Stephan Pastis offers Pearls Before Swine fans a combustible collection brimming with explosive action inside Pearls Blows Up. Collecting every cartoon from 50,000,000 Pearls Fans Can't Be Wrong and When Pigs Fly, this hot-to-the-touch, volatile edition also includes annotated thoughts reflecting Pastis's searing wit.

Offering blistering commentary on hot-button topics related to recent news events, popular culture, cartoon-page contemporaries, and more, Pearls Before Swine expertly illustrates the flaws and shortcomings of human nature through Pastis's mindful menagerie of fiery and feisty characters. Arrogant, self-centered, and totally hilarious Rat stars in misadventure after misadventure with his four-legged friends, Pig, the slow but good-hearted conscience of the strip; Goat, the voice of reason that often goes unheard; Zebra, the activist; and those eternally inept carnivorous Crocs.

Catch the dynamite action inside this hot-off-the-press edition of Pearls Blows Up. With multiple honors as Best Comic Strip of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society, and an international fan base that follows the strip's appearance in more than 600 newspapers worldwide, Pearls Blows Up is guaranteed to be a blast.

A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams...A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim...In the stories collected here -- including "Blow-Up;' on which Antonioni based his film -- Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible. This is the most brilliant and celebrated book of short stories by a master of the form.

When a violent explosion rocks Los Angeles, killing thousands and leveling an entire beachfront community, the news media reports that a nuclear device was involved. The government receives an ominous threat from an anonymous Middle Eastern source: Similar attacks will be launched upon other American cities unless all aid to Israel is terminated, virtually isolating the Jewish State and allowing its Arab neighbors to overrun it. The FBI, CIA and other federal organizations are called to action. A crack U.S. Israeli team is given the daunting assignment of uncovering the source of the threat and the identity of the next targeted city against a five day deadline.
The team: Lara, a young female FBI computer whiz and Uri, a charismatic male Mossad field agent. Theirs is a breakneck chase across the country in a race against time and the unknown terrorists.

When a violent explosion rocks Los Angeles, killing thousands and leveling an entire beachfront community, the news media reports that a nuclear device was involved. The government receives an ominous threat from an anonymous Middle Eastern source: Similar attacks will be launched upon other American cities unless all aid to Israel is terminated, virtually isolating the Jewish State and allowing its Arab neighbors to overrun it. The FBI, CIA and other federal organizations are called to action. A crack U.S. Israeli team is given the daunting assignment of uncovering the source of the threat and the identity of the next targeted city against a five day deadline.
The team: Lara, a young female FBI computer whiz and Uri, a charismatic male Mossad field agent. Theirs is a breakneck chase across the country in a race against time and the unknown terrorists.

CD ALBUM

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through political statements and romantic liaisons, these musicians broke through the government's official narrative and gave their audiences an unprecedented vision of the black American experience. In the process, new collaborations developed between Americans and the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East--collaborations that fostered greater racial pride and solidarity.

Though intended as a color-blind promotion of democracy, this unique Cold War strategy unintentionally demonstrated the essential role of African Americans in U.S. national culture. Through the tales of these tours, Von Eschen captures the fascinating interplay between the efforts of the State Department and the progressive agendas of the artists themselves, as all struggled to redefine a more inclusive and integrated American nation on the world stage.

When my husband divorced me for a trophy wife, I thought my sex life was over. Then I started working at a truck stop, found a spy hole to the men’s bathroom and was given a blow-up sex doll in the form of a Great Dane with a penis bigger than Job. Suddenly I was having sex with it, Billy Boy, who was hung like a horse, and Thelma, whose breast were humongous. This is a hot nasty story filled with straight, and gay sex, and lesbian sex . . . something for everyone.

When my husband divorced me for a trophy wife, I thought my sex life was over. Then I started working at a truck stop, found a spy hole to the men’s bathroom and was given a blow-up sex doll in the form of a Great Dane with a penis bigger than Job. Suddenly I was having sex with it, Billy Boy, who was hung like a horse, and Thelma, whose breast were humongous. This is a hot nasty story filled with straight, and gay sex, and lesbian sex . . . something for everyone.

Lon Cerel, the "world's fastest balloon animal maker," has written a how-to for all of us who wish we could make poodles, elephants, and such out of balloons the way Lon and some of his fellow artists do.

Here, in a highly-illustrated book that captures the fun of Cerel's standup comedy-with-magic-and-ballooning act, are step-by-step instructions covering everything from how to correctly inflate the balloon without inflating your cheeks, through numerous rubber creatures, all the way to a few hats you can actually wear if you don't mind being made fun of.

Featuring a "Forewarned" by the inimitable Henny Youngman, Cerel's book comes with a coupon for 20 free balloons to get you started.

The book also features easy-to-understand illustrations cover to cover for all of the balloon sculptures.

Lon Cerel's How To Blow Up Animals: A Beginner's Guide to Fun with Balloons makes a great birthday gift, anniversary present, or the perfect gift for that person who has everything!

A subject not discussed very often is the causes of guns that blow up or are damaged during shooting. This book goes into detail on these incidents and how to prevent them. There is a lot of food for thought here.

A subject not discussed very often is the causes of guns that blow up or are damaged during shooting. This book goes into detail on these incidents and how to prevent them. There is a lot of food for thought here.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up is a masterfully constructed and paced exploration of the enigmas that challenge our interpretations of both the moving and the still image. Photography plays a key role at the very core of the film, providing the metaphorical site for the director's questioning of the relationship between reality and perceptions.

This book provides a fresh and stimulating study of Antonioni's masterpiece. It reassembles and re-tells - through onset stills and the original blow-ups - the film's key narrative and pictorial strands in a focused visual investigation that is complemented by the authors' analytical essays. These texts draw on new research and effectively situate the film in the social and creative contexts that informed Antonioni's screenplay and art direction - on the one hand through an account of the milieu of fashionable photographers and models and the media through which they became so vivid a phenomenon, and on the other hand through the revelation of the artistic and literary reference points that so pervasively enrich the film.