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What Everyday Objects and Conventions Tell Us About Ourselves

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The beloved and bestselling "anthropologist of everyday life" turns her witty and insightful gaze to the oddities of living in our modern world


Over the course of her time as a contributor and editor for Saturday Night magazinea span during which she published her award-winning book The Rituals of DinnerMargaret Visser specialized in thought-provoking columns capable of turning the banal into the extraordinary. From high heels to showers to the metamorphosis of Santa Claus, these essays span an eclectic and engrossing range of topics perfect for Visser fans and newcomers alike. With academic rigor and a warm narrative style, she takes commonplace facets of everyday lifecrossword puzzles, fireplaces, paid time offand digs into their peculiar origins and surprising social legacies. In examining some of the most ordinary elements of life, Visser sorts through historical facts and cultural implications to reveal the hidden assumptions behind our modern behavior.

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Before he let his life fall apart, James Neil Beauchamp was special. He lived and flourished in the world of privilege, adored and accommodated. Then, before he truly learned to appreciate it, the one talent that lifted him from a small life in a small town was gone. The only thing worse than spending your life earthbound, Neil would learn, is landing hard and knowing youll never fly again.   Born in Penns Castle, in the castle itself, he was a prince of sorts. But when his mother left the castle with him in tow, he lost everything, even his name. He seemed destined for a life as a shopkeepers barely tolerated stepson.   Thats when baseball presented itself and saved him. For what Neil could do was hit. Through some combination of reflexes, vision, and coordination, the lean and supple Virginia Rail turned the game of his childhood into the driving force of his life. Before he was through, he would win batting championships and be elected to the Hall of Fame.   Yet before his talent failed, he already was failing those closest to him. His wife and son suffered from being outside his field of vision too much of the time. Then, with his career over well before his 40th birthday, everything collapsed. The final crash, with his half-sister Blanchard beside him in the car, the crash that sent him to prison, was seen by most who knew him as the inevitable landing at the end of a very long fall.   On the day he was paroled, he was met at the prison gates by his son David, the last person Neil expected to see, and returned to the castle from which he was banished as a child and to Blanchard, a woman of tenuous mental balance.   Neil is looking for some way to make amends. And his son, who will learn things about Neil he never would have guessed, still wants to salvage something out of their mutual wreckage.

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Hailed by the Western Writers of America as one of the top twenty-five Westerns ever written: The harrowing story of an innocent young man pursued across west Texas by a relentless posse 


A crack shot more skilled with a rifle than are men twice his age, eighteen-year-old Tot Lohman has no intention of using his genius for evil. But when a fight erupts at a schoolhouse dance, Lohman is forced to defend himself, and a young rancher named Shorty Boyd winds up dead. The Boyds are numerous, powerful, and vicious, and they want revenge. With no one else to turn to, Lohman sets out across canyon country to reunite with his ailing father in New Mexico Territory. The journey will be long, hot, and perilous, and to survive it, this mild-mannered boy must become the cold-blooded killer he never wanted to be. 


 


Based on real events, The Hell Bent Kid is a tale of pursuit as stark and mesmerizing as the Southwestern landscape in which it is set. Unrelenting from first page to last, it ranks alongside The Ox-Bow Incident, True Grit, and The Searchers as one of the most unique and artful stories of the West ever told. In 1958 it was adapted into the film From Hell to Texas, directed by the famed Henry Hathaway and starring Don Murray, Diane Varsi, Chill Wills, and Dennis Hopper.

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A preCivil War era murder haunts a present-day family in this atmospheric suspense novel by the New York Timesbestselling author of The Art Forger.


How long can murder haunt a family? Until the wrong is put right and the victim is able to rest in peace. Set in Lexington, Massachusetts, The Safe Room is a story of such a murder and such a haunting. A psychological thriller, the tale toggles between the eve of the Civil War and present day. It follows the doomed love affair of Silas Person, a runaway slave riding the Underground Railroad, and Sarah Harden, the daughter of a famous abolitionist. Sarah and Silas's story is intertwined with that of Lee Seymour, a modern-day descendant of the Harden family who must suddenly grapple with a world in which murder and ghosts are all too real.


The Safe Room is a suspenseful tale that employs love and the paranormal to explore the ugliness of injustice and the beauty of human hope.

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A powerful novel of vengeance and regret set against the dramatic backdrop of the Texas border wars 


The powerful Mexican landowner De Gorios is notorious on both sides of the Rio Grande. In order to add to his already-vast wealth, he regularly sends raiders north of the border to burn, plunder, and kill. But when De Gorios's marauders swoop down on John Killane's property, set it ablaze, and murder Killane's brother, the taciturn Texan vows revenge.


 


Aided by his fellow ranchers, Killane slips into Mexico and prepares an assault on De Gorios's hacienda. Violence leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, and the motives of his backers may not be as transparent as they first appeared, but Killane has made a promise that he would rather die than break. If he cannot summon the courage and the coldness to act, he might just get his wish.


 


From the groundbreaking author of The Hell Bent Kid, one of the most acclaimed Westerns ever published, The Taste of Infamy is both a thrilling novel of adventure and a stunning morality tale.

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Tuttwyler, Ohio, is the perfect Midwestern town. Beautiful square. Gazebo dripping with gingerbread. Leafy streets lined with big white houses.   Even the towns annual summer festival is perfect. It commemorates the unfortunate clubbing death of the Indian princess Podewedka, by the towns founding fathers, John and Amos Tuttwyler, back in 1803.   The only thing thats not perfect is Howie Dornicks house. Its right on the parade route and it hasnt been painted in years. But thats going to change, now that D. William Aitchbone is chairman of the Squaw Days Committee. You can bet on that!   But Bill Aitchbone has to tread carefully. Howie, after all, is the illegitimate son of local war hero Artie Brown. Howie finally does paint his house. But not white like all the others. He paints it the most obnoxious shade of green imaginable. Howies really in hot water now.   Then Hugh Harbinger sees Howies green house. Hugh was once New York Citys most famous color designer. Before going off the deep end, he created 300 different shades of black! Hes determined to make a comeback. Determined to make Serendipity Green the most popular color ever.  Serendipity Green not only lampoons Americas small town festivals, it lowers the boom on big city trendiness as well. It is irreverent and iconoclastic and simply irresistible.  

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A philosophy student's research draws him into the sexual underground of 1980s and early nineties New York


John Marr is surprised he doesn't have AIDS. He has been having near-daily sexual encounters with strange men since before the dawn of HIV, but he remains healthy. His initiation began in the bathroom of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and since then he has found himself at home in the darkest corners of Manhattan's culture of anonymous gay sex. During the day, it is a different story, as Marr works on his graduate thesisan analysis of the work of a brilliant 1970s philosopher who died mysteriously in one of the gay bars of Hell's Kitchen. As his research and his sex life begin to converge, Marr senses that if AIDS doesn't get him, something darker will.


 

The Mad Man, which the author dubbed a "pornotopic fantasy," is more than a powerful work of philosophical erotica; it is a snapshot of a vanished moment in New York City's gay history, when fear and lust commingled in a single powerful force.

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This innovative novel combines Spanish folktales with Native American legends to create a captivating Southwestern version of The Arabian Nights.


Like Scheherezade, who ensured her survival by telling her royal husband stories, the title character in Rudolfo Anaya's creative retelling of The Arabian Nights must entertain the recently widowed governor with legends of Nueva Mexicana, or she and her fellow captives will die.



With fresh snow covering the high peaks of Sangre de Cristo, a group of native dissidents prepare for revolt. In seventeenth-century Santa Fe, insurrection against a colony of the king of Spain is punishable by death. A Spaniard loyal to the governor names twelve conspirators. One of them is a young woman. Raised in a mission church, fifteen-year-old Serafina speaks excellent Spanish and knows many of her country's traditional folktales. She and the governor strike a bargain: Each evening, she will tell him a cuento. If he likes it, he will release one prisoner the following day.



The twelve tales recounted here mirror the struggle of a divided country. They include the social and political symbolism behind "Beauty and the Beast" and retell "Cinderella" as "Miranda's Gift." Interspersed with these timeless cuentos is the story of Serafina herself, and that of a people battling to preserve a vanishing way of life under the long shadow of the Inquisition.

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A Newbery Honor Book: Spending the summer in a dull French village is not what Johnny had in mind . . . but soon he's hot on the trail of a Nazi spy!


When twelve-and-a-half-year-old Johnny Littlehorn's dad returns from the front lines and announces they're spending the summer in France, Johnny is appalled. He doesn't understand why they're going to France when they could stay home at their Wyoming ranch instead. But that's before he discovers an old German pistol hidden in a loaf of bread.


 


When Johnny arrives, he finds the village of Saint-Chamant anything but boring. With the help of his new friends Suzanne and Charles, Johnny follows a winding trail that leads to a fugitive spy and a stolen fortune. Before long, he's learning French, helping his oncle Paul build a real airplane, and unraveling an evil Nazi plot!

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American Book Award Winner: A novel of a New Mexico teenager's journey of physical and spiritual recovery from the author of Bless Me, Ultima.


When the story opens, the eponymous hero of Rudolfo Anaya's novel is in an ambulance en route to a hospital for crippled children in the New Mexican desert. A poor boy from Albuquerque, sixteen-year-old Tortuga takes his name from the odd, turtle-shaped mountain that is rumored to possess miraculous curative powers. Tortuga is paralyzed, and not even his mother's fervent prayers can heal him. But under the mountain's watchful gaze, with the support of fellow patients, he begins the Herculean task of breaking out of his shell and becoming whole again.



Drawn from personal experience and imbued with the phantasmagorical vision quests that distinguish Anaya's work, Tortuga is a joyful, life-sustaining book about hope, faith, friendship, and love that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit in the physical world.



"An extraordinary storyteller." Los Angeles Times Book Review

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A "startling, terrifying" novel about a troubled young street thief in the gritty Washington, DC, of the thirties and forties (Houston Post).


At the park where the outcasts of Washington, DC, gather, everyone calls him Yogi. Although only a boy, he steals like a man, taking jewelry and money from wherever and whomever he can. When he's flush, Yogi spends like a prince, eating beef stew and wasting whole afternoons at the cinema. When he's broke, he looks for someone else to rob.


 


At home, Yogi goes by his real name: George Brown. With their violent, alcoholic father absent for long periods of time and their mother too brittle to cope, George and his older brother learn to fend for themselves. Roland becomes a security guard while George turns to a life of crime. But to survive among the prostitutes, muggers, and extortionists who prowl the streets of the nation's capital, a young man must always have his wits about him, and Yogi/George is prone to schizophrenic hallucinations. When he is locked up in jail for a night and experiences his most vivid delusion yet, he fears that the line between sanity and insanity has become permanently blurred.


 


Brilliantly fusing hard-edged realism and surrealistic flights of fantasy, The Bold Saboteurs is a highly original work of art from the groundbreaking author of Who Walk in Darkness.

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From the author of Who Walk in Darkness and The Bold Saboteurs, a wild and wickedly funny tale of madness, lust, and murder in midcentury New York


In a posh mental institution upstate, Carter bides his time between electroshock treatments, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. A longtime alcoholic, he is desperate to get better but feels worse every dayperhaps because he suspects that his wife and best friend are having an affair back home in Manhattan.


 


The truth, however, is that Carter has no clue how depraved his friends have become. Nymphomaniacs, adulterers, killers, and thieves, they have succumbed to every temptation, no matter how grotesque. If Carter knew what the intelligentsia of New York was really up to, he would never want to leave his padded room.


 


A dark satire of urbane sophistication and a chilling expose of the thin veneer that masks the madness within us all, The Double View is a brilliant provocation from one of America's most revolutionary authors.

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A Hugo Awardwinning novelette and other stories by the author of Way Station, a Grand Master of Science Fiction.
"To read science fiction is to read Simak." Robert A. Heinlein
Hiram Taine is a handyman who can fix anything. When he isn't fiddling with his tools, he is roaming through the woods with his dog, Towser, as he has done for as long as he can remember. He likes things that he can understand. But when a new ceiling appears in his basementa ceiling that appears to have the ability to repair television sets so they're better than beforehe knows he has come up against a mystery that no man can solve.
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, "The Big Front Yard" is a powerful story about what happens when an ordinary man finds reality coming apart around him. Along with the other stories in this collection, it is some of the most lyrical science fiction ever published.
Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook.
The third author to be honored as a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), Clifford D. Simak also received three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, an International Fantasy Award, and a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award.

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A brilliant collection of thought-provoking essays on gender, nature, passion, and society from an acclaimed feminist, philosopher, and poet


In The Eros of Everyday Life, one of America's most provocative writers and thinkers offers insightful and compelling views on a wide range of social, ecological, and gender issues. From a distinctly feminist point of view, Susan Griffin explores the intricate connections between science and religion, nature and society, women and men, and love and consciousness. She brilliantly commingles lyrical memoir with cogent social commentary, producing a colorful literary tapestry that examines contemporary life and culture, its contradictions and complexities, and the rise of new ideologies.


 

The Eros of Everyday Life showcases a decade's worth of the very best writing by this acclaimed Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. It is an enthralling anthology that reveals the ways in which Western society undermines itself by diminishing both woman and the natural environment, and yet it is also a celebration of the power of passion, and the remarkable evolution of the human capacity for love.

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Jenny's new house has an unwanted ghost: "Readers will enjoy the imaginative pranks of the specter and the resourceful way [Jenny] solves her problem" (School Library Journal).


Jenny knows she should be excited about the beautiful old house that her mother has inherited from Miss Nagle. She'll finally have her own bedroom, and the place even comes with Rufus the cat, a ready-made pet. But when Jenny visits the house, she's scared out of her wits. Giant snakes, elephants, and all kinds of terrifying creatures lurk around every corner. With a little help from Rufus, Jenny discovers who's behind these spooky happenings. It's the ghost of Miss Nagle's grandmother, the once-famous witch of Willowby Lane. The ghost witch loves to scare people, and she thinks Jenny and her friends will be perfect targets.


 


Jenny decides to meet the ghost witch face-to-face in this scary, yet delightful short-chapter book.

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Stanley Noseworthy is, at best, a serial monogamist. At worst, a faithless rake. Now his record-breaking long-term lover (1001 better-than-Arabian nights) Nina is fed up with his inimitable bull%#$# and threatening to end their relationship. Show us there is some good in you, Stanleys best friend urges. Show us there is a brain. But Stanleys decisions do not tend to be made by his brain. He has profoundly mixed feelings about losing Nina, for he is nothing if not a profoundly mixed (up) fellow. Stanley is either a dedicated artist or a posturing fraud, a charming rogue or a shallow lothario, tragic victim or pathetic loseror all of the above. (Vote Online! Stanley might well say to this, for he is always prepared to satirize his own life as sharply as the life around him.) Meanwhile, Stanleys beloved artists cooperative, The Hotel Beaux-Arts (hence Bozarts) to its inhabitants, is also under threat. Since its endowment a quarter-century ago by the august Canterbury Institute of Technology, the Bozarts has had a frequently glorious, always rambunctious, character-rich history. Lately, mysteriously, it has been dwindling toward extinction. Stanley (who may or may not be paranoid) fears the reason for this is either that the Institute wants its building back for more profitable use, or that George W. Bush has declared an end to Art and Thought in Americaor both of the above.

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"One of the best of the tough sleuths" tangles with blackmail and murder in Miami Beach in this hardboiled detective tale by one of the all-time greats (The New York Times).


The day he met Phyllis Brighton, Mike Shayne saved her from jumping out a windowand he has been rescuing her ever since. First he helped her beat a murder rap; now he's trying to pry her away from the sleaziest lawyer in Dade County: Harry Grange. A mouthpiece for every crook in Miami, Grange is running a blackmail racket when Shayne sees him with Phyllis on his arm at a local gambling hall. Shayne warns his friend to ditch her crooked beau, but she is too proud to take his advice. Unfortunately for her, the relationship will end with murder.


 


Shayne gets the call just after he gets back to his office. Harry Grange has been found dead on the sands of Miami Beach. Even worse, Shayne's gun is missing and his friend Larry Kincaid may have used it to gun down the blackmailing lawyer. To save his friends, Mike Shayne will have to outsmart the cleverest killer in town.



Adapted into the film Michael Shayne, Private Detective, this classic PI novel is part of the long-running mystery series that also inspired a 1940s radio show and translations around the world. 



The Private Practice of Michael Shayne is the 2nd book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

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As two brothers try to reunite the lonely ghosts of a farmer and a sheepdog, "readers will be cheering them on every step of the way" (Publishers Weekly).


In this short-chapter winner of the IRA Children's Choices, Peter and Martin enjoy living atop Popcorn Hill, except for two things: They long for a big dog and their cabin is haunted by a lonely ghost. They do get a frisky mutt named Rosie, but she's not as big or as appealing as the stray sheepdog that has been roaming around outside. When the boys learn the sheepdog is a ghost, however, they devise a plan for bringing the two ghosts together. In the process, they learn to appreciate their real pet, Rosie.

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Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for . . . "An adventure story with a hint of the supernatural . . . full of action and suspense" (School Library Journal).


Most years Corby likes summer vacation, but not now. He's stuck at his grandparents' house in Wisconsin, where his grandfather constantly reminds him how timid he is and how different his father was at his age. And his new friend Buck seems to think he's chicken, too, just because he'd rather be sensible than risk getting hurt. To prove he's tough, Corby joins Buck for a nighttime journey into the woods to find the Wish Master, a fierce, giant statue that is rumored to grant wishes.


 


Soon it seems as if the Wish Master does have special powersthough it doesn't always get things exactly right. When Corby wishes for a puppy, a mangy stray comes into his life. He soon grows attached to the loyal mutt. Then the dog gets Corby in big trouble, and Corby decides it's time to wish for what he really wants: to go home. But will this wish bring more harm than good?

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Tales of nostalgia and loss in a world overrun by technology from a multi-award-winning Grand Master of Science Fiction.
Hank is walking home from the bar when the Model T pulls alongside him. It's been decades since he saw a car this old, and the sound of it takes him right back to his twenties. The door is open, and when he climbs in, the car takes offwithout a driver. Before he knows what's happened, Hank is right back at Big Spring Pavilion, where he spent his youth drinking bootleg whiskey and chasing pretty girls. He will find the past is not quite as he remembered it, but still a lovely place to go for a drive.
The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories includes some of the finest short fiction Clifford Simak ever wrote, including "City," the story that became the basis for his beloved novel of the same name. In the history of science fiction, no author has ever better understood that the Great Plains and the cosmos are closer together than we think.
Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook.
The third author to be honored as a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), Clifford D. Simak also received three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, an International Fantasy Award, and a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award.