From the world leader in fascinating facts and amusing true stories comes a book about all things beer. For more than 25 years, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader has helped you learn amazing things you didn’t know (and amazing things you didn’t know you didn’t know). Now, Uncle John’s tackles one of the world’s best loved and—fastest growing interests— beer. Pull up a stool and chug a pint of Beer-Topia, a rich, deep-bodied keg of beer knowledge, beer trivia, beer history, and beer fun. In recent years, beer has evolved from the swill your uncle drank at the bowling alley to the explosively-popular “microbrew” culture. There’s a lot to explore about the beer phenomenon, and Beer-Topia will plumb the depths. What’s on tap: The histories and origins of all the different styles of beers Interesting (and weird) beer flavors The science of beer, and how it’s made Crazy beer-related news stories Beer terminology Funny microbrew names And lots, lots more!

Uncle John is back with the 36th annual Bathroom Reader, an all-new collection of entertaining articles that explore the weird and wonderful world we live in. In this 36th edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, longtime fans and new readers alike will be astounded by a treasure trove of wonderfully weird (and true!) stories that explore the realms of pop culture, history, sports, science, and everyday folks, including the always popular misadventures of dumb crooks. Uncle John and his team at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute have reached into all corners of the world to bring you this all-new collection of entertaining and informative articles that include short reads for a quick trip to the throne room as well as longer page-turners for when you take an extended visit. You’ll also find a plethora of amusing lists, odd factoids, quotes, and quizzes that will tickle every trivia enthusiast’s fancy.

Awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Byron Society in 2013 The nineteenth century is sometimes seen as a lacuna between two literary periods. In terms of women’s writing, however, the era between the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the 1860s feminist movement produced a coherent body of major works, impelled by an ongoing dialogue between Enlightenment ‘feminism’ and late Romanticism. This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Lord Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous critics’ segregation of the male Romantic writers from their female peers. The Romantic movement in general unleashed the creative ambitions of nineteenth-century female novelists, and the public voice of Byron in particular engaged them in transnational issues of political, national and sexual freedom. Byronism had itself been shaped by the poet’s incursion onto a literary scene where women readers were dominant and formidable intellectuals such as Madame de Staël were lionized. Byron engaged in rivalrous dialogue with the novels of his female friends and contemporaries, such as Caroline Lamb, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, whose critiques of Romantic egotism helped prompt his own self-parody in Don Juan. Later Victorian novelists, such as George Sand, the Brontë sisters and Harriet Beecher Stowe, wove their rejection of their childhood attraction to Byronism, and their dawning awareness of the significance for women of Lady Byron’s actions, into the feminist fabric of their art.

This collection of new essay examines how authors of the 20th and 21st centuries continue the use of sentimental forms and tropes of 19th century literature. Current literary and cultural critical consensus seems to maintain that Americans engaged in a turn-of-the-century refutation of the sentimental mode; an analysis of 20th and 21st century narratives, however, reveals an ongoing use of sentimental expression that draws upon its ability to instruct and influence readers through their emotions. While these later narratives employ aspects of the sentimental mode, many of them also engage in a critique of the failures of the sentimental, deconstructing 19th century perspectives on race, class and gender and the ways they are promoted by sentimental ideals.