The film Casablanca opens with the words, “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.” Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events—most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942—coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca—was born to write.

Do we make too much of our day-to-day problems? In the big scheme of things how important can they be? Award-winning storyteller Valerie Schultz answers these questions through deeply touching—and sometimes provocative—personal accounts of family, career, addiction, alienation, romance, aging, and loss. With compassion and honesty Schultz retraces the passages of ordinary life, finding grace and the presence of God in those she loves and those she struggles to love.

American English(es) focuses on the manifold nature of a macro-regional variety of English which is better described in the plural form, thus enhancing the endless contribution of most diverse ethnic groups, such as those kidnapped from Africa to be employed as slaves, survivors of native American tribes systematically exterminated in the past, and, later on, European Jews escaping from pogroms, Europeans and Asians escaping from poverty, and, more recently, Central and South Americans, mostly Spanish speakers, emigrating to the USA in search of supposedly better living conditions. By tackling the notions of “minority”, “variety”, and “dialect”, this book singles out three language-related phenomena which are currently relevant to the academic and cultural debate concerning US society, namely the obsolescent representation of minority vs hegemonic varieties of English, the latest developments of the Spanish vs English controversy, and the increasing exposure of slang in public contexts. The multiple points of view on American Englishes, offered by the essays included in the present volume, draw on diverse and often contrasting approaches, ranging from corpus linguistics to cultural studies, from lexicography/lexicology to discourse analysis.

Each of the more than seven hundred entries in the dictionary contains a description of the historical background of each of the two types of language, literal and nonliteral, and provides an explanation for the relationship between them. Wherever possible, dates of first record in English are provided, along with the bibliographical sources of these dates; and all of the works that record those terms and expressions are given in coded form as listed in the Key to Works Cited. A Guide to Reading the Entries illustrates the typical form of an entry by analyzing an example from the dictionary that introduces five nonliteral expressions, cites thirteen bibliographical sources, and refers the reader to three other relevant entries by means of cross-references. Following the dictionary proper is a Classification of Terms According to Source, in which nearly three hundred nonliteral terms and expressions are listed under the more than four hundred literal categories from which they derive.

Food is a favorite topic of conversation around the world—how to create it, how to season it, how to compliment it with other foods, how to serve it...the list goes on. Yet little attention is paid to where the names of food actually come from or why so many phrases we use daily involve food, whether or not they actually relate to the kitchen. Bring some history to the table with this delightful phrasebook!

Barefoot, a memoir and sequel to Road to Mound Grove, continues the story of Betty Jean and her family in rural southeastern Oklahoma as they deal with the struggles of life during the Depression and benefits of Roosevelts New Deal leading up to World War II. Betty Jeans family and neighbors lacked the modern conveniences that town folk enjoyed. Some neighbors had water wells in their yards, but Betty Jean and her sister, Olaree, still had to carry water from a spring in the woods. They find themselves living in a chicken house, electricity illuminating the countryside, and a hunting tragedy shakes the community.