The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals

The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals PDF Author: McSweeney's
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307948633
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Ever since John Hancock broke into song after signing the Declaration of Independence, American politics and musicals have been inextricably linked. From Alexander Hamilton's jazz hands, to Chester A. Arthur's oboe operas, to Newt Gingrich's off-Broadway sexscapade, You, Me, and My Moon Colony Mistress Makes Three, government and musical theater have joined forces to document our nation's long history of freedom, partisanship, and dancers on roller skates pretending to be choo choo trains. To celebrate this grand union of entrenched bureaucracy and song, the patriots at McSweeney's Internet Tendency (“The Iowa Caucus of humor websites”) offer this riotous collection (peacefully assembled!) of monologues, charts, scripts, lists, diatribes, AND musicals written by the noted fake-musical lyricist, Ben Greenman. On the agenda are . . . Fragments from PALIN! THE MUSICAL Barack Obama’s Undersold 2012 Campaign Slogans Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Financial Crisis Your Attempts to Legislate Hunting Man for Sport Reek of Class Warfare A 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Becomes Politically Uncomfortable Donald Rumsfeld Memoir Chapter Title Or German Heavy Metal Song? Noises Political Pundits Would Make If They Were Wild Animals and Not Political Pundits Ron Paul Gives a Guided Tour of His Navajo Art Collection Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, As Told to Me By My Father And much more!

The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals

The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals PDF Author: McSweeney's
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307948633
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ever since John Hancock broke into song after signing the Declaration of Independence, American politics and musicals have been inextricably linked. From Alexander Hamilton's jazz hands, to Chester A. Arthur's oboe operas, to Newt Gingrich's off-Broadway sexscapade, You, Me, and My Moon Colony Mistress Makes Three, government and musical theater have joined forces to document our nation's long history of freedom, partisanship, and dancers on roller skates pretending to be choo choo trains. To celebrate this grand union of entrenched bureaucracy and song, the patriots at McSweeney's Internet Tendency (“The Iowa Caucus of humor websites”) offer this riotous collection (peacefully assembled!) of monologues, charts, scripts, lists, diatribes, AND musicals written by the noted fake-musical lyricist, Ben Greenman. On the agenda are . . . Fragments from PALIN! THE MUSICAL Barack Obama’s Undersold 2012 Campaign Slogans Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Financial Crisis Your Attempts to Legislate Hunting Man for Sport Reek of Class Warfare A 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Becomes Politically Uncomfortable Donald Rumsfeld Memoir Chapter Title Or German Heavy Metal Song? Noises Political Pundits Would Make If They Were Wild Animals and Not Political Pundits Ron Paul Gives a Guided Tour of His Navajo Art Collection Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, As Told to Me By My Father And much more!

A Load of Hooey

A Load of Hooey PDF Author: Bob Odenkirk
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN: 1940450667
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
Bob Odenkirk is a legend in the comedy-writing world, winning Emmys and acclaim for his work on Saturday Night Live, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and many other seminal TV shows. This book, his first, is a spleen-bruisingly funny omnibus that ranges from absurdist monologues (“Martin Luther King, Jr’s Worst Speech Ever”) to intentionally bad theater (“Hitler Dinner Party: A Play”); from avant-garde fiction (“Obituary for the Creator of Madlibs”) to free-verse poetry that's funnier and more powerful than the work of Calvin Trillin, Jewel, and Robert Louis Stevenson combined. Odenkirk's debut resembles nothing so much as a hilarious new sketch comedy show that’s exclusively available as a streaming video for your mind. As Odenkirk himself writes in “The Second Coming of Jesus and Lazarus,” it is a book “to be read aloud to yourself in the voice of Bob Newhart.”

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes PDF Author: McSweeney's
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030738733X
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
As John Hodgman says in this book's introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.” With that in mind, the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters, and spoofs as: Postcards from James Joyce to his Brother Stan Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character? Popular Children's Fairy Tales Reimagined Using Members of My Family The Very Unauthorized Biography of Steven Seagal Chuck Norris Erotica John Updike, Television Writer Jane Eyre Runs for President Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech to a High School Letters from Odysseus's College Roommate And many dozens more.

Mountain Man Dance Moves

Mountain Man Dance Moves PDF Author: McSweeney's
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307277208
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
If a mountain man felt compelled to dance, how would he do it? If koala bears could talk, what would they say? And what’s the right pickup line, if you’re a necrophiliac? (Maybe “I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get you pregnant.”) In the throes of debates like these, we’re lucky to have the learned people of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, America's best low-budget humor website, and their edifying work. From their best-looking writers comes this collection of over three hundred lists, including... “Signs Your Unicorn Is Cheating on You.”"Errors in Communication Between My Hairdresser and Me, in the Form of What I Said and What He Heard""Things This City Was Built On, Besides Rock 'n' Roll""Things This One Girl Sitting Near Me in a Movie Theater Said Out Loud When One of the Characters Was Shown Pulling Into a Gas Station""Future Winners of the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest""Adjectives Rarely Used by Wine Tasters""The Collected Apologies of Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard""Exactly What I Mean When I Say My Ex-Girlfriend Kristin and I 'Wanted Different Things from Life’"And much, much more...

Everything that Rises

Everything that Rises PDF Author: Lawrence Weschler
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

Love in the Time of Time's Up

Love in the Time of Time's Up PDF Author: Christine Sneed
Publisher: Tortoise Books
ISBN: 1948954729
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
With pathos and insight, each of the sixteen accomplished authors—among them Lynn Freed, Karen Bender, May-lee Chai, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza, and Amina Gautier—featured in Love in the Time of Time’s Up skillfully explores the complexities of desire, intention, and what it means to be a woman in the era of Me Too and Time’s Up. From the fraught, sexually charged groves of academia and elevators of corporate America, to the imagined diary entries of Brett Kavanaugh and the tragicomic travails of a woman swiping right on Tinder in order to dispense advice to men whose profiles she finds lacking, these stories offer a blend of humor and horror, victory and heartache, righteous anger and rueful recrimination. It’s a collection that’s sure to leave a mark on readers’ minds—and earn a place in their hearts.

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses PDF Author: Lucy Corin
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN: 1944211101
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback. At the heart of Lucy Corin’s dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer. At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).

Priests of the Law

Priests of the Law PDF Author: Thomas J. McSweeney
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198845456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Priests of the Law tells the story of the first people in the history of the common law to think of themselves as legal professionals. In the middle decades of the thirteenth century, a group of justices working in the English royal courts spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about what it meant to be a person who worked in the law courts. This book examines the justices who wrote the treatise known as Bracton. Written and re-written between the 1220s and the 1260s, Bracton is considered one of the great treatises of the early common law and is still occasionally cited by judges and lawyers when they want to make the case that a particular rule goes back to the beginning of the common law. This book looks to Bracton less for what it can tell us about the law of the thirteenth century, however, than for what it can tell us about the judges who wrote it. The judges who wrote Bracton - Martin of Pattishall, William of Raleigh, and Henry of Bratton - were some of the first people to work full-time in England's royal courts, at a time when there was no recourse to an obvious model for the legal professional. They found one in an unexpected place: they sought to clothe themselves in the authority and prestige of the scholarly Roman-law tradition that was sweeping across Europe in the thirteenth century, modelling themselves on the jurists of Roman law who were teaching in European universities. In Bracton and other texts they produced, the justices of the royal courts worked hard to ensure that the nascent common-law tradition grew from Roman Law. Through their writing, this small group of people, working in the courts of an island realm, imagined themselves to be part of a broader European legal culture. They made the case that they were not merely servants of the king: they were priests of the law.

Rerun Era

Rerun Era PDF Author: Joanna Howard
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN: 9781944211677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

And Then We Grew Up

And Then We Grew Up PDF Author: Rachel Friedman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143132121
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2019 A journey through the many ways to live an artistic life—from the flashy and famous to the quiet and steady—full of unexpected insights about creativity and contentment, from the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost. Rachel Friedman was a serious violist as a kid. She quit music in college but never stopped fantasizing about what her life might be like if she had never put down her bow. Years later, a freelance writer in New York, she again finds herself struggling with her fantasy of an artist’s life versus its much more complicated reality. In search of answers, she decides to track down her childhood friends from Interlochen, a prestigious arts camp she attended, full of aspiring actors, artists, dancers, and musicians, to find out how their early creative ambitions have translated into adult careers, relationships, and identities. Rachel’s conversations with these men and women spark nuanced revelations about creativity and being an artist: that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, that success isn’t always linear, that sometimes it’s okay to quit. And Then We Grew Up is for anyone who has given up a childhood dream and wondered “what-if?”, for those who have aspired to do what they love and had doubts along the way, and for all whose careers fall somewhere between emerging and established. Warm, whip-smart, and insightful, it offers inspiration for finding creative fulfillment wherever we end up in life.