Humor

Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

Lemony Snicket’s work is filled with bitter truths, like: ‘It is always cruel to laugh at people, of course, although sometimes if they are wearing an ugly hat it is hard to control yourself.’ Or: ‘It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.’ For all of life’s ups and downs, its celebrations and its sorrows, here is a book to commemorate it all – especially for those not fully soothed by chicken soup. Witty and irreverent, Horseradish is a book with universal appeal, a delightful vehicle to introduce Snicket’s uproariously unhappy observations to a crowd not yet familiar with the Baudelaires’ misadventures.

Precocia: The Sixth Circle of Heck

Following sentencing in the court of Judge Judas, eleven-year-old Milton and his older sister Marlo find themselves in Precocia, the circle of Heck for kids that grow up too fast.

Who Cut The Cheese?

Nilly, Lisa, and Doctor Proctor are too busy inventing things to watch TV, and everyone says they’re missing out on the hot singing competition. But then Nilly and Lisa notice that their friends and family are acting really weird. And the only people acting weird…are the ones watching TV.

What’s going on is WAY bigger than a singing competition. It could mean the end of the world.

Or a silent but deadly could save everything!

Scaredy Squirrel Has a Birthday Party

Lovable worrywart Scaredy Squirrel would rather celebrate his birthday alone quietly in the safety of his nut tree and avoid any pesky party animals. But despite his detailed plans, things get out of control when the party animals arrive.

 

Mister Dash and the Cupcake Calamity

When Madame Croissant decides to open a bakery, the baking world is thrown into turmoil. Daphne, Madame’s granddaughter, helps with Mayor Chester Field’s order for five hundred cupcakes.

The Skeleton Pirate

The Skeleton Pirate is the Terror of the Seas, and he’ll never be beaten! That is, until he gets beaten by an unruly bunch of pirates and is thrown overboard. Down in the depths of the sea, he is rescued by a beautiful mermaid, only to be swallowed by a whale. But the whale has a tummy ache from all the other things he has swallowed — like a golden ship full of treasure.

Funny in Farsi

This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.” In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi).Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent.