Not A One Horse Town

Transcribing from his voluminous notes our main character tells of the many adventures that beset him, beginning with his being orphaned as a teenager, his felonious Uncle Bascombs treachery, Prohibitions Days in Chicago and the local Mob, his special college Pal, Burt and his and their adventures together. The lovely Amanda Richards he meets at the University of Illinois is sure to intrigue you. Things really start to get interesting when the boys Durant breaks down just outside of Pineville City, Nebraska and they meet Doc Hasberg, Big Ben Collins and other interesting people in that city. Wait til you meet Lord Henry James Augustus Wilton-Smith and his family, Lady Agatha and daughter Pamela. Once you start this book, you might have trouble putting it down, you just know, that in just a few more pages, some other adventure will capture your attention. Enjoy!

THE MATCHMAKING CHEF COLLECTION The eight Matchmaking Chef novellas When Suzie Matthews (Bed, Breakfast & You) accidentally cooks up a scene that causes her sister to get back together with her high school boyfriend (Home for the Holidays), she wonders if she can help other singletons living in the small mountain town of Legend, Tennessee find the loves of their lives. Being a matchmaker isn't really on her list of things to do--after all, she has a bed & breakfast to run, cookbooks to write, and a television show on the Food Channel to keep up with. But baking is her thing, and perhaps matchmaking can be her thing, too. After all, there is a song going through her head that goes something like this... Matchbaker, Matchbaker, bake me a match? No wait. Make me a match. Nevermind! You get the picture, right? Welcome to Legend, Tennessee. And welcome to the matchbaking, er, matchmaking world of Chef Suzie Matthews.

When master chocolate taster, Scott Matthews, escapes to Harbor Falls to visit his brother and sister-in-law, Brad and Suzie Hart Matthews, he has only one request—no talk about work, and that includes any discussion of chocolate. He knows Suzie is a celebrity chef and warns them away from any fanfare, or discussion of his professional work with the Italian-based, world-renowned chocolate company, Bianchi Chocolates. All he wants is an uneventful few weeks to get away from chaos and relax. What Jillian Bass wants is to make a success of her new business in Harbor Falls. This Manhattan transplant really wants to make it big in the small southern town. Forget New York, she is starting over small with her chocolate shop, Bittersweets, and setting out to impress the locals. Start small, think big, is her motto. What she doesn’t share is that chocolate runs in her veins, or that she has recently inherited her grandmother’s famous chocolate business—Chocolates by Jeaneva. This time she is doing things on her own terms, without help or influence from family. Bittersweets is her baby and hers alone. It’s time to prove herself. All is fine until Jillian smacks straight into Scott outside of her shop, and he takes a whiff of her Belgian truffle… What follows is a flurry of spontaneous sexy encounters, a scandal, a couple of untruths, and a carefully orchestrated reunion by Suzie Hart guaranteed to result in no sweeter match than the one between Scott and Jillian. Whether love comes with chocolate truffles, syrups, creams, or covered in sprinkles, this humorous and quirky story of dueling chocolatiers might leave you craving chocolate (and more!), all the while begging the question, “Is there anything better than chocolate?”

The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog, rush hour, butter-and-egg man, gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smart aleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline, straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie--these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were born or took on new meaning in the streets of New York. In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces this flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley. Some terms of great pertinence to city people today have unexpectedly old pedigrees. Rush hour was coined by 1890, for instance, and rubberneck dates to the late 1890s and became popular in New York to describe the busloads of tourists who craned their necks to see the tall buildings and the sights of the Bowery and Chinatown. The Big Apple itself (since 1971 the official nickname of New York) appeared in the 1920s, though first in reference to the city's top racetracks and to Broadway bookings as pinnacles of professional endeavor. Allen also tells fascinating stories behind once-popular slang that is no longer in use. Spielers, for example, were the little girls in tenement districts who danced ecstatically on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men and, when they were old enough, frequented the dance halls of the Lower East Side. Following the trail of these words and phrases into the city's East Side, West Side, and all around the town, from Harlem to Wall Street, and into the haunts of its high and low life, The City in Slang is a fascinating look at the rich cultural heritage of language about city life.

530 illustrations in text

Reproduction of the original: The Skipper and the Skipped by Holman Day