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THE WEIRD SERIES What’s weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the best-selling phenomenon, Weird N.J. But why should they stop at New Jersey when there’s so much that’s peculiar, odd, and utterly nutty across the whole U.S.? So the two Marks—along with several other writers with a taste for the strange—have focused on some key locales, giving each of them the full “New Jersey” treatment. Spanning the breadth of the country, from New York to California, these are travel guides of a sort, but to the kind of places voyagers will never find on their everyday maps. Instead, they’re chock-full of local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and bizarre roadside attractions. So come along and join the fun: Some of what’s out there is disturbing, some hilarious, but all of it is unforgettably…weird. Praise for WEIRD N.J.: “They are the chroniclers of the creepy, bards of the bizarre…From abandoned asylums to colorful real-life characters past and present, to folk stories of ghosts, monsters, and aliens, Mr. Sceurman and Mr. Moran have created a journal of New Jersey’s unwritten history.”—The New York Times. “Enough with the head-severing mobsters of Jersey. The state is packed with far more evil than TV could ever invent—from satanic Klan rallies to time-traveling tree farmers. And Weird N.J. has the pictures to prove it.”—Rolling Stone. “Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran see their native state as others do not. For them, it is a demented Disneyland of worldly, and otherworldly, delights.”—The Boston Globe. “If it’s the offbeat, paranormal or downright weird that you crave…there could be no better place”—USA Today. Praise for Weird U.S. “Weird U.S. is delicious armchair reading. Who can resist an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit, a home shaped like a giant shoe, cannibal albino villages, midget colonies, passages to hell or close relations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?”—San Francisco Chronicle. “Weird U.S. is a marvelous work of entertainment and the basis for a truly unique vacation.”—Library Journal. “Kudos to Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman…This is the book by which future explorers will chart their road trips in pursuit of the meaning of this nation.”—New York Press.
"An anthology exploring the complex mythologies of the Golden State"--Cover.
Suitably, hauntings and paranormal happenings in the Lone Star state are larger than life. Included in this must-read collection are tales of the ghost lights of Marfa, the werewolf of Elroy, and the Devil’s brand in the eternal roundup of El Paso. Your hair will stand on end as you read about the mysteries and lore in Spooky Texas.
Is there a shadow over this sunny land of healthful vigor and natural abundance? This region includes the Central Coast, the San Joaquin Valley, and metropolitan Los Angeles and San Diego, where readers will encounter the spirits of gold prospectors, cowboys, Spanish padres, and movie stars, as well as the phantom camels of Fort Tejon, the shape-shifting witch of Tulare, underwater UFOs, ghosts aboard the Queen Mary, and the tragic specter of Marilyn Monroe.
Describes haunted houses and the sites of unexplained events in each California county
Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.
Filled with stories of strange phenomena, odd places, and weird beings in the Golden State, Eerie California tells of haunted houses, unexplained events, and creepy characters from the Dark Watchers and ghostly women-in-white to bizarre beasts like Bigfoot and the Billewhack monster. Discover painted caves, petroglyphs drawings, rocks that move on their own, and odd drawings of human figures in the desert sand only visible from the air. Eerie California poses many questions to muse upon. Who built the Lizard People Tunnels below Los Angeles? Is it really Al Capone's banjo-playing ghost haunting Alcatraz's shower room? Whose ghost haunts Nob Hill? Eerie California is a fanciful introduction to little known, often inexplicable, historical events, and curious phenomena in the Golden State. A wonderful, fun book for parents to read with their kids or to curled up with in a comfy chair. A great gift and welcome addition to any library.
A light breezy look at the history of Ventura, California, that includes: odd history, lost treasures, strange characters, Ghosts and haunted places, including the old Mission San Buenaventura (founded by St. Junipero Serra 1782). Ventura has over 200 years of history bizarre happenings!
Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of the vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.
"Joyful and funny . . . Park uses science, compassion, humor, diverse stories and examples of her own shame-free living to take the stigma out of these infections." —The New York Times With curiosity and wit, Strange Bedfellows rips back the bedsheets to expose what really happens when STDs enter the sack. Sexually transmitted diseases have been hidden players in our lives for the whole of human history, with roles in everything from World War II to the growth of the Internet to The Bachelor. But despite their prominence, STDs have been shrouded in mystery and taboo for centuries, which begs the question: why do we know so little about them? Enter Ina Park, MD, who has been pushing boundaries to empower and inform others about sexual health for decades. With Strange Bedfellows, she ventures far beyond the bedroom to examine the hidden role and influence of these widely misunderstood infections and share their untold stories. Covering everything from AIDS to Zika, Park explores STDs on the cellular, individual, and population-level. She blends science and storytelling with historical tales, real life sexual escapades, and interviews with leading scientists—weaving in a healthy dose of hilarity along the way. The truth is, most of us are sexually active, yet we’re often unaware of the universe of microscopic bedfellows inside our pants. Park aims to change this by bringing knowledge to the masses in an accessible, no-nonsense, humorous way—helping readers understand the broad impact STDs have on our lives, while at the same time erasing the unfair stigmas attached to them. A departure from the cone of awkward silence and shame that so often surrounds sexual health, Strange Bedfellows is the straight-shooting book about the consequences of sex that all curious readers have been looking for.