From the producer of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, the director of Poultry in Motion: Truth is Stranger than Chicken, and the writer of The Stormglass Protocol for the iPad comes the blog compilation of the decade! Featuring unseen photos, original stories, deranged dishes, new adventures and all your favorite AsiaObscura moments, as seen in BoingBoing, io9, The Huffington Post, Ain't It Cool News, The Phnom Penh Insider, China Daily and The Daily Mail. Praise for Andy Deemer's cheesesteak ice cream: "We may be witnessing the birth of a new frozen treat genre" - THE VILLAGE VOICE "Don't blame us when everyone stops wanting to come to your ice cream socials." - BON APPETIT "Amazingly, it didn't make him want to vomit forever." - THAT'S NERDALICIOUS "Did he go too far (like, to the Land of Cray-Cray)?" - INCREDIBLE THINGS

Eighteenth-century anatomist Honoré Fragonard’s écorchés—preserved dissected real animal and human cadavers—are extraordinary works of virtuosic skill that have survived nearly two and a half centuries in the Fragonard Museum in Alfort, on the outskirts of Paris. Like the superb anatomical preparations made by the renowned seventeenth- to eighteenth-century anatomist Frederik Ruysch, Fragonard’s specimens challenge our understanding of historical science, Western culture, and the display of the dead. A desiccated rider mounted atop a galloping horse, wondrous demonstrations of animal anatomy: these impressive spectacles of permanently preserved bodies are still on display in the stunning collection of the Fragonard Museum. Intriguing, strange, and the rarest of rare, Fragonard’s écorchés are specimens from a realm that exists between art and science and are the historical precursor of modern-day plastinated anatomical specimens popularly exhibited worldwide.

In The Way of All Flesh Midas Dekkers argues that things are at their most beautiful when they decay, provided they are given the chance. Old buildings are usually pulled down or restored. Aging people desperately try to act and look young, because novelty, youth, and beauty are equated in our minds with what is desirable. Only mankind is bothered by the realization that "life is a way of dying slowly." By ignoring or evading the lure of decay, which has its own attractions, are we simply trying to escape from the truth?

With the idiosyncratic erudition of the European intellectual-Roberto Calasso and Umberto Eco come to mind-Dekkers stresses that our aversion to decay and mortality makes our lives shallow. This is the meditative essay as Fellini might have written it; Dekkers asserts that ancient Rome's days of decline were its finest. The Way of All Flesh is a profound and entertaining meditation on what it means to outlive one's usefulness, when the wheel of fortune has gone full circle.

These are soft mathematics, they don't explain, they express...

A highly comprehensive compendium tackles a perpetually fascinating topic: American folklore, fairy tales, beliefs, practices, and symbols that all have superstitions attached to them.

424pages. poche. Poche.

Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals—a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the nineteenth-century spectator at the dime museum. This distinctly American phenomenon was unprecedented in both the diversity of its amusements and in its democratic appeal, with audiences traversing the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and class. Andrea Stulman Dennett's Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history.

Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its eighteenth-century inception as a "cabinet of curiosities" to its death at the hands of new amusement technologies in the early twentieth century. From big theaters which accommodated audiences of three thousand to meager converted storefronts exhibiting petrified wood and living anomalies, this study vividly reanimates the array of museums, exhibits, and performances that make up this entertainment institution. Tracing the scattered legacy of the dime museum from vaudeville theater to Ripley's museum to the talk show spectacles of today, Dennett makes a significant contribution to the history of American popular entertainment.

Growing up on Coney Island in the '¬?50s and '¬?60s, Charles Denson experienced legendary amusements and attractions like the Cyclone and Thunderbolt roller coasters, the Parachute Jump, and Steeplechase Park. In CONEY ISLAND: LOST AND FOUND, Denson gives us an insider'¬?s look at one of New York'¬?s best-known neighborhoods, weaving together memories of his childhood adventures with colorful stories of the area'¬?s past and interviews with local personalities, all brought to life by hundreds of photographs, detailed maps, and authentic memorabilia. CONEY ISLAND is a heartfelt chronicle that stretches from colonial times to the island'¬?s heyday in the early 20th century and through its subsequent decline and revival, culminating in the 2001 opening of the new ballpark that brought baseball back to Brooklyn.‚Ä¢ Features 300 color and black-and-white photographs, including many never-before-published images.‚Ä¢ Detailed hand-drawn maps trace a century of amusement park history.‚Ä¢ Includes posters, programs, and tickets from past and present.Reviews"Evocative."-Newark Star-LedgerRecommended in "New York Bookshelf, Nonfiction" -New York Times"Charles Denson traces CONEY ISLAND . . . in all its glory." -Birmingham News"[A] crisply researched and tenderly rendered love letter." - St. Petersburg Times"Many delightful details assembled in the thoughtful and handsome" volume." -San Francisco Chronicle"Denson'¬?s CONEY ISLAND is a well-researched, passionate account of his neighborhood's decline and rebirth is an invaluable addition . . . to American history." -New York'¬?s City Limits

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