Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.
Allan Wesley Eckert was an American novelist and playwright who specialized in historical novels for adults and children, and was also a naturalist. His novel Incident at Hawk's Hill (1971) was initially marketed to adults and selected by Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A runner-up for the Newbery Medal, it was afterward marketed as a children's novel and adapted by Disney for a television movie known as The Boy Who Talked to Badgers (1975).
USS Saratoga (CV-3) was a Lexington-class aircraft carrier built for the United States Navy during the 1920s. Originally designed as a battlecruiser, she was converted into one of the Navy's first aircraft carriers during construction to comply with the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The ship entered service in 1928 and was assigned to the Pacific Fleet for her entire career. Saratoga and her sister ship, Lexington, were used to develop and refine carrier tactics in a series of annual exercises before World War II. On more than one occasion these exercises included successful surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. She was one of three prewar US fleet aircraft carriers, along with Enterprise and Ranger, to serve throughout World War II.
Shōhō was a light aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Originally built as the submarine support ship Tsurugizaki in the late 1930s, she was converted before the Pacific War into an aircraft carrier and renamed. Completed in early 1942, the ship supported the invasion forces in Operation MO, the invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea, and was sunk by American carrier aircraft on her first combat operation during the Battle of the Coral Sea on 7 May. Shōhō was the first Japanese aircraft carrier to be sunk during World War II.
Attachment parenting (AP) is a parenting philosophy that proposes methods aiming to promote the attachment of parent and infant not only by maximal parental empathy and responsiveness but also by continuous bodily closeness and touch. The term attachment parenting was coined by the American pediatrician William Sears. There is no conclusive body of research that shows Sears' approach to be superior to "mainstream parenting".
FLIT is the brand name for an insecticide. The original product, invented by chemist Dr. Franklin C. Nelson and launched in 1923 and mainly intended for killing flies and mosquitoes, was mineral oil based and manufactured by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey before the company, now part of ExxonMobil, was renamed first Esso and later Exxon. The Esso formulation contained 5% DDT in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the negative environmental impact of DDT was widely understood. Later marketed as "FLIT MLO", it has since been discontinued. A hand-operated atomizer called a Flit gun was commonly used to perform the spraying.
A salvage tug, known also historically as a wrecking tug, is a specialized type of tugboat that is used to rescue ships that are in distress or in danger of sinking, or to salvage ships that have already sunk or run aground.
HMS Speedy was a 14-gun Speedy-class brig of the British Royal Navy. Built during the last years of the American War of Independence, she served with distinction during the French Revolutionary Wars.
HMS Danae was the lead ship of the Danae-class cruisers, serving with the Royal Navy between the world wars and with the Polish Navy during the latter part of World War II as ORP Conrad.
Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean is a children's novel by British author Justin Somper about two young siblings who get separated at sea and are picked up by two very different ships.
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and has been nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. Nonfiction essays of his have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers, including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune.
Gay pulp fiction, or gay pulps, refers to printed works, primarily fiction, that include references to male homosexuality, specifically male gay sex, and that are cheaply produced, typically in paperback books made of wood pulp paper; lesbian pulp fiction is similar work about women. Michael Bronski, the editor of an anthology of gay pulp writing, notes in his introduction, "Gay pulp is not an exact term, and it is used somewhat loosely to refer to a variety of books that had very different origins and markets". People often use the term to refer to the "classic" gay pulps that were produced before about 1970, but it may also be used to refer to the gay erotica or pornography in paperback book or digest magazine form produced since that date.
HMS Dauntless was a Danae-class light cruiser of the Royal Navy. She was built by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company of Jarrow, launched on 10 April 1918 and commissioned on 22 November 1918.
Barry Lyga is an American young adult novelist and short story writer. He lives in New York. Lyga majored in English at Yale receiving his BA in 1993. He then spent ten years working at Diamond Comic Distributors after having spent his teenage years immersed in comic books. During this period, Lyga had seen his short stories published. His book Archvillain was released in October 2013. and I Hunt Killers was released in March 2012.
"The Shobies' Story" is a 1990 science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, describing the story of the first human crew to participate in a newly invented faster-than-light mode of space travel. It was first published in the anthology Universe 1 and subsequently appeared in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea published by Harper Prism in 1994.
Allen Zadoff is an American author of young adult fiction. He is mainly known for his young adult novels including the series Wild & Chance and The Unknown Assassin/Boy Nobody. His novel Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can’t Have was awarded the 2010 Sid Fleischman Humor Award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. and was included in Popular Young Adult Paperbacks of 2012 by YALSA. It has also been optioned for a feature film. His other novels for young adults include My Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies and Since You Left Me. He is also the author of The Unknown Assassin books from Little Brown Books for Young Readers.
Gail Carriger is an author of steampunk fiction and an American archaeologist. She was born in Bolinas, an unincorporated community in Marin County, California, and attended high school at Marin Academy. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, a masters of science in archaeological materials at England's University of Nottingham in 2000, and a master of arts in anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008. She is a 2010 recipient of the Alex Awards.
James Patterson has written or co-written many "Bookshots" or novellas, and has co-written books with many authors. The list below separates the works into four main categories: fiction written for adults, for young adults and for children, and non-fiction.
SS Margaret Olwill was a shipping vessel originally constructed in 1887 to transport goods on Lake Erie. It was rebuilt twice to new specifications. It was wrecked in 1899 in an unexpected June storm with the loss of at least eight lives.
The Drowned Cities is a 2012 young adult novel by Paolo Bacigalupi set in a post-apocalyptic future. The book is a sequel to Ship Breaker.
