In cultures throughout the world, sex and gender issues have been expressed in proverbs, the world's most concise literary genre. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet provides revealing insights into the female condition across centuries and continents, as recorded in thousands of vivid and earthy proverbs about women. 
Mineke Schipper explores the similarities, differences, and contradictions that coexist in cultural norms about gender from hundreds of languages and over 150 countries. Grouping the sayings into such categories as the female body, love, sex, childbirth, and female power, she finds stunning patterns in ideas about women—and men. This cross-cultural study and critical analysis of proverbs about women is a unique and intriguing resource to dip into again and again.

This is not a dictionary of academic terms you might have been expected to learn in school. Nor is it a dictionary directed to travelers in foreign lands from which you are supposed to learn scores of terms about ordering your dinner in restaurants, or learning to get about in a train station, or arguing with concierges about the state of your hotel room or the high amount of your bill. It is, rather, a dictionary to help you elucidate what you come across every day in newspapers or hear on television. Its choice of terms and directness of style reflect the immediacy of everyday discourse. Thus it is a unique and exceptionally useful addition to the genre of special dictionaries.

DISCOVER’S 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything is the first book written by the editors of the award-winning DISCOVER magazine. Based on DISCOVER’S most eagerly awaited monthly column, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About,” this original book looks at many popular and sometimes unexpected topics in science and technology, and reveals quirky, intriguing, and little-known facts. Whether you’re just curious or think you’ve already known everything, this book is guaranteed to expand your mind.

In the fall of 1978 (between The Stand and The Dead Zone), Stephen King taught a course at the University of Maine on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." As he writes in the foreword to this book, he was nervous at the prospect of "spending a lot of time in front of a lot of people talking about a subject in which I had previously only felt my way instinctively, like a blind man." The course apparently went well, and as with most teaching experiences, it was as instructive, if not more so, to the teacher as it was to the students. Thanks to a suggestion from his former editor at Doubleday, King decided to write Danse Macabre as a personal record of the thoughts about horror that he developed and refined as a result of that course.

The outcome is an utterly charming book that reads as if King were sitting right there with you, shooting the breeze. He starts on October 4, 1957, when he was 10 years old, watching a Saturday matinee of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Just as the saucers were mounting their attack on "Our Nation's Capital," the movie was suddenly turned off. The manager of the theater walked out onto the stage and announced, "The Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it ... Spootnik."

That's how the whole book goes: one simple, yet surprisingly pertinent, anecdote or observation after another. King covers the gamut of horror as he'd experienced it at that point in 1978 (a period of about 30 years): folk tales, literature, radio, good movies, junk movies, and the "glass teat". It's colorful, funny, and nostalgic--and also strikingly intelligent.