From the bestselling author of Woe Is I: A guide to grammar fundamentals that’s sympathetic to the struggling writer and often just plain funny” (The Seattle Times). Whether you need to improve your skills for work or school, or aspire to the Great American Novel, a grounding in grammar, spelling, and punctuation is essential—not just to make you look like a professional but to communicate effectively in emails, essays, or anything you need to write. This painless, practical book is filled with short, snappy chapters, crystal-clear examples, and a “playful sense of humor” (The New York Times Book Review)—covering everything from “Pronoun Pileups” and “Verbs That Zing” to “What to Do When You’re Stuck.” With these simple, straightforward tips, you can learn how to sort your thoughts and make sentences that make sense. “Students writing papers, employees preparing reports, and those who just want to be understood in print may benefit from this fun-to-use answer to Strunk and White. O’Connor uses humor as she takes apart sentences and their parts and shows how each element is used effectively.” —Booklist

In this reissue of the bestselling Words Fail Me, Teresa Monachino rounds up and breaks down a variety of unruly words: words lacking in integrity, misleading words that do not mean what they say, words that mean more than they say, words with inconsistent pronunciation or spellings that are just plain cruel! Using striking and witty graphic design the author demands answers to such troublesome questions as, why is abbreviation such a long word, does monosyllabic really need five syllables and why is lisp so hard to say if you have one?

Can music make the world a better place? Can it really 'belong' to anyone? Can the magic, mystery and incertitude of music - of the human brain meeting or making sound - can it stop wars, rehabilitate the broken, unite, educate or inspire? From Jimi Hendrix playing 'Machine Gun' at The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan under siege in 2015, Ed Vulliamy has lived the music, met the legends, and asked, when words fail, might we turn to music? There's only one way to find out, and that is to listen...

What if you found out your life has been threaded with secrets — ones that rocked you to your core? An affecting page-turner written in a brave, memorable language all its own. Some words are hard to get out of your mouth. Because they spell out secrets that are too huge to be spoken out loud. But if you bottle them up, you might burst. So here's my story. Told the only way I dare tell it. Sophie Nieuwenleven is sort of English and sort of Belgian. She and her family came to live in Belgium when she was only four or five, but she's fourteen now and has never been sure why they left England in the first place. She loves her international school, adores her friend Comet, and is protective of her little brother, Hercule. But it’s hard to feel carefree when her mom never leaves the apartment — ordering groceries online and blasting music in her room — and her dad has a dead-end job as a car mechanic. Then one day Sophie makes a startling discovery, a discovery that unlocks the mystery of who she really is. This is a novel about identity and confusion and about feeling so utterly freaked out that you can't put it into words. But it's also about hope. And trust. And the belief that, somehow, everything will be OK. Sophie Someone is a tale of good intentions, bad choices, and betrayal — and ultimately, a compelling story of forgiveness.

In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story.

In Scott Blackwood's debut collection of thematically linked stories, people live on the cusp of the past and present, saddled with the knowledge that "sometimes what you're thinking can't be dovetailed with what you do.” Set in Austin, Texas, the nine stories are told in spare language freighted with a sense of loss and dread, responsibility and fate. The characters in Blackwood's narratives face the result of the irrevocable choice they've made, accept their losses, and attempt to forge something meaningful out of what remains of their frayed connections to one another. In "Alias,” a man grapples with the decision to kidnap his step-daughter's child and raise her himself. During a medical crisis, a woman in "New Years" is forced to confront her growing estrangement from her teenage son and comfort her ex-husband's lover. In "Worry," a fifteen-year-old faces his father's infidelity and his own darkening vision of himself and the world around him. And in the title story, neighbors ponder what, if anything, they can do about the disappearance from their midst of Odie Dodd, an aging physician who witnessed the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana. The moments Blackwood takes his stories to are small and quiet, but they contain whole worlds with wisdom coming at you--slow, certain, indelible.

Interracial half-siblings come together for the first time and embark on a cross-country road trip to confront their absentee father before he dies.