WE’RE KNEE DEEP— ARE YOU SHOVEL READY? Politicians who say anything and do nothing . . . People lamenting Constitutional rights they don’t have . . . Protesters equating everyone to Hitler . . . Teeth-gritting partisans! Tax-evading congressmen! Fact-evading Americans! If you’re incredibly disenchanted, if you feel that this great country of ours is suffering from chronic bullsh*t at the federal, state, and local levels, good news: Not only are you in good company, but here’s a book to make you feel a little bit better— THE B. S. OF A.! Whether you voted for “hope” in 2008, or “change” in 2010, odds are you’re feeling a tad despondent. Here at last is a straight-talking, partisan-busting look at politics from humorist Brian Sack, who mercilessly pokes fun at The B.S. of A. with a double helping of objectivity and wit, pulling no punches and giving partisans, politicians, and their politics a well-deserved shellacking. The B.S. of A. takes full advantage of our poorly understood First Amendment to fearlessly cut through the bull on both sides of the aisle and ask serious questions: Why does this enormous country have only two real parties? How does a bad idea become a terrible law with a misleading name? How can you identify the Seven Habits of Highly Partisan People? What’s the deal with this Constitution thing people keep citing? Can we stop comparing people we don’t like to Hitler? You’ll find a handy glossary to thoroughly expand your political vocabulary. And, perhaps most important, you’re guaranteed to finish this book with a complete understanding of how to solve America’s biggest issues—including gun control and abortion!* The B.S. of A.: You’re in it, so get to know it. *Actually, these issues can’t be solved. Their complexity was misunderestimated.

Speak for Yourself Do you yearn for a book to disambiguate words and phrases commonly used in business settings, your workplace, and in life in general? Do you wish the kimono would open on idioms and clichés that stretch the bandwidth of understanding and make you wonder if your career is scalable? What are you really saying when you go against the grain and are aboveboard? What do you hear when your colleague wants face time or to move the needle? The BS Dictionary: Uncovering the Origins and True Meanings of Business Speak provides the real-world definitions to about 300 of the world's most commonly-used business terms and gives you the origin story (who coined the term? when did it start to be used figuratively in the business world?) for each one. Get the language clarity you need and have fun learning the full etymology of favorite phrases. Read humorous commentary about how phrases might be misused or misunderstood. If you are interested in language, business speak, writing, and trivia knowledge, this book is for you! Get The BS Dictionary and impress your friends with your newfound wealth of phrases and their history.

The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theaters typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios—most of which also owned the theater chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theaters from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity in the wake of profound changes to the corporate organization and production methods of the major Hollywood studios. In The Battle for the Bs, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood had abandoned the Bs. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (think Destination Moon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema. Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come.

At age 23, Shane McSimov was sick of the BS he kept hearing about work, life, business and careers. Three days after starting a new job in Seattle, he grabbed his notebooks, computer, and ideas and booked a round-trip train ride from Seattle to San Francisco. The mission? To write a book in the 24-hour train ride and share all the notes he'd collected so far in his working career: and to cut the crap about what people were saying about business and careers.What results is a collection of 75 funny, real, raw thoughtsand occasional rants about starting a career, doing work that matters, making a difference, and why having a carefully-crafted resume is the last thing you need to make shit happen in today's world. Along the way, he maps his journey with photographs out the train window and annotating what's on his iPod, what's distracting him, and the time it takes to write each post. Raw, funny, vulnerable and to-the-point, each essay cuts down on the layers of crap we hear daily to tell the real story-about how to make it happen.

The #1 New York Times bestseller that explains why bullshit is far more dangerous than lying One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

From 1959 to 1973, the writers B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose regularly wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their own work and literary preoccupations. They exchanged early drafts of poems, short stories, plays and novels, and their correspondence contains detailed comments and extended analyses of these texts, as well as illuminating reflections on literature, criticism, poetics and aesthetics. Though much of the correspondence is an extended literary discussion, it also contains moments of personal revelation, jokes and anecdotes so that the letters, with their surprising asides, are enjoyable to read, even as they inform with their biographical and intellectual content. The two authors also frequently refer to the university poetry journals and literary magazines they contributed to or edited, and they write about the poetry meetings they attended and the writers they met or read. Their involvement in literary groups and their dealings with publishers, editors and agents are indicative of the publishing mechanisms of the time. This correspondence thus not only provides insight into the work of both B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose, but also conjures up a comprehensive picture of the London literary world of the 1960s.