After his mother, hurrying to her tuba lesson, tells him that a poem will cure his pet fish's boredom, a little boy tries to find out what a poem is by asking friends, neighbors, and other members of his family.

“Humorous and forthright...[Gaby] Dunn makes facing money issues seem not only palatable but possibly even fun....Dunn’s book delivers.” —Publishers Weekly The beloved writer-comedian expands on her popular podcast with an engaging and empowering financial literacy book for Millennials and Gen Z. In the first episode of her “Bad With Money” podcast, Gaby Dunn asked patrons at a coffee shop two questions: First, what’s your favorite sex position? Everyone was game to answer, even the barista. Then, she asked how much money was in their bank accounts. People were aghast. “That’s a very personal question,” they insisted. And therein lies the problem. Dunn argues that our inability to speak honestly about money is our #1 barrier to understanding it, leading us to feel alone, ashamed and anxious, which in turns makes us feel even more overwhelmed by it. In Bad With Money, she reveals the legitimate, systemic reasons behind our feeling of helplessness when it comes to personal finance, demystifying the many signposts on the road to getting our financial sh*t together, like how to choose an insurance plan or buy a car, sign up for a credit card or take out student loans. She speaks directly to her audience, offering advice on how to make that #freelancelyfe work for you, navigate money while you date, and budget without becoming a Nobel-winning economist overnight. Even a topic as notoriously dry as money becomes hilarious and engaging in the hands of Dunn, who weaves her own stories with the perspectives of various comedians, artists, students, and more, arguing that—even without selling our bodies to science or suffering the indignity of snobby thrift shop buyers—we can all start taking control of our financial futures.

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously' How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion' The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

It’s easy for the mind to accept that an intelligent device is able to link pieces of information faster and with more accuracy than herself. However, she refuses to admit that she can learn nothing about “It”, which is at the same time, the origin and the substance of everything that exists. As a result of this resistance to being defeated she has generated concepts about “It”, calling it God (from a religious perspective) or Universe (from a scientific perspective) with a wide range of variations in between. Due to this fundamental impotence to know something about what contains herself, sooner or later her ideas get caught in contradictions that reflect our mental limitations. This way when she wonders about the origin of God, she tells herself it’s infinite, but answers nothing with this, given that she herself cannot imagine something without and end or a limit, projecting in this way her own configuration. The reader may try to imagine something endless and sooner or later will find a “wall” at the end of that image. Making an effort to represent a limitless expansion, with no beginning and no end, after the first dizziness caused by the mental effort, he will find vague limits but limits at last. The mind carries in its own structure time and space as a reflection of her own conformation. Infinity is not accessed with the mind. This is why (its inherent structure) the mirror doesn’t show what is not in front of it and it is not possible to imagine light without conceiving the existence of darkness. It is possible to transcend time/space but not for the mind. How could a fish from the depths imagine the surface or something different from the ocean in which it is immersed from birth to death? In the same way, when science asks about the beginning, speaks of a moment (the big bang) in which everything starts, even time and space necessary for the universe to be. Nevertheless, the scientist cannot imagine the total nothingness that would have existed before the initial explosion. (This “nothingness” would anyway be “something”, which invalidates the scientific thesis) Despite all the macrocosmic and quantum terminology that is used, it is still hard not to see a creationist formulation similar to that from genesis or from other religious writings. In one case it is said that it was only God, that only He existed and that he made the world; in the other, it is said that there was a spot of infinite density and concentration of energy that exploded producing the universe. The hypothesis is not the problem, but in the fact that it is not acknowledged that we are talking about a belief, situated in the same ontological status as any other.

"Fear of the unknown--it is the essence of the best horror stories, the need to know what monstrous vision you're beholding and the underlying terror that you just might find out. Now, twenty authors have gathered to ask--and maybe answer--a question worthy of almost any horror tale: "What the #@ & % is that?"Join these masters of suspense as they take you to where the shadows grow long, and that which lurks at the corner of your vision is all too real"--Amazon.com.

Now in paperback and with a new foreword, a kaleidoscopic look at the many faces of Bob Dylan, legendary folk singer-songwriter and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock's shifting sensibilities. Few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined, yet he remains something of an enigma. Who, we ask, is the "real" Bob Dylan? Is he Bobby Zimmerman, yearning to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, or the Woody Guthrie wannabe playing Greenwich Village haunts? Folk Messiah, Born-Again Bob, Late-Elvis Dylan, Jack Fate, or Living National Treasure? In Who Is That Man? David Dalton--cultural historian, journalist, screenwriter, and novelist--paints a revealing portrait of the rock icon, ingeniously exposing the three-card monte games he plays with his persona. Guided by Dalton's cutting-edge insights and myth-debunking point of view, Who Is That Man? follows Dylan's imaginative life, integrating actual events with Dylan's words and those of the people who know him most intimately. Drawing upon Dylan's friends and fellow eyewitnesses--including Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Stampfel , Larry "Ratso" Sloman, Eric Andersen, Nat Hentoff, Andrew Oldham, Nat Finkelstein, and others--this book will provide a new perspective on the man, the myth, and the musical era that forged them both.