Popular Literature

When a group of short construction workers begins building a school playground, Lisa begins to suspect that they are really Christmas elves, but Melody and Howie think Lisa has an overactive imagination.

Tori Rodriguez leads the perfect life. Or so everyone thinks. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect family. But what no one knows is that she's secretly struggling to keep it together, even as she leads the cheer squad to nationals. Noah has never had it easy. His clothes come second-hand, not off designer racks, and his home life is far from ideal. With his knowledge about computers, he's determined to make it to college and beyond, even if everyone else has a free ticket. The minute Noah meets Tori, he thinks she's just another entitled queen bee.

Optics can make or break an election. Everything Mark knows about politics, he learned from his father, the Congressman who still pretends he has a daughter and not a son. Mark has promised to keep his past hidden and pretend to be the cis guy everyone assumes he is. But when he sees a manipulatively charming candidate for student body president inflame dangerous rhetoric, Mark risks his low profile to become a political challenger. The problem? No one really knows Mark. He didn’t grow up in this town, and his few friends are all nerds.

Cairo, 1912: though Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she's certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer. So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, Al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case.

As the recent tragedies in Oregon, Arkansas, and Colorado Have shown, children as young as eight years old are capable of murder and violence. No community is safe from this tragic phenomenon, and experts ranging from law enforcement officials to guidance counselors are confused and conflicted about how to approach it.

Ya instalada en su nueva escuela, la vida parece sonreírle a Nikki Maxwell, especialmente desde que su flechazo, Brandon, le pidió ser su compañero de laboratorio. No obstante, cuando Nikki oye a Mackenzie alardear de que Brandon la lleva a un baile de Halloween, se compromete a pasar esa noche en una fiesta infantil junto a su hermana pequeña Brianna. Después de descubrir que Mackenzie mentía y que su sueño de ir a la fiesta con Brandon podría hacerse realidad, Nikki tendrá que hacer malabarismos para asistir a las dos fiestas.

A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young Black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race - or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex.

From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

With their fearless crime-fighting, good manners, and manly fashion sense, the Hardly boys are the pride of Feyport, Illinois. In A Ghost in the Closet, dark-haired, muscular Frank and his lovable kid brother, Joe, return from a gay trip to Europe to find that their parents - world-famous detective Fennel P. Hardly and his wife, Mrs. Hardly - have been kidnapped! Even worse, so have six poodles from the Lake Merrimen Dog Show! Pals Nancy Clue, Cherry Aimless, R.N., and Police Detective Jackie Jones help the Hardly boys track down the criminals.

Indie Blackwood is a popular cheerleader with a football-star boyfriend. On the surface, her life looks perfect. But when a guy dies right before her eyes and an ancient family Bible is stolen, Indie's world spirals into darkness. Turns out, Indie has a destiny. And it involves much more than pom-poms and parties. If she doesn't get the Bible back, every witch on the planet will die. And that's seriously bad news for Indie, because according to Bishop, the hot warlock who has an uncanny knowledge of everything that matters, she's a witch, too.

This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels and her home life and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement.

Exploring more than 100 of the world's most important literary works and the literary geniuses that created them, this book is the perfect introduction to the subject of literature and writing. The Literature Book features some of the world's most celebrated books, plays and poetry, including Latin American and African fiction, and best-selling masterpieces from the most renowned authors ever to have lived.

Liam "Mr. Popular" Carter will always be the closest thing to the "walking plague" in my eyes. His cockiness seeps through his every move, and no matter how many state championships he wins with the basketball team, he will forever be a "loss" to me. Because he's my older brother's best friend, I'm forced to tolerate him, and he's forced to tolerate me. In fact, unless my brother is around, we happily ignore each other every chance we get. It wasn't always this way, though....

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking - as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being - and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.

From growing up in Detroit, where he marched as a 10-year-old with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to attending the inauguration of President Barack Obama, where he narrowly avoided the Purple Tunnel of Doom but still saw nothing, David Alan Grier examines how he - and America - have changed for the better and the funnier.

Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities.

Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honours the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary - friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back.

Meet Fisher Bas: a 12-year-old, growth-stunted, geeky science genius who is the son of Nobel Prize–winning parents. Despite his outsized IQ, Fisher is far from the most popular kid in his middle school — he’s actually tormented daily by overgrown goons he calls the Vikings. Holed up in his home lab over a long weekend, Fisher uses his mother’s revolutionary Advanced Growth Hormone to clone himself.

A new, expanded collection of both new and previously published essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC underground rock-and-roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is the most complete collection of writings by Ian Svenonius. The selections are written in a scholarly yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, and the status of rock and roll as a religion.

We all know how Darth Vader shared his big secret with Luke Skywalker, but what if he had delivered the news in a handwritten note instead? And what if someone found that letter, as well as all of the drafts that landed in the Dark Lord’s trash can? In the riotously funny collection Dear Luke, We Need to Talk. Darth, John Moe finally reveals these lost notes alongside all the imagined letters, e-mails, text messages, and other correspondences your favorite pop culture icons never meant for you to see.