Tween Hobo Off The Rails

From playwright and TV writer Alena Smith comes a hilarious and irreverent illustrated book based on the popular Twitter feed (@tweenhobo), featuring a young spunky girl who sets out in search of freedom, adventure, and her own personal obsession: Justin Bieber tickets. Get ready to laugh and learn with the littlest hobo. She’s only twelve years old, but a “hard twelve.” You’ll meet her friends: Stumptown Jim (her weatherbeaten BFFL); Tin Cap Earl (who’s always down to shoot a junkyard haul video); Toothpick Frank (who learns to love Pinterest); Salt Chunk Annie (a “woman of the night,” whatever that means); and Hot Johnny Two-Cakes (who Tween Hobo swears she does NOT have a crush on). Find out how she survives, thanks in part to strawberry lip gloss. You’ll hear her take on major cultural events (“I go off a fiscal cliff every time I go near a Claire’s”). And you’ll enjoy beautiful hand-rendered illustrations that bring out the beauty in her words—just like how eyeliner makes a hobo’s look really pop. Often snarky and frequently ridiculous, this imaginative journal-like book includes maps, jokes, laughs, doodles, tips, hobo symbols (“House with a triangle on top means PIZZA PARTY!!!), games, stories, and more. So grab your iPhone and wrap it in a handkerchief, tie it to a stick, and let’s roll!

"A hilarious and irreverent illustrated book based off of the popular Twitter feed, which tells the story of a Tween Girl who packed a bindle full of glitter pens and snuck out of math class one Monday afternoon to hop the rails in search of freedom, adventure, and her own personal white whale: Bieber tickets"--

The Anachronistic Turn: Historical Fiction, Drama, Film and Television is the first study to investigate the ways in which the creative use of anachronism in historical fictions can allow us to rethink the relationship between past and present. Through an examination of literary, cinematic, and popular texts and practices, this book investigates how twenty-first century historical fictions use creative anachronisms as a way of understanding modern issues and anxieties. Drawing together a wide range of texts across all forms of historical fiction - novels, dramas, musicals, films and television - this book re-frames anachronism not as an error, but as a deliberate strategy that emphasises the fictionalising tendencies of all forms of historical writing. The book achieves this by exploring three core themes: the developing trends in the twenty-first century for creators of historical fiction to include deliberate anachronisms, such as contemporary references, music, and language; the ways in which the deliberate use of anachronism in historical fiction can allow us to rethink the relationship between past and present, and; the way that contemporary historical fiction uses anachronism to better understand modern issues and anxieties. This book will appeal to students and scholars of historical fiction, contemporary historical film and television studies, and historical theatre studies.

This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around the terms 'hobo', 'tramp', and 'vagabond'.

"We are a family on a journey to a place called wonderful" is the motto of Deza Malone's family. Deza is the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in life. But it's 1936 and the Great Depression has hit Gary hard, and there are no jobs for black men. When her beloved father leaves to find work, Deza, Mother, and her older brother, Jimmie, go in search of him, and end up in a Hooverville outside Flint, Michigan. Jimmie's beautiful voice inspires him to leave the camp to be a performer, while Deza and Mother find a new home, and cling to the hope that they will find Father. The twists and turns of their story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.

Childhood buddies whose paths have diverged reunite on a late summer afternoon for some beer, grilling and weed-but deep within their friendships lurk ghosts that rock the patio beneath them. Bitingly comic and ruthlessly recognizable, this is the story of a generation at war with itself over what it means to man up.

The phenomenal New York Times bestseller that “explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building” (Publishers Weekly). In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible—short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she’s everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: She furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor, she scrutinizes the lives of the tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth. Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives on the fifth floor. Talented and precocious, she’s come to terms with life’s seeming futility and decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Until then, she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop culture, a good but not outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide their true talents and finest qualities from a world they believe cannot or will not appreciate them. But after a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building, they will begin to recognize each other as kindred souls, in a novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us, and “teaches philosophical lessons by shrewdly exposing rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors” (Kirkus Reviews). “The narrators’ kinetic minds and engaging voices (in Alison Anderson’s fluent translation) propel us ahead.” —The New York Times Book Review “Barbery’s sly wit . . . bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations.” —The New Yorker

THE STORY: Rose Spencer has just achieved the ultimate young-intellectual’s dream: becoming a staff writer for a prestigious New York literary/criticism journal. And her editor, the smart and attractively cynical Benjamin, is definitely flirting with her—while also respecting her writing. With the sudden rise of an Occupy-style political movement in a public park right outside the journal’s offices, Rose sees a way to participate in what may be the defining activist movement for her generation, but too quickly she must learn to recognize the difference between sincere action and skillful self-promotion.