An ALA Notable Book Kids ages 9-12 will “delight in [the] oddness” of this Home Alone-style tale set in the 1970s—from a prolific children’s author who captures “a magic that’s not like anyone else’s” (Neil Gaiman). With Victor’s parents out of town, he is free to investigate the mysterious lizard musicians who have recently appeared on TV . . . Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor has plenty of time to indulge himself and to try a few things he’s been curious about. Exploring the nearby city of Hogboro, he runs into a curious character known as the Chicken Man (a reference to his companion, an intelligent hen named Claudia who lives under his hat). The Chicken Man speaks brilliant nonsense, but he seems to be hip to the lizard musicians (real lizards, not men in lizard suits) who’ve begun appearing on Victor’s television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Are the lizards from outer space? From “other space”? Together Victor and the Chicken Man, guided by the able Claudia, journey to the lizards’ floating island, a strange and fantastic place that operates with an inspired logic of its own.

Bear tries repeatedly to learn Lizard's song. Includes music. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A lonely boy’s new pet grows into a rather large dilemma—and a Thanksgiving parade offers an uplifting solution—in this charming tale from the author of The Boy and the Airplane and The Girl and the Bicycle. When Leonard takes a shortcut through the park, he finds an egg and takes it home, where it hatches into a lizard (or so Leonard thinks). Leonard names his new pet Buster and takes him all around the city: on the subway, to the library, to a baseball game, and more. But Buster keeps growing and growing—and Leonard gets the sense that Buster is longing for something Leonard can’t provide. Before long, Buster becomes too big to keep, and Leonard realizes he needs to set Buster free. So Leonard comes up with an inventive plan, one that involves all the balloons Leonard can find and the annual Thanksgiving parade, in an imaginative plot twist that will spark readers’ imaginations—and touch their hearts.

When Snake starts sleeping on the rock where Lizard lives, Lizard must figure out how to get his home back.

Six short stories by a Japanese woman writer known for her unusual themes. In Blood and Water, a woman abandons the religious commune where she was raised, goes to the big city and finds another idol of worship, a charismatic lover. The story looks at the connection between spiritual and romantic fervor. By the author of Kitchen.

This book provides an overview of the diversity of lizards and their major adaptive features. The authors discuss the latest research findings and provide new hypotheses about lizard diversity.

Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, has achieved a bizarre cult status since his death in 1971. Morrison was one of the most popular and controversial figures to emerge during the sixties; described as an 'erotic politician', poet, shaman, Dionysian drunk, his style and influence have grown steadily in the twenty years since his death, so that the real man has gradually disappeared behind the legend. Now, in The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison, Morrison's biographer Jerry Hopkins, co-author of No One Here Gets Out Alive, reassesses Jim's life and provides fresh insights into him as a human being rather than the myth that he has become. But this reassessment is only part of this remarkable book. At its heart is a series of interviews with Jim Morrison by journalists including Hopkins himself, Ben Fong-Torres, John Tobler, Bob Chorush, Salli Stevenson, Richard Goldstein and the late John Carpenter, Morrison shows himself to have been articulate, intelligent and witty. Published uncut, these interviews provide a unique insight into a man who consciously created his own myth, then lived to regret it. Stripping bare the facts from the fantasies of Jim's death in Paris in 1971, and taking a long hard look at what has happened since to the people who he left behind, The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison brings sharply into focus the broken dreams and unreachable ideals of one of the sixties' most enduring icons.