Laura Pedersen, author of bestseller Play Money and award-winning Buffalo Gal, serves up a hilarious memoir about three decades of city life. Originally from Buffalo, NY, friends thought the seventeen year old was suffering from blizzard delirious when she left Buffalo for Manhattan. Pedersen experiences her adopted city in the best and worst of times while becoming the youngest person to have a seat on the stock exchange, performing stand up comedy, and writing a column in the New York Ti...

As New York becomes the world's hardest-hit city by the coronavirus, best-selling author and former New York Times columnist Laura Pedersen reports on how the populace is turned upside-down. Practically overnight millions of people went from living according to facts and figures to being at the mercy of fever and fate. It's Come to This chronicles the pandemic year as it unfolded, with every week bringing a new set of seemingly impossible challenges and contradictions. Pedersen explains ho...

“Laura Pedersen delivers . . . Throughout, you can’t help but think how hilarious some of the scenes would play on the big screen.”—The Hartford Courant“There could be no doubt left in anyone’s mind that my life had all the makings of a country-and-western song.”The second of seven children (with another on the way), Hallie Palmer has one dream: to make it to Vegas. Normally blessed with an uncanny gift for winning at games of chance, she’s just hi...

Follow the journey of one thoughtful and creative girl as she learns to pursue her passions Young Wanda is a girl on a mission; she wants to decide what to do when she grows up. Will she be a dancer? A landscape designer? Maybe a pastry chef? Her teachers and parents all make suggestions, but Wanda sets out to explore each option on her own. Along the way she invents a clever pulley system, a squirrel-proof bird feeder, and the best way to separate eggs. With the school career fair...

Writing about the economic collapse and social unrest of her 1970s childhood in Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen was struck by how things were finally improving in her beloved hometown. As 2008 began, Buffalo was poised to become the thriving metropolis it had been a hundred years earlier—only instead of grain and steel, the booming industries now included healthcare and banking, education and technology. Folks who'd moved away due to lack of opportunity in the 1980s talked excitedly abou...

Card sharp and former wild child Hallie Palmer is in college now–and Bernard Stockton, her legal guardian, has suddenly appeared during final exams. He’s hysterical about his recent breakup with his longtime boyfriend, Gil, and wants to enlist Hallie in a scheme to win Gil back. So Hallie returns to Cosgrove County, Ohio, for the summer, to her job as live-in yard person for Bernard and his delightfully oddball mother, Olivia. Also present are Ottavio, Olivia’s hot-tempered Italian lover, ...

Having descended from a long line of indomitable, good-humored Scots, Hayden MacBride sees no reason to take his own death lying down. In fact, he now spends his days crashing funerals for the free food and insight into the Great Beyond. Then he meets Rosamond, a nun playing hooky from the Holy Orders. Hayden is smitten the instant her heavy silver cross smacks him in the face when she leaps up to do the wave at a ball game. Luckily, Rosamond has picked the right person to teach her how to...

“We’re approaching Cat in the Hat level chaos and no one’s even had breakfast yet.”When the death of her father leaves her mother bereft and incapacitated, card shark Hallie Palmer returns home from college to raise Hallie’s eight younger siblings. Hallie’s older brother has a scholarship and a sensible major–which translates to free tuition and desperately needed future income for the family. So it’s up to Hallie to deal herself in as head of the chaotic household.But even...

Since Hallie's father died and left behind ten children, money at the Palmer household is tighter than ever. And just when Hallie thought she was graduating from college, it turns out she's four credits short. A professor needs one more student for a project that will take her around the world, only longtime boyfriend Craig has another proposition for Hallie.Thus begins Hallie's great odyssey, for the first time she ventures outside the safety of Cosgrove County and the sixty-mile ...

Informed by her parents that they can’t afford to send her on a weekend snowboarding trip with her friend, Ava escapes to her room.There she begins using her imagination for creative play, and in the end has a better time than her snowboarding friend while making some important discoveries about herself.Addresses the issue of economic diversity sensitively.

What will gain the system's attention? "Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution." — Political Studies ReviewBefore making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the v...