us to explore the harmony of science and spirituality.

What is the amazement revolution? It is the culture that can drive any organisation -- from one employee to tens of thousands -- to focus completely on delivering an amazing customer-service experience. In this sequel to the Wall Street Journal best-selling book "The Cult of the Customer", Shep Hyken shares seven powerful strategies that any organisation can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty. In a tough, competitive, and price-sensitive economy, customer service is one of the most essential tools to separate your business from the competition. These strategies work, as evidenced by the more than seventy case studies and examples that Hyken shares throughout the book. These examples provide dozens of lessons that can and should be implemented immediately. Corporate and industry clients from all over the world have tapped into the expertise of Shep Hyken. His client list is a who's who in the business world. As an author and speaker, Hyken is known for his simple and direct strategies that help his clients build successful, customer-focused organisations.

Have you ever stopped to look at a breathtaking sunset and felt tremendous joy, calmness, or even timelessness? Has your entire body ever responded to something with awe? The Art of Amazementhelps us to identify the source of that wonder, and to cultivate it and experience it daily-even hourly and minute by minute. Rabbi Seinfeld's powerful book outlines the ancient Jewish spiritual arts in clear terms for any spiritual seeker. The art of amazement is practical and accessible to anyone, and does not demand a radical lifestyle change. Each chapter in the book offers a lesson paired with exercises to help make small changes in routine to ultimately achieve a larger shift in perspective. Judaism is a profound and complex spirituality. Now The Art of Amazementbrings this wisdom within reach of us all, and we can learn how to take joy and pleasure in even the smallest of everyday occurrences.

This book, which accompanied a groundbreaking exhibition, presents a multilayered picture of influence and experimentation between a family of artists. A few years before his death in 1984, the conceptual artist Stan VanDerBeek recalled a dream he had of the ideal exhibition space, which he playfully referred to as 'Amazement Park'. Taking inspiration from that dream, this project combines artwork by the influential filmmaker and artist with work by his daughter, Sara, and son, Johannes, both contemporary artists. This unique book captures the ensuing exhibition: a studio-like space that changed every month for one year and featured works by all three artists. The drawings, photographs, video, and sculpture that revolved in and out of the exhibition reflect the artists' common interest in recombination and collage, ephemeral materials, and architectural forms. AUTHOR: Ian Berry is Associate Director and The Susan Rabinowitz Malloy Curator of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Anne Ellegood is Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

There are many wonderful creatures on earth - and even more incredible ways to describe them. With more collective nouns for animal groups than anyone else in the world, from a Business of Ferrets to a Wobble of Ostriches (not forgetting, of course, an Implausibility of Gnus) Alon Shulman's A Mess of Iguanas, A Whoop of Gorillas will tell you what to call a group of zebras, chickens, parrots, spiders, tigers or penguins the next time you encounter one - and will even let you know the difference between a school and a shoal of fish. Not to mention why groups of swans are known as a lamentation, a bank and a wedge. It will also tell you the most outlandish, strange yet completely accurate animal facts you can imagine. For example, did you know that polar bears are invisible to infra-red because they have transparent fur? Or that hippopotamus can't swim? Or that ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand? Filled with everything you could ever want to know about the creatures that inhabit our world, this brilliant compendium of animal curiosities is perfect for pub quizzers, language buffs, wannabe know-it-alls and any readers aged, well ... 8 to 80.

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called "Frances Farmer Is My Sister," arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the “minor,” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. “ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,” writes Zambreno. “When he does, it's existential.” With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.