Seven-year-old Stink Moody, having discovered that he can get free samples by writing letters of complaint to companies, gets so caught up in his letter writing campaign that he misses his best friend's birthday, but he plans a super surprise to make up for his mistake.

"Here, in these four crisp essays on writing and reading by the internationally bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion...

Provides strategies, tips, and four practice tests covering listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills and is thematically arranged by history, science, education, business, social science, arts, technology, and entertainment.

"The introductory pages of the Common Core State Standards call for the following distributions of text: 50% literary/50% information (4th grade); 45% literary/55% information (8th grade); 30% literary/70% information (12th grade). This is a major shift in encouraging teachers to get students understanding and using more academic language as they progress through middle and high school. Many students today, whether they are native English speakers...

"Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Why should a group of aging Swedish men determine what "world" literature is best? Do books change anything? Did they use to? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I'm Reading From, the internationally acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over a lifetime...

"A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities...

"Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman's work, Maus Now gathers together many of contemporary culture's leading critics, authors, and academics on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus more than forty years since its first publication. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and it is hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus has shaped the fields...

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins, share an obsession with words. As adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation begins to push them apart. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

Including 64 focused snapshots of outreach in action, this resource reflects the creative solutions of librarians searching for new and innovative ways to build programs that meet customer needs while expanding the library's scope into the community