Blake Crouch

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Michigan

A Novel

"Extra Libris: Essays, Reader's Guides, and More"--Page [345].

Dark Matter

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Neal Thompson

Riley’s believe or not story of the man and his collections

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Believe It or Not! Ripley

A Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable.

As portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley's life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness of the world. After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at age eighteen, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his "Believe It or Not" conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it birthed that would make him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him to search the globe's farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human curiosities, and shocking phenomena.

Ripley delighted in making outrageous declarations that somehow always turned out to be true--such as that Charles Lindbergh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that "The Star Spangled Banner" was not the national anthem. Assisted by an exotic harem of female admirers and by ex-banker Norbert Pearlroth, a devoted researcher who spoke eleven languages, Ripley simultaneously embodied the spirit of Peter Pan, the fearlessness of Marco Polo and the marketing savvy of P. T. Barnum.

In a very real sense, Ripley sought to remake the world's aesthetic. He demanded respect for those who were labeled "eccentrics" or "freaks"--whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 1,615 alphabet letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose.

By the 1930s Ripley possessed a vast fortune, a private yacht, and a twenty-eight room mansion stocked with such "oddities" as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices, and his pioneering firsts in print, radio, and television were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness--a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, dumbest and most weird. Today, that legacy continues and can be seen in reality TV, YouTube, America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, MythBusters and a host of other pop-culture phenomena.

In the end Robert L. Ripley changed everything. The supreme irony of his life, which was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual, is that he may have been the most amazing oddity of all.

A Curious Man

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Henry Hobhouse

Five Plants That Transformed Mankind

In the manner of Barbara Tuchman and Paul Johnson, a superior, popular account of how five plants--quinine, sugar, tea, cotton and the potato--have determined the course of history. Illustrated.

Seeds of Change

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Gregory Maguire

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

From the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller Wicked, the magical story of a toymaker, a nutcracker, and a legend remade . . . Gregory Maguire returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him. Hiddensee: An island of white sandy beaches, salt marshes, steep cliffs, and pine forests north of Berlin in the Baltic Sea, an island that is an enchanting bohemian retreat and home to a large artists' colony-- a wellspring of inspiration for the Romantic imagination . . . Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in Wicked and to Wonderland in After Alice, Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann-- the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. Hiddensee imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann's mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier-- the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's fairy tale ballet-- who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter. But Hiddensee is not just a retelling of a classic story. Maguire discovers in the flowering of German Romanticism ties to Hellenic mystery-cults-- a fascination with death and the afterlife-- and ponders a profound question: How can a person who is abused by life, shortchanged and challenged, nevertheless access secrets that benefit the disadvantaged and powerless? Ultimately, Hiddensee offers a message of hope. If the compromised Godfather Drosselmeier can bring an enchanted Nutcracker to a young girl in distress on a dark winter evening, perhaps everyone, however lonely or marginalized, has something precious to share.

Hiddensee

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Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his home. Is the spirit Winnie's great-great-grandfather, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin? Winnie begins to investigate and finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades—some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past. In the spirit of A. S. Byatt's Possession, with dark echoing overtones of A Christmas Carol, Lost presents a rich fictional world that will enrapture its readers.

Lost

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Camilla Arvidsson

Malin Nilsson

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Easy and Inexpensive Containers, Furniture, Water Features and More

For gardeners and backyard do-it-yourselfers, concrete is a revelation. It's durable, weatherproof, impossible to steal, and it provides much-needed insulation for outdoor plants. Concrete weathers beautifully, softening around the edges, developing moss, and becoming more picturesque with age. Concrete Garden Projects takes advantage of concrete's numerous assets, showcasing an inspiring array of creative options. The step-by-step instructions for dozens of easy, do-it-yourself décor ideas include containers of all shapes and sizes, elegant benches and stools, miniature ponds and birdbaths, stepping stones, a barbecue, and a fire pit. The authors use a variety of molds easily found or made, household items like bowls and baking pans, and simple wooden frames and boxes. At pennies per pound, and so simple to use—just mix with water and pour—concrete is the key to hand-crafted backyard décor.

Concrete Garden Projects

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Kate Scelsa

A Magical Guide to Self-Care

A collection of mystical practices and exercises, Luminary is a one-of-a-kind guide to mindfulness and self-care for teens to support a life of empowerment, confidence, and, of course, magic!

Self-care is not only necessary, it's magical! Your road to self-care can be a mystical journey that leaves you feeling more confident, determined, and ready to accomplish all those bucket-list items and dreams you have scribbled in your journal. So why not start that journey now?

Find both mystical and practical tools to help deal with stress, depression, and other challenges in this gorgeously illustrated and highly designed guide offering different creative ways of living a heart-centered, mindful, and magical life through concrete tools for self-care and advice from a diverse group of practitioners in areas like tarot, astrology, energy work, and much more.

Luminary is a book of practical magic that empowers you to pursue mental wellness with curiosity and confidence. But it's also a book of possibility that pushes the boundaries of what self-help can be.

Luminary

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E. E. Knight

Fleeing those who had killed his siblings, Young Auron, a rare gray dragon, ventures through a perilous world of mercenary elves and deceitful humans as he searches for others of his kind, in the first volume in a new fantasy series. Original.

Dragon Champion

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Joe Hill

Huge Paperback (6 to 8 lbs)

Unlock the mysteries of Keyhouse! Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez's extraordinary tale of the Locke family is collected in its entirety in this handsome slipcase set. Includes all six softcover volumes of the Locke & Key series.

Locke and Key Slipcase Set

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V. E. Schwab

Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source. #1 New York Times-bestselling author Victoria Schwab weaves a dark and original tale about the place where the world meets its shadow, and the young woman beckoned by both sides. The Secret Garden meets Crimson Peak in this stand-alone novel perfect for readers of Holly Black and Neil Gaiman.

Gallant

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Unsheltered 

Rachel Joyce

Given days to live and attended by a cast of well-wishers, Queenie Hennessy hides the existence of a long letter to Harold Fry revealing shocking and beautiful truths about her life. By the author of the international best-seller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. 50,000 first printing.

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

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Shaun Hamill

A tender and terrifying literary horror novel, the author's debut tells the story of a family that created a haunted house attraction called the Wandering Dark and the hereditary monsters--both metaphorical and all-too-real--that haunt them.aunt them.

A Cosmology of Monsters

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David Joachim

50 Great Guy Meals Even You Can Make!: a Cookbook

Presents sixty simple and inexpensive recipes featuring canned foods, providing easy-to-follow illustrated steps in a lay-flat design and offering suggestions for such occasions as cooking for a woman and preparing a meal for the morning after. 35,000 first printing.

A Man, a Can, a Plan

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E. Lockhart

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Spending the summers on her family's private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged Cadence struggles to remember what happened during her fifteenth summer.

We Were Liars

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Matthew Kelly

Life is messy. It isn't a color-within-the-lines exercise. It's a wild and outrageous invitation full of uncertain outcomes. The mess of life is both inevitable and unexpected. It is filled with delightful mysteries and frustrating predicaments. In our disposable culture, we throw broken things away. So, what will we do with broken people, broken relationships, broken institutions, broken families, and of course, our very own broken selves? We are all broken and wounded. This book is about putting our lives back together, and allowing ourselves to be put back together, when life doesn't turn out as we expected it to. Based on his own heart-wrenching personal journals, Matthew Kelly shares how the worst three years of his life affected him, by exploring this question: Can someone who has been broken be healed and become more beautiful and more lovable than ever before? The answer will fill you with hope. There has never been a more urgent need for us to attend to what is happening within us. This is quite simply the right book at the right time.

Life Is Messy

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Olivia Judson

The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex

A sex guide for all living things and a hilarious natural history in the form of letters to and answers from the preeminent sexpert in all creation.

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is a unique guidebook to sex. It reveals, for example, when necrophilia is acceptable and who should commit bestiality with whom. It discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, and when to eat your lover. It also advises on more mundane matters -- such as male pregnancy and the joys of a detachable penis.

Entertaining, funny, and marvelously illuminating, the book comprises letters from all creatures worried about their bizarre sex lives to the wise Dr. Tatiana (a.k.a. Olivia Judson), the only sex columnist in creation with a prodigious knowledge of evolutionary biology. Fusing natural history with advice to the lovelorn, blending wit and rigor, she is able to reassure her anxious correspondents that although the acts they describe might sound appalling and unnatural, they are all perfectly normal -- so long as you are not a human. In the process, she explains the science behind it all, from Darwin's theory of sexual selection to why sexual reproduction exists at all. Applying human standards to the natural world, in the end she reveals the wonders of both.

"Delightful . . . Easy to understand and hard to resist, it's sex education at its prime -- accurate, comprehensive, and hilarious." -- Newsweek

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

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Jenny Lawson

A Funny Book about Horrible Things

"Jenny made me laugh so hard I feared for my safety! I think that's how she was able to get past my defenses and make me feel more okay about myself." -Allie Brosh, author ofHyperbole and a Half For fans of David Sedaris, Tina Fey, and Mindy Kaling-the new book from Jenny Lawson, author of the #1New York Times bestseller LET'S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED... In LET'S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED, Jenny Lawson baffled readers with stories about growing up the daughter of a taxidermist. In her new book,FURIOUSLY HAPPY, Jenny explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea. And terrible ideas are what Jenny does best. According to Jenny: "Some people might think that being 'furiously happy' is just an excuse to be stupid and irresponsible and invite a herd of kangaroos over to your house without telling your husband first because you suspect he would say no since he's never particularly liked kangaroos. And that would be ridiculous because no one would invitea herd of kangaroos into their house. Two is the limit. I speak from personal experience. My husband says thatnone is the new limit. I say he should have been clearer about that before I rented all those kangaroos." "Most of my favorite people are dangerously fucked-up but you'd never guess because we've learned to bare it so honestly that it becomes the new normal. Like John Hughes wrote inThe Breakfast Club, 'We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it.' Except go back and cross out the word 'hiding.'" Jenny's first book, LET'S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED, was ostensibly about family, but deep down it was about celebrating your own weirdness.FURIOUSLY HAPPY is a book about mental illness, but under the surface it's about embracing joy in fantastic and outrageous ways-and who doesn't need a bit more of that?

Furiously Happy

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A month by month guide for projects, gardening, cooking and crafts 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Herbal Treasures

John-Roger McWilliams

Peter McWilliams

Let's Get off Our Butts

Offers a complete guide to setting and achieving goals, outlining simple but powerful steps and providing a wealth of motivation

Do It

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Witch & Wizard

The Detox Strategy

Spencer Quinn

A Chet and Bernie Mystery

The first book of the New York Times bestselling Chet and Bernie mystery series, an “enchanting one-of-a-kind novel” (Stephen King) that is “nothing short of masterful” (Los Angeles Times). Chet, the wise and lovable canine narrator of Dog on It, and Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator, are quick to take a new case involving a frantic mother searching for her teenage daughter. This well-behaved and gifted student may or may not have been kidnapped, but she has definitely gotten mixed up with some very unsavory characters. With Chet’s highly trained nose leading the way, their hunt for clues takes them into the desert to biker bars and other exotic locales—until the bad guys try to turn the tables and the resourceful duo lands in the paws of peril. Spencer Quinn’s irresistible mystery kicks off a delightful new series that will have readers panting for more.

Dog on It

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Augusten Burroughs

A Memoir

The #1 New York Times Bestseller An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year Now a Major Motion Picture Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull an electroshock- therapy machine could provide entertainment. The funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances. Running with Scissors Acknowledgments Gratitude doesn't begin to describe it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin's Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.

Browse by categories

Blake Crouch

Dark Matter

Neal Thompson

A Curious Man

Henry Hobhouse

Seeds of Change

Gregory Maguire

Hiddensee

Gregory Maguire

Lost

Camilla Arvidsson; Malin Nilsson

Concrete Garden Projects

Kate Scelsa

Luminary

E. E. Knight

Dragon Champion

Joe Hill

Locke and Key Slipcase Set

V. E. Schwab

Gallant

Barbara Kingsolver

Unsheltered

Rachel Joyce

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

Shaun Hamill

A Cosmology of Monsters

David Joachim

A Man, a Can, a Plan

E. Lockhart

We Were Liars

Matthew Kelly

Life Is Messy

Olivia Judson

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

Jenny Lawson

Furiously Happy

Phyllis V Shaudys

Herbal Treasures

John-Roger McWilliams; Peter McWilliams

Do It

James Patterson

Witch & Wizard

Brenda Watson c.n.c.

The Detox Strategy

Spencer Quinn

Dog on It

Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors

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