An authorized visual history of America's most popular sport Timed to coincide with the National Football League's 100th anniversary, NFL 100 celebrates the history of America's most popular and highly watched sport. From its humble beginnings in Canton, Ohio, to its emergence as a sport cherished by millions, all the key moments and famous athletes are honored within the pages of this handsomely produced book. In addition to the lively text, and action and portrait photography, the story of the game and the context in which it grew are animated by original lists, charts, creative statistics, and infographics, along with beautiful photos of the evolving equipment and artifacts essential to the story of the sport. A perfect gift, NFL 100 will be cherished by every football fan, new or old.

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition Any number of writers could spend an entire season with an NFL team, from the first day of training camp until the last pick of the draft, and come up with an interesting book. But only Roy Blount Jr. could capture the pain, the joy, the fears, the humor—in short, the heart—of a championship team. In 1973, the Pittsburgh Steelers were super, but missed the bowl. Blount’s portrait of a team poised to dominate the NFL for more than a decade recounts the gridiron accomplishments and off-the-field lives of players, coaches, wives, fans, and owners. About Three Bricks Shy . . . is considered a classic; Sports Illustrated recently named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes additional chapters on the Steelers’ Super Bowl wins, written for the 1989 paperback, as well as a new introduction by the author.

No man of letters savers the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, "Alphabetter Juice". Which is better. This book is for anyone - novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian - who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from "The Tempest" to "The Wire". He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possumtossing, to metanarrative. As Michael Dirda wrote in "The Washington Post Book World", "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance 'sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." "Alphabetter Juice" is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

"If everybody's first English teacher were Roy Blount Jr., we might still be trillions in debt, but we would be so deeply in love with words and their magic . . . that we'd hardly notice." --Chris Tucker, "The Dallas Morning News" After forty years of making a living using words in every medium except greeting cards, Roy Blount Jr. still can't get over his ABCs. In "Alphabet Juice," he celebrates the juju, the crackle, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, but he is not out to prescribe proper English. His passion is for questions such as these: Did you know that both "mammal "and "matter "derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how "wince" makes you wince? Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced his "Glossographia," the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. "This "Blount's Glossographia takes that pursuit to new levels. From sources as venerable as the "OED" and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com, and especially from the author's own wide ranging experience, "Alphabet Juice "derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other. "Amusing, bemusing, and smart as hell." --Daniel Okrent, "Fortune" "Danced in Blount's arms, English swings smartly." --Jack Shafer, "The New York Times Book Review" "Gracefully erudite and joyous." --Katherine A. Powers, "The Boston Sunday Globe"

A "witty, lively and wholly fascinating" ("The New York Times") portrait of an iconic Southern hero

With lively storytelling and full-hearted Southern directness, Roy Blount, Jr., presents a unique portrait of Robert E. Lee. Fascinated by the qualities that made Lee such a charismatic, though reluctant, leader, Blount vividly conveys Lee's audacity and uncanny successes in battle, as well as his humility, his quirky sense of humor, and the sorrowful sense of responsibility he felt for his outnumbered, half-starved army. The first concise biography of this American legend, "Robert E. Lee" will appeal to history and military buffs, students of Southern culture, and every reader curious about the makeup of a man who has become an American icon.

Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Ward, and Bret Harte.

Have you ever asked yourself, Am I southern? If not geographically, then deep down, at heart? Or, if I am not southern myself, do I know people who are southern, whom I misunderstand? Is there some authority I should consult? Crackers. Without this book, you will just flail around in the shallows of Southernity, with nothing solid to hold onto. Roy Blount Jr. puts you in touch with possums, heterosexist dancing, people named Junior, a two-headed four-armed three-legged gospel-singing man, your feelings about the Carter administration. These specifics take you out into the depths. As a character in Crackers puts it, "I don't read books about the South, but I read southern books. Hoooo, people stealing one another's wooden legs, setting fires, making tarbabies out of one another. . . ." Crackers is a southern book.

Playwrights from the South have always figured largely in the Actors Theatre of Louisville's contribution of new work to the repertoire of American dramatic literature. What better way to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Humana New Festival of American Plays -- an event that has drawn upon the strengths of the South to garner international acclaim -- than to honor southern playwrights in a collection of works that have premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville, most of which are previously unpublished. By Southern Playwrights makes available for the first time in print Marsha Norman's romantic comedy Loving Daniel Boone, novelist Harry Crews's only play, Blood Issue, and humorist Ray Blount Jr.'s ventures into one-act comedy, Five Ives Gets Named and That Dog Isn't Fifteen. Also included are novelist Elizabeth Dewberry's first play, Head On, Kentucky novelist and essayist Wendell Berry's The Cool of the Day, and Digging In, a remarkable array of Kentucky farm voices adapted for the stage by Julie Crutcher and Vaughn McBride. Southern playwriting is a distinctive voice in the American theater, a point eloquently made in the foreword by Jon Jory, producing director of Actors Theatre of Louisville since 1969. The literary works of the South, he writes, are dominated by "great language, family, strong women, religion, the land, and the past," all of which makes them wonderful for acting -- and for reading. Jory sees the key to the success of southern writing for the stage in this "speakability.... Actors love these plays because you can say them, and that, as they say, makes all the difference." This book is a rare assemblage of southern plays from the 1980s and 1990s by playwrights continuing the tradition of Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and Beth Henley, among others.

In this appealing collection of fourteen interrelated stories, twelve-year-old William Stroup recounts the ludicrous predicaments and often self-imposed hardships his family endures. Playing on the tension between Martha, his hardworking, sensible mother, and Morris, his disarmingly likable but shiftless and philandering father, William tells of Pa's flirtation with a widow, his swapping match with a band of gypsies, his battle of wits with a traveling silk-tie saleswoman, and his get-rich-quick schemes based on selling Ma's old love letters and collecting scrap iron. Often caught in the middle of the Stroups' bungles is Handsome Brown, their yard hand, as well as a number of animals with all-too-human qualities: Ida, the mule; Pretty Sooky, the runaway calf; College Boy, the fighting cock; a small flock of woodpeckers that favor Handsome's head over a tree; and goats who commandeer the roof of the Stroups' house. Georgia Boy was a special book to Caldwell, and its humor is less in the service of social criticism than in other works in which he dealt with poor white southerners. Beneath Georgia Boy's folksy lightheartedness, however, lie the problems of indigence, racism, and apathy that Caldwell confronted again and again in his fiction.

Seventy-seven years ago a slim, agile, quick-witted, self-assured young man, identifying with but transcending his ethnic minority, was summoned to save a nation from financial ruin. As the nation's new president he brought together a team of rivals, a band of brothers. And those brothers' names: Pinky, Chicolini, and Lt. Bob Roland. And that leader's name: Rufus T. Firefly. It was a movie, and what a movie: "Duck Soup", the Marx Brothers at their most intense, in their finest hour. In "Hail, Hail, Euphoria!" Roy Blount, Jr. takes us through the history and making of "Duck Soup", examining the comedic genius of the Marx Brothers with the insight and appreciation of a true fan. Though first released in theaters nearly eighty years ago, "Duck Soup" continues to impress audiences and serve as an important cultural reference. In "Hannah and Her Sisters", Woody Allen's character, Mickey Sachs, is considering suicide when he happens to see a bit of Duck Soup and has an epiphany: How can anyone even think of killing himself when this world affords such high-low comedy as the Brothers' spectacular musical number, "The Country's Going to War", in which the call to arms involves, among many other rousing elements, takeoffs on gospel ("All God's Chillun Got Guns") and the Virginia reel. There is nothing anywhere else in the history of American culture quite like Harpo's contribution to the do-si-do. You can't write a whole book about how funny a movie is. But this is a movie that can be discussed and probed in many directions. The parallels to current politics are obvious, and then there are links to be made involving Woody Allen and mirrors ("the Duck Soup" scene in which Harpo pretends to be Groucho's reflection is famous, but there's a little-noted Allen mirror scene whose autobiographical resonance is startling), George W. Bush and projectiles, Margaret Dumont and moms, Groucho and Karl, Jews and Irishmen.

Hank Morgan awakens one morning to find he has been transported from nineteenth-century New England to sixth-century England and the reign of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan brings to King Arthur’s utopian court the ingenuity of the future, resulting in a culture clash that is at once satiric, anarchic, and darkly comic.

Critically deemed one of Twain’s finest and most caustic works, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is both a delightfully entertaining story and a disturbing analysis of the efficacy of government, the benefits of progress, and the dissolution of social mores. It remains as powerful a work of fiction today as it was upon its first publication in 1889.