Shopping Mall

Two eighth-grade loners decide to take up residence in a department store. Little do they know that theirs is not an original idea.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The mall near Mat thew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center's, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus Dawn of the Dead. Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Let's go shopping! The 216 shopping mall vocabulary words introduced in this unit will prepare students for the real world. Words are introduced in context and then reinforced in motivating exercises that emphasize word pronunciations and definitions. Interesting stories and real life activities improve problem solving and writing skills. As students work their way through the exercises, they will gain knowledge that will allow them to become more confident and independent when out shopping at a mall or department store. Skills Covered Include: - Apply information - Choose the correct word - Expand vocabulary - Understand meaning of words and ideas - Use context clues - Develop life/survival skills - Apply math to real-life situations - Use dictionary and glossary skills - Analyze information - Classify information - Make decisions/choices - Determine alphabetical order - Use logic to solve problems - Spell correctly - Understand consumer information - Develop consumer skills - Understand long vowel sounds

- Focus on children's favorite places- Simple, easy-to-read text and full-page photographs- Glossary, Index

In Get a Job at the Shopping Mall, fictional character Jeremiah Oliver Baumgartner (Job, for short) introduces readers to a wide variety opportunities found (through his adventure and misadventures) at the shopping mall. Back matter includes creative writing prompts and activities

"Pasha Malla writes like a reincarnated Kafka." —Ian Williams, winner of the Giller Prize for Reproduction Douglas Adams meets David Lynch in this ingenious, witty fable about one of North America's most surreal inventions—the local mall. After writing a letter in praise of malls, our eccentric narrator is offered a residency at a shabby suburban shopping centre. His mission: to occupy the mall for several weeks, splitting his time between "making work" and "engaging the public," all while chronicling his adventures in weekly progress reports. Before long, a series of strange after-hour events rattles our hero, and he sets forth on a nightly quest to untangle the mysterious forces at play in the mall's unmapped recesses. Things quickly get hairy, and our narrator's optimism about his mall residency descends into doubt, and then into a full-blown phantasmagoria of horror and (possibly) murder. With the aid of a weird and wonderful cast of mall-dwelling misfits--including a pony named Gary--our narrator is forced to conclude that his new residence may not be the temple of consumer bliss he initially imagined, but something far more sinister. And who, or what, is benefitting from its existence? Much like the shopping centres it praises and parodies, Pasha Malla’s wildly adventurous novel follows its own internal logic, channeling its narrator’s unshakeable innocence to explore the darker edges of human (and other) nature.