A hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhereElla Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”Now Ella finds herself acting to save her fr...

The story of the second British penal settlement in Australia, where a notoriously brutal convict regime became the template for penal stations in other states. Mark Dunn explores relations between the white settlers and the local Aboriginal landholders, and uncovers a long forgotten massacre.Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Australian History 2021In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat and were swept ashore near present...

A novel in footnotes by the best-selling author of Ella Minnow Pea. When the only copy of his manuscript - a biography of a three-legged circus performer-come-entrepreneur - is lost by a careless editor, writer Mark Dunn accepts an offer to publish the only surviving text - the footnotes. With great playfulness, Dunn writes himself into this full-length novel; a totally original story constructed mischievously in the margins of a lost book, and an extraordinary fictional life. The result is a...

From 1983 to 1987, author Mark Dunn worked as a court clerk for a justice of the peace in Travis County, Texas, where, he says, “I learned more about human nature . . . than I could have learned in any other job I might have taken up as a bushy-tailed kid from Tennessee.” Based on interviews with 200 justices of the peace from all parts of Texas, Texas People’s Court promises to take readers on a tour of what it means to be a Texas justice of the peace: an experience that is by tu...

From Geronimo! to gesundheit to haminahamina to holy mackerel , and from abracadabra to zoinks —a look at interjections like you've never seen them before.Often thought of as unnecessary verbal fringe ...

Following the national success of 'Ella Minnow Pea', this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South. 'Welcome to Higby' follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. The weaving of narratives brings us Stewie Kipp and Marci Luck, whose love for one another has grown stale as Stewies faith becomes impertinent; Carmen Valentine and Euless Ludlam, whose shared debilitating shyness thr...

What if Charles Dickens had written a 21st century thriller? Welcome to Dingley Dell.The Encyclopedia Britannica (Ninth Edition), a King James Bible, a world atlas, and a complete set of the novels of Charles Dickens are the only books left to the orphans of Dingley Dell when the clandestine anthropological experiment begins. From these they develop their own society, steeped in Victoria tradition and the values of a Dickensian world. For over a century Dinglians live semi-idyllic and anac...

From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of 'Ella Minnow Pea' comes Mark Dunns most ambitious novel to date. 'American Decameron' tells 100 stories spanning 100 years. A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army finds himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an...

What if Jane Austen had had a black-sheep brother? Lets call him Chad. Chad Austen. What if Chad had always chafed at the literary preciousness of his sister Janes mannered tales? The kind of chat-filled tales of the heart wherein characters sit in properly appointed drawing rooms with tea cups and cakes and exchange the sort of whispered confidences that in actuality took place nowhere upon this planet? And certainly not during the Regency period, known to British scholars as the seediest, m...

The 1950s television game show was a cultural touchstone, reflecting the zeitgeist of a flourishing modern nation. The author explores the iconography of the mid-20th century U.S. in the context of TV watching, game playing and prize winning. The scandals that marred the genre's reputation are revisited, highlighting American's propensity for both gullibility and winking cynicism.

We Five tells the story of five young female friends and co-workers through the voices of five different authors, the story unfolding against five distinct historic backdrops. The driving conceit is that an anonymously authored manuscript from the mid-1860s (perhaps the work of Dickens contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell) was discovered and later published. Over the succeeding decades four other authors choose to retell this story in their own time and in their own way. The last author...

Thirteen-year-old twins Rodney and Wayne McCall and their friend Professor Johnson are the only people in Pitcherville who can see that all the natural laws of the universe have stopped applying to their town. When everyone in Pitcherville wakes up twelve years in the past, baby Rodney and baby Wayne must locate the Professor and find a way to get back to the present. From the critically-acclaimed author of 'Ella Minnow Pea' comes yet another mind-bending tale of wit and whimsy for the whole ...