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The Short Book: Tall Stories, Freakish Facts, and the Long and Short of Being Small in a Great Big World.

List Price: $9.95 Price: $9.95

Product Description

Long on laughs and never short on anecdotes, facts, and lore, The Short Book is the last word on all things small—and the perfect stocking-stuffer for diminutive friends and loved ones.

Short people everywhere, stand up and be counted! Oh...you ARE standing up? Then this funny, information-packed little book is for you!

Eighty percent of people in the world consider themselves "short"—and yet the world belongs to the tall. (They get the girl, win the election, get paid more, and even live longer.) So what do short people get? They get THIS BOOK, by a shorty and devoted to all that is fascinating and fabulous—and funny—about being short. Written with humor but filled with "true facts" and entertaining stories, The Short Book covers such topics as the science of shortness; short criminals, celebrities, and superheroes; shortness in literature, film, sports, and the arts; short job options and "smallotry" in the workplace; short dating, dancing, and romance; short nicknames (and how to answer back); short songs; short clothing—and much more.

Witty illustrations, charts, and photos throughout add visual humor and appeal. How tall are you compared to Napoleon, Danny DeVito, Tom Cruise...? Take a look! What is the Napoleon Complex, and do you have it? Is there any truth to the rumor that the taller candidate always wins the election, and if so—why? What are some of the tricks Hollywood uses to make short actors appear taller than they are—and can you use them in your own life? The facts and fun just keep on coming.

Also included are comments from famous shorties including Will Shortz, Martin Short, Jon Stewart, Dennis Kucinich, and others. Short is beautiful!

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The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

List Price: $19.95 Price: $13.57 You Save: $6.38 (32%)

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"How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies." Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? "Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?"

In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ("That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy"). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." From Flannery O'Connor we find "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," and from John Cheever, "The Death of Justina," one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.

This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

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LeapFrog Tag Learn to Read Phonics Book Series Short Vowels

List Price: $19.99 Price: $19.97 You Save: $0.02 (%)

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Use your TagTM Reader to make phonics skills spring to life! The Tag Learn to Read Series combines fun stories with rich audio to help children identify letter sounds and hear how they come together to form words. Each six-book set introduces a different series of skills, helping children build confidence with the fundamentals of reading. This set introduces short vowels.\n\n \n\nIntroduces:\n\n- Short vowels\n\n- Phonics skills\n\n- Word recognition\n\n- Reading basics\n

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The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

List Price: $15.00

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“In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.” —Ben Marcus, from the Introduction

Award-winning author of Notable American Women Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today.

Sea Oak by George Saunders
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr
The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis
The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro
The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon
People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz
Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri
Down the Road by Stephen Dixon
X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott
Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby
Short Talks by Anne Carson
Field Events by Rick Bass
Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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The works that editor Ben Marcus has collected in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, while diverse in their stylistic methods, are uniformly accomplished. An almost confoundingly cerebral and brilliant novelist and short story writer, Marcus is a genre unto himself, a linguistic alchemist not primarily known for spinning yarns. It's to Marcus's credit that the stories in this anthology span a wide swath of American writing, not just the outer reaches of narrative invention. In his introduction, he calibrates our literary compass, proclaiming:

Stories keep mattering by reimagining their own methods, manners, and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling old ones.

The collection includes 29 of these new ways of telling stories. Herein are experiments with form by David Foster Wallace and Joe Wenderoth, flawless executions of realism from Mark Richard and Jhumpa Lahiri, and stories that waver in what could most easily be described as parallel realities. The granddaddy of this latter category, George Saunders's "Sea Oak," brilliantly fuses the inherent humor of male stripping with the undead. Elsewhere Gary Lutz proves himself to be one of our foremost artists of the sentence in "People Shouldn't Have to Be the Ones to Tell You," and Christine Schutt serves up "You Drive," an elusive piece unsettling with undertones of father-daughter incest.

The varied treasures in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories accelerate outward into new modes of American writing as if from a radiant nucleus. While each story is daring in its own right, the most daring feat of all might have been including them all under the same cover. --Ryan Boudinot

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Short Circuit

List Price: $9.99 Price: $5.99 You Save: $4.00 (40%)

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Something wonderful has happened--Number Five is alive! Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy co-star in this high tech comedy adventure about Number Five, a robot who escapes into the real world after he short circuits in an electrical storm and decides that he's human. Because he's carrying destructive weapons, the Defense Department and his designer (Guttenberg) are desperate to find him. But Number Five is being protected by a young woman (Sheedy) who is teaching him a gentler way of life.

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John Badham's family-oriented adventure comedy, though obviously hatched in the wake of E.T. and Star Wars, manages to create its own identity through a sweet tone and an affectionate sense of fun. Military robot Number 5, a well-armed killing machine, is zapped by lightning during a test and emerges with a consciousness, curiosity, a wacky sense of humor, and a new peace-loving philosophy. Ally Sheedy (who debuted in Badham's hit WarGames) is the animal lover whose home is sanctuary for a zoo-full of strays and who adopts the adolescent robot. Steve Guttenberg is the goofy but reclusive robotics designer who goes off in search of his creation to save him from the gun-happy army. The mix of gentle slapstick and innocent romance makes for a harmless family comedy. It veers toward the terminally cute, what with 5's hyperactive antics and E.T.-ish voice, and the mangled grammar of Guttenberg's East Indian sidekick (Fisher Stevens) threatens to become offensive, but Badham's breezy direction keeps the film on track. Sheedy and Guttenberg deliver spirited and engaging performances, but most importantly the robot emerges as a real person. Give credit to designer Syd Mead, an army of puppeteers and robotics operators, and the cartoony voice of Tim Blaney: Number 5 is alive. --Sean Axmaker

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