Finalist for the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor a Rocky Mountain News (Denver) Best Book of the Year Millions of people dream of abandoning the city routine for a simple country life. Jim Mullen was not one of them. He loved his Manhattan existence: parties, openings, movie screenings. He could walk to hundreds of restaurants, waste entire afternoons at the Film Forum, people-watch from his window. Then, one day, calamity. His wife quits smoking and buys a weekend house in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York -- in a tiny town diametrically opposed to Manhattan in every way. Slowly, however, the man who once boasted, "Life is just a cab away," begins to warm to the place -- manure and compost and strangers who wave and all -- and to embrace the kind of life that once gave him the shakes.

In addition to sharing detailed accounts of her highest highs and lowest lows, as well as her scathing views on the state of public affairs today, Mayor Lois Griffin also shares the pages of this book with the people who put her in office. By giving them such a strong voice in this record of history, she not only reveals how Quagmire pimped out the vote, Peter sold out to the media, Meg coped with sudden celebrity through sullen poetry, Stewie mounted yet another terrorist plot against her, disgraced former mayor West recovered from defeat, and she herself succumbed to the temptations of the job, she also reveals just how valuable she holds the ideals of democracy. Part biography, part town-ography, this no-holds-barred book comes with a strong message for all: It takes a village—and sometimes even a village idiot’s wife—to set things right in America again.

Drawing on her experiences as daughter, mother, public servant, and longtime child advocate, as well as on her observations of children and families across the country and around the world, Mrs. Clinton reflects on the needs of children and the possibilities the children themselves suggest for rekindling a better family and community life in today's world. Abridged. 5 CDs.

Leaving Manhattan gave magazine writer Jim Mullen the heebie jeebies. He recounts his change from a trend-chasing, club-hopping, acid-tongued night owl to a manure-spreading, cow-dodging, aphorism-spouting farmer.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 "A frothy picaresque that ... vibrates to the “sweet celestial confusion” of Soutine’s painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and irreligious." -- The New York Times Book Review A wild, effervescent, absinthe-soaked novel that tells of the life of the extraordinary artist Chaim Soutine Steve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race. At the head of the regatta is Amedeo Modigliani, seated regally in a bathtub pulled by a flock of canvasback ducks. But unbeknownst to the competition, he has a secret advantage: his young friend, the immigrant painter Chaim Soutine, is hauling the tub from underwater. Soutine, an unwashed, misfit artist (who incidentally can’t swim) has been persuaded by the Italian to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor of the river Seine. Disoriented and confused by the artificial air in his helmet Chaim stumbles through the events of his past and future life. It’s quite an extraordinary life. From his impoverished beginnings in an East European shtetl to his equally destitute days in Paris during the Années Folles, the Crazy Years, from the Cinderella patronage of the American collector Albert Barnes, who raises him from poverty to international attention, to his perilous flight from the Nazi occupation of France, Chaim Soutine remains driven by his unrelenting passion to paint. To be sure, there are notable distractions, such as his unlikely friendship with Modigliani, who drags him from brothels to midnight felonies to a duel at dawn; there are the romances with remarkable women who compete with and sometimes salvage his obsession. But there is also, always on the horizon, the coming storm that threatens to sweep away Chaim and a generation of gifted Jewish refugees from a tradition that would outlaw their longing to make art. Wildly inventive, as funny as it is heart-breaking, The Village Idiot is a luminous fever-dream of a novel, steeped in the heady atmosphere of a Paris that was the cultural capital of the universe, a place where anything seemed possible.

Leaving Manhattan gave magazine writer Jim Mullen the heebie jeebies. He recounts his change from a trend-chasing, club-hopping, acid-tongued night owl to a manure-spreading, cow-dodging, aphorism-spouting farmer.

'This week the first pet passports came into effect. Around the country dogs have been hopping into photo booths and trying to look as relaxed as possible, which is not easy when you know you're not allowed on the chair.' Gathered here are the best of John O'Farrell's newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Independent which saw him win the coveted Best Columnist of the Year Award at the prestigious British Liars Awards. Among many other things, he claims that the only conviction in the Tory Party will be when Jeffrey Archer gets sent to prison; that scientists have created a genetically superior monkey which will advertise lapsang souchong instead of PG Tips; and that with the election of George W. Bush, the global village has finally got its own global village idiot.