"Being Weird Is a Wonderful Thing"

Author: Kathryn Petras
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
ISBN: 1523515341
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A gift that celebrates being yourself, in your own unique way. Do you ever feel different? A little weird, a little wacky? It’s time to own it, because, as Meryl Streep proclaimed, “what makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.” In this inspiring collection, singers, poets, actors, activists, comedians, designers, athletes, and philosophers share wise and pithy reflections on what it’s like to march to the beat of a different drummer. Every statement is a powerful, positive reminder that to live successfully is to be completely unapologetically you. “We are not what other people say we are. We are who we know ourselves to be, and we are what we love. That’s OK.” —Laverne Cox “All the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.” —Shel Silverstein “I am different, not less” —Temple Grandin “The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.” —Jhumpa Lahiri “Self-censorship is insulting to the self. Timidity is a hopeless way forward.” —Ai Weiwei

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Author: Bryn Greenwood
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250074134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
"Struggling to raise her little brother Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star-gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery"--

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Author: Hank Green
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524743453
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Sparkling with mystery, humor and the uncanny, this is a fun read. But beneath its effervescent tone, more complex themes are at play.” —San Francisco Chronicle In his wildly entertaining debut novel, Hank Green—cocreator of Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, and SciShow—spins a sweeping, cinematic tale about a young woman who becomes an overnight celebrity before realizing she's part of something bigger, and stranger, than anyone could have possibly imagined. The Carls just appeared. Roaming through New York City at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor—April and her best friend, Andy, make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day, April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight. Seizing the opportunity to make her mark on the world, April now has to deal with the consequences her new particular brand of fame has on her relationships, her safety, and her own identity. And all eyes are on April to figure out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us. Compulsively entertaining and powerfully relevant, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing grapples with big themes, including how the social internet is changing fame, rhetoric, and radicalization; how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty; and how vilification and adoration spring for the same dehumanization that follows a life in the public eye. The beginning of an exciting fiction career, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a bold and insightful novel of now.

Things Hoped For

Author: Andrew Clements
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142410738
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Seventeen-year-old Gwen is preparing to audition for New York City’s top music schools when her grandfather mysteriously disappears, leaving Gwen only a phone message telling her not to worry. But there’s nothing more stressful than practicing for her auditions, not knowing where her grandfather is, and being forced to lie about his whereabouts when her insistent great-uncle demands an audience with him. Then Gwen meets Robert, also in town for music auditions, and the two pair up to brave the city without supervision. As auditions approach and her great-uncle becomes more aggressive, Gwen and Robert make a startling discovery. Suddenly Gwen’s hopes are turned upside down, and she and Robert are united in ways neither of them could have foretold. . . .

The Weird

Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1466803193
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 2482

Book Description
From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Big Wonderful Thing

Author: Stephen Harrigan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292759517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 944

Book Description
The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

Things Not Seen

Author: Andrew Clements
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200456
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Winner of American Library Association Schneider Family Book Award! Bobby Phillips is an average fifteen-year-old-boy. Until the morning he wakes up and can't see himself in the mirror. Not blind, not dreaming-Bobby is just plain invisible. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to Bobby's new condition; even his dad the physicist can't figure it out. For Bobby that means no school, no friends, no life. He's a missing person. Then he meets Alicia. She's blind, and Bobby can't resist talking to her, trusting her. But people are starting to wonder where Bobby is. Bobby knows that his invisibility could have dangerous consequences for his family and that time is running out. He has to find out how to be seen again-before it's too late.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 0316090522
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Book Description
These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

Weird, Wild & Wonderful

Author: James Carter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913074739
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description
Poet James Carter selects his favourite and best poems, including many classroom classics, with pictures by an award-winning children's illustrator. Welcome to the weird, wild and wonderful world of James Carter! Expect to hear the moon speak, explore a magic wood and play air guitar. You'll meet wolves, elephants and a dung beetle; you'll get close to a gorilla and sing a lullaby to a woolly mammoth; you might even meet an alien in a library. Packed with James Carter's most popular and requested poems, plus 8 brand new poems, this is an important collection from one of the top children's poets writing today.

WEIRD

Author: Craig Groeschel
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310597439
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
"When people describe my lifestyle or family as weird, I find comfort," writes author Craig Groeschel. He then shares a Christ-centered philosophy, on everything from money to scheduling to purity, to help you break out of the normal rut and live according to the rhythms of God’s grace and truth of his word. Normal people are stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Many of their relationships are, at best, strained and, in most cases, just surviving. Even though we live in one of the most prosperous places on earth, normal is still living paycheck to paycheck and never getting ahead. In our oversexed world, lust, premarital sex, guilt, and shame are far more common than purity, virginity, and a healthy married sex life. And when it comes to God, the majority believe in him, but the teachings of scripture rarely make it into their everyday lives. Simply put, normal isn't working. Groeschel’s WEIRD will help you break free from the norm to lead a radically abnormal (and endlessly more fulfilling) life.