This 1901 volume of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language completely updates the classic reference work first published in 1882. Skeat provides a staggering number of words, including those most frequently used in everyday speech and those most prominent in literature. They appear along with their definitions, their language of origin, their roots, and their derivatives. Those who are fascinated with the English language will find much to explore here and many overlooked but interesting tidbits and treasures of an ever-evolving language. Walter W. Skeat was a scholar of Old English, mathematics, English place names, and Anglo-Saxon. He founded the English Dialect Society in 1873 and was a professor at Cambridge University. Skeat edited many classic works, including Lancelot of the Laik, Piers Plowman, The Bruce, Lives of Saints, and a seven-volume edition of Chaucer.

Have you ever heard about the thirteen curses of Hollywood celebrities? How about a relative, a nobody, or a neighbor next door. Planted a seed in the mother of a child of Satan that my grandfather created when he had an affair with a woman, when he took a trip to Canada after his divorce in 1939, and had a child out of wedlock from this woman who was not created out of love but anger. Because of the fact that he had four years of free time before he got married to his second wife, who he was with until the day he passed away. Therefore, it was not until 1975 when his daughter (Dorothy) came in contact with her biological father, and came back into his life as a daughter of his he met for the first time. Little did we know this woman turned out to be nothing but a bad luck omen. She brought chaos into everyone’s life to the point of people dying of cancer, health problems that played hide and seek with the doctors, families getting divorces that have been married for 30 years or more, and so many other freak and bizarre scenarios that you just can’t imagine. Because it was not your normal good and bad every day things people dealt with in life, you will learn about these things when you read the dark star of the Dorothy Curse.

New York Times Bestseller: This true Depression-era story of a down-and-out fighter’s dramatic comeback is “a delight” (David Halberstam). James J. Braddock was a once promising light heavyweight. But a string of losses in the ring and a broken right hand happened to coincide with the Great Crash of 1929—and Braddock was forced to labor on the docks of Hoboken. Only his manager, Joe Gould, still believed in him. Gould looked out for the burly, quiet Irishman, finding matches for Braddock to help him feed his wife and children. Together, they were about to stage the greatest comeback in fighting history. Within twelve months, Braddock went from being on the relief rolls to facing heavyweight champion Max Baer, renowned for having allegedly killed two men in the ring. A brash Jewish boxer from the West Coast, Baer was heavily favored—but Braddock carried the hopes and dreams of the working class on his shoulders, and when he emerged victorious against all odds, the shock was palpable—and the cheers were deafening. In the wake of his surprise win, Damon Runyon dubbed him “Cinderella Man.” Against the gritty backdrop of the 1930s, Cinderella Man brings this dramatic all-American story to life, telling a classic David and Goliath tale that transcends the sport. “A punchy read with touches of humor.” —The New York Times “A wonderful, thrilling boxing story, and simultaneously a meticulous look at Depression life.” —Jimmy Breslin

For more than eighty years, The New Yorker has been home to some of the toughest, wisest, funniest, and most moving sportswriting around. The Only Game in Town is a classic collection from a magazine with a deep bench, including such authors as Roger Angell, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and John McPhee. Hall of Famer Ring Lardner is here, bemoaning the lowering of standards for baseball achievement—in 1930. John Cheever pens a story about a boy’s troubled relationship with his father and the national pastime. From Lance Armstrong to bullfighter Sidney Franklin, from the Chinese Olympics to the U.S. Open, the greatest plays and players, past and present, are all covered in The Only Game in Town. At The New Yorker, it’s not whether you win or lose—it’s how you write about the game. Including: “The Web of the Game” by Roger Angell “Ahab and Nemesis” by A. J . Liebling “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” by John Updike “The Only Games in Town” by Anthony Lane “Race Track” by Bill Barich “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee “El Único Matador” by Lillian Ross “Net Worth” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “The Long Ride” by Michael Specter “Born Slippy” by John Seabrook “The Chosen One” by David Owen “Legend of a Sport” by Alva Johnston “A Man-Child in Lotusland” by Rebecca Mead “Dangerous Game” by Nick Paumgarten “The Running Novelist” by Haruki Murakami “Back to the Basement” by Nancy Franklin “Playing Doc’s Games” by William Finnegan “Last of the Metrozoids” by Adam Gopnik “The Sandy Frazier Dream Team” by Ian Frazier “Br’er Rabbit Ball” by Ring Lardner “The Greens of Ireland” by Herbert Warren Wind “Tennis Personalities” by Martin Amis “Project Knuckleball” by Ben McGrath “Game Plan” by Don DeLillo “The Art of Failure” by Malcolm Gladwell “Swimming with Sharks” by Charles Sprawson “The National Pastime” by John Cheever “SNO” by Calvin Trillin “Musher” by Susan Orlean “Home and Away” by Peter Hessler “No Obstacles” by Alec Wikinson “A Stud’s Life” by Kevin Conley

Among the legendary athletes of the 1920s, the unquestioned halcyon days of sports, stands Gene Tunney, the boxer who upset Jack Dempsey in spectacular fashion, notched a 77—1 record as a prizefighter, and later avenged his sole setback (to a fearless and highly unorthodox fighter named Harry Greb). Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring, Tunney willingly receded into the background, renouncing the image of jock celebrity that became the stock in trade of so many of his contemporaries. To this day, Gene Tunney’s name is most often recognized only in conjunction with his epic “long count” second bout with Dempsey. In Tunney, the veteran journalist and author Jack Cavanaugh gives an account of the incomparable sporting milieu of the Roaring Twenties, centered around Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the gladiators whose two titanic clashes transfixed a nation. Cavanaugh traces Tunney’s life and career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunney’s native Greenwich Village to the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of his only love, the heiress Polly Lauder; from Parris Island to Yale University; from Tunney learning fisticuffs as a skinny kid at the knee of his longshoreman father to his reign atop boxing’s glamorous heavyweight division. Gene Tunney defied easy categorization, as a fighter and as a person. He was a sex symbol, a master of defensive boxing strategy, and the possessor of a powerful, and occasionally showy, intellect–qualities that prompted the great sportswriters of the golden age of sports to portray Tunney as “aloof.” This intelligence would later serve him well in the corporate world, as CEO of several major companies and as a patron of the arts. And while the public craved reports of bad blood between Tunney and Dempsey, the pair were, in reality, respectful ring adversaries who in retirement grew to share a sincere lifelong friendship–with Dempsey even stumping for Tunney’s son, John, during the younger Tunney’s successful run for Congress. Tunney offers a unique perspective on sports, celebrity, and popular culture in the 1920s. But more than an exciting and insightful real-life tale, replete with heads of state, irrepressible showmen, mobsters, Hollywood luminaries, and the cream of New York society, Tunney is an irresistible story of an American underdog who forever changed the way fans look at their heroes.

Magic, mystery and murder in a mystical small town setting. This volume contains books four through six: A Taste of Honey Touch of a Vanished Hand The Spirit of the Place Second Chances, Enemies to Lovers, Opposites Attract, First Love, Holiday Magic, Suspense, Angels.