Awesome Awkward Album and Music Offers

Have you ever been in a situation in which you were caught off guard, left speechless, or, worse yet, put your foot in your mouth?

This easily accessible book focuses on those moments when knowing exactly what to say is both a challenge and important. From the light-hearted how to react when your boyfriend gives you a blender as a gift or what to say when you run into another lady at a party wearing exactly the same dress to the more serious what to say to a friend who has had a miscarriage or to a friend who has suffered the sudden death of a parent.

As A Lady Would Say differs from other etiquette books. It not only offers suggestions for the correct thing to say in more than 100 social situations, but it gives humorous examples of the wrong thing to say as well.  Saying the right thing requires a little logic, a bit of forethought, and a great deal of consideration for others. With the advice provided in this book, a lady will never need to stumble or stutter again.

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Price: $5.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This easily accessible book focuses on those moments when knowing exactly what to say is an absolutely necessary challenge From the light-hearted how to react when someone turns you down for a date or what to say when you notice someone's fly is open to the more serious what to say to a co-worker who has had a miscarriage or to a friend who has suffered the sudden death of a parent, As A Gentleman Would Say differs from other etiquette books in that it not only offers suggestions for the correct thing to say in more than 100 social situations--it also gives examples of the wrong thing to say!.
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ariel Schrag captures the American high school experience in all its awkward, questioning glory in Awkward and Definition, the first of three amazingly honest autobiographical graphic novels about her teenage years.

During the summer following each year at Berkeley High School in California, Ariel wrote a comic book about her experiences, which she would then photocopy and sell around school. Some friends thrilled to see themselves in the comic, others not so much, but everyone was interested.

Awkward chronicles Ariel's freshman year, and Definition, her sophomore year. With anxiety in excess and frustration to the fullest, Ariel dives in -- meeting new people, going to concerts, crushing out, loving chemistry, drawing comics, and obsessing over everything from glitter-laden girls to ionic charges and the constant pursuit of the number-one score.

Totally true and achingly honest, with every cringe-inducing encounter and exhilarating first moment documented -- Awkward and Definition is an unflinching look at what it's like being a teenage girl in America..
Price: $4.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Stranded in Portsmouth, John Pearce has once again failed to secure the release of those who depended on him his fellow Pelicans They have been shipped off to the Mediterranean while he was indulging himself in London. So he must take ship and follow them. His application to William Pitt for a place finds him as 8th lieutenant on HMS Victory, flagship of Admiral Lord Hood. South and ahead of him, his Pelicans are serving under a flogging captain, but all is not lost as each of the gang does what he can to promote himself O Hagan fights to establish his place in the below decks hierarch; Taverner carves out a niche where his trickery can work to the gang's advantage; Gherson ends up as secretary to Rear Admiral Ralph Barclay. As the action moves to the main French Mediterranean port of Toulon, the tension between crews and captains intensifies, coming to a brilliant head when the HMS Brilliant is detached from the fleet under the orders of Captain Horatio Nelson, bound for North Africa..
Price: $9.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This fourth volume in the Library of America edition of the complete novels of Henry James contains the four novels he wrote after a failed attempt to forge a career as a playwright on the London stage. Together they mark the beginning of the brilliant period in the novelist's career known as the late phase.

The Other House (1896) shows James incorporating an act of murder into the heart of his narrative. Long neglected, the novel is a fascinating glimpse into a very different side of Henry James, as he explores the violent implications of jealousy and possessiveness. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), the artworks conserved in the manor house of the title become the object of a protracted power struggle between the mother and the fiancée of the heir to the house. The struggle, in this most tightly constructed of James's late novels, hinges ultimately on the sensitivities of a third woman.

What Maisie Knew (1897) recounts the aftermath of a divorce through the eyes of the couple's daughter. James adopts what he described as "the consciousness, the dim, sweet, scared, wondering, clinging perception of the child." Similarly experimental, The Awkward Age (1899) maps the interrelations of a large cast of characters, a group of old friends and their children, almost entirely through dialogue. The ambiguity of childhood innocence is central to both of these novels..
Price: $23.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Her writing shines."-The New York Times Book Review

Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys-from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text-to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.

Mary Cappello is the author of Night Bloom (1999) and is a professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Price: $10.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Little fixes for life's BIG faux pas

Figuring out which salad fork to use is a relative no-brainer, but what's the protocol for using a lockless bathroom or getting caught regifting?

Saving Face daringly examines dozens of our worst-case social scenarios. Using helpful illustrations and a "toolbox" of general techniques and technologies, you'll learn what to do if caught:

• Arriving without a gift
• Forgetting a name
• Being served horrible food
• Starting or ending a workplace romance
• Sitting next to your boss on a plane
• Mistakenly thinking someone's coming on to you
• Clogging someone else's toilet
• Getting rid of guests
• Leaving a bad phone message

From the office to the dining room to the appearance of freeloading cousins at your doorstep, you'll confidently turn snafus into saves and finesse those social situations once destined for disaster..
Price: $0.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers—Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow—used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers’ statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the Supremes.

Awkward sees Franklin’s early album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, released shortly after Washington’s death in 1964, as an attempt by a struggling young singer to replace her idol as the acknowledged queen of the black female vocal tradition. He contends that Green’s album Call Me (1973) reveals the performer’s attempt to achieve formal coherence by uniting seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his personal history, including his career in popular music and his religious yearnings, as well as his sense of himself as both a cosmopolitan black artist and a forlorn country boy. Turning to Snow’s album Second Childhood (1976), Awkward suggests that through covers of blues and soul songs, Snow, a white Jewish woman from New York, explored what it means for non-black enthusiasts to perform works considered by many to be black cultural productions. The only book-length examination of the role of remakes in American popular music, Soul Covers is itself a refreshing new take on the lives and work of three established soul artists..
Price: $9.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]