Mark Dunn

An epistolary novel set on a fictional island off the South Carolina coastline, 'Ella Minnow Pea' brings readers to the hometown of Nevin Nollop, inventor of the pangram 'The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog'. Deified for his achievement in life, Nevin has been honored in death with a monument featuring his famous phrase. One day, however, the letter 'Z' falls from the monument, and some of the islanders interpret the missing tile as a message from beyond the grave. The letter 'Z' is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride them-selves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock when another tile falls. And then another... In his charming debut, first published in 2001, Mark Dunn took readers on a journey through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea, a young woman forced to create another clever turn of phrase in order to save the islanders’ beloved language.

Ella Minnow Pea

Tells the story of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and the CEO of Dandy-de-odor-o Inc., in a novel composed entirely of footnotes. By the author of Ella Minnow Pea. Reprint.

A Novel

Ibid

Collects one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.

American Decameron

Sergio Aragones

A lighthearted study of more than five hundred colorful interjections explores the origins of these unique words and phrases and their colorful role in the English language, featuring such useful verbiage as Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" and Archimedes's "Eureka!"--all accompanied by hilarious cartoons by creator of usch comics as "Fanboy." Original. 35,000 first printing.

A Browser's Dictionary of Interjections

ZOUNDS!

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 has now gone astep further: she has assembled all five versions into a literary pastiche which cycles chapter-by-chapter through the different versions as the central narrative progresses. The result is a novel about five young women pursued by five young men of predatory purpose, which takes place alternatively in a small mill town outside of Manchester, England in 1859; in San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake and fire; in Sinclair Lewis's fictional Zenith, Winnemac in 1923; in London during the Blitz of autumn, 1940; and in a small town in northern Mississippi in 1997. In the first book "We Five" are seamstresses; in the next they are department store sales clerks; in the next, they sing in the choir of a popular female evangelist; in the next, they work in an ordinance factory outside of London; and in the final version, they are cocktail waitresses in a Mississippi River casino. The book's climax is a dramatic collision of all five incarnations of the story: an incident of mass hysteria arising from a solar storm in 1859, the 1906 San Francisco quake, a fire in the evangelist's newly built "temple" in 1923, the 1940 Balham Underground station bombing and flooding, and a tornado in rural 1997 Mississippi.

We Five

What if Charles Dickens had written a contemporary thriller? In Dingley Dell, a group of Victorians lives a semi-idyllic existence--products of an experiment. But the experiment has run its course, and Dingley Dell must be totally expunged--and with it, all the men, women, and children who live there.

Under the Harrow

A hilarious and charming novel by the author of Ella Minnow Pea follows the lives of the colorful residents of Higby, Mississippi, as they search for love, happiness, and salvation over the course of the Labor Day weekend of 1993. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

Welcome to Higby

In a small, mid-twentieth century town that is secretly being used as a laboratory, thirteen-year-old twins Rodney and Wayne and their physicist friend, Professor Johnson, face a series of calamities including a time experiment that sends the boys from infancy to old age in just a few days.

Reluctant chrononauts

What would it be like to be confined with people you don¿t really know? Strange visitors leave behind a deadly disease that leaves seven separate households unexpectedly quarantined. Seven story lines are deftly balanced as people are forced to confront their personal issues. A heart-warming original comedy/drama about how people react when there¿s nowhere else to go.

A Play about a Homebound Town

A Delightful Quarantine

BOOK CLUB KIT

Recounts what happens when the citizens of an island must rely on all their ingenuity to communicate in an increasingly limited language when the goverment progressively bans letters from the alphabet.

A Novel in Letters

Ella 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 pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both 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 everywhere. *pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet.

Mark White

Helen Richardson

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Off Grid Living Box Set 3 in 1

First published by MacAdam/Cage in 2001, Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea celebrates its twentieth anniversary under the roof of Penguin/Random House and the British publisher Methuen. Over the years it has become a mainstay of book clubs and middle-school and high-school English classes, has inspired a stage musical LMNOP, and is the recipient of multiple accolades, including winning the 2001 Borders Original Voices competition for fiction. Set on a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina, Ella Minnow Pea takes readers to the homeland of the late Nevin Nollop, the inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Lionized for this achievement, he's been honored with a monument featuring this famous phrase. But life for Nollopians drastically changes when the tile containing the letter "z" topples from the statue and island authorities interpret the fall as a message from Nollop from beyond the grave. They waste no time in banning this letter from all use. As other tiles fall, additional laws are passed which put increasing communicational constraints on the islanders, and ultimately undermine all the freedoms they had heretofore taken for granted. It is up to a young woman named Ella to restore order and sanity to the nation of Nollop, using the very tools used by Mr. Nollop to win the day. In this special anniversary edition by Dzanc Books, author Dunn is joined by talented illustrator Brittany Worsham. She enhances this tale - embraced for decades by readers throughout the world - with insight and whimsy as the story explores through this new graphic lens themes relating to language and freedom and human dignity in an era of political oppression. Readers, both longtime fans of the book and those newly discovering its power and literary merit, will cherish this special keepsake edition.

20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition

Dramatic Comedy / 9m, 8f (cross casting and double casting possible) Inspired by Pygmalion, Shaw's classic drawing room tale of language and class division, and its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady, the play tells the story of one Eliza Doolittle-the daughter of a hardscrabble Mississippi pig farmer-who sells homemade pork rinds at the Tri-Counties Fair and Livestock Show, and dreams of someday working as a waitress at one of those nice downtown barbecue restaurants where all the tourists go. With the support of her best friend, a sassy Transgender firecracker named Miss Tiffany Box, patroness Ida Hill and her daughter Clara; and with Ida's instantly enamored son Freddy nipping romantically at Eliza's heels, Delta-drawlin' Eliza engages the services of a Kudzu-league college prof named Henry Higgins to take the country out of her speech and give her some semblance of class. Devotees of Shaw's original will delight in the transplantation of Eliza and Professor Higgins and his colleague Pickering to the American South.But this gentle, warm-hearted comedy gives us something else as well, a question for which everyone in the play must find the answer: how do we reconcile the way we present ourselves on the outside with who we truly are on the inside?

PIGmalion

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.

Television Game Shows and Popular Culture in the 1950s

Quizzing America

"Before there was Truman, there was Frank! Frank is the star of his own soap opera. Frank's Life. Unfortunately for poor Frank, he doesn't know it. Nor does he realize that his wife, his mother, his sister and best friend, indeed everyone he has met since the age of 3 are actors. But the elaborate deception can't last much longer: ratings have dropped, revenues are down--even the network itself is in trouble. As cast members are asked to take pay cuts, they begin to leave the show--killing themselves off in unseemly soap-opera ways. Frank's gnawing feeling that something about his life just "doesn't seem right" grows to near paranoia before he makes the painful discovery that he's been duped by everyone he cares for. Then there's the little matter of "what to do with Frank." A darkly funny allegory about an everyman honest, good and true--who learns that he has lost title of his very life--and his final showdown with corporate powers to win back that life and stake out his own spot in a world without artifice. And in the end, as Frank reclaims his humanity, the actors who surround him discover theirs as well." -- Publisher's website.

A Play in Two Acts

Frank's Life

The play revolves around an ad hoc meeting of a North Georgia women's social club called "The Glitter Girls," convened by its richest member - one Trudy Tromaine - who is supposedly at death's door and wishing to bequeath some of her millions to one lucky "Sister of the Gleam and Sparkle." The hitch is that it's the members themselves who must decide to whom to award the small fortune (with hopes that the Glitter Girl they select will see it in her heart to share the money with the rest of her "sisters"). The play can be economically described as Steel Magnolias meets Survivor, with a big dose of quirky Mark Dunn humor thrown in for good measure.

The Glitter Girls

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.

The Bloody Struggle on Australia's Early Frontier

The Convict Valley

The story of friendship between two women in their sixties is played out over the course of ten years, each year representing another reunion for Beverly Duggins and Addie Spools, two participants in a series of annual "tableaux" sponsored by the Museum of Dix, in a small city in the South. Within human diorama settings as simple as a frontier cabin porch or the cow stall of a local dairy barn, and as elaborate as the "Spit and Curl" beauty salon (circa 1930) and the front seat of Thelma and Louise's plummeting convertible, Beverly, the lonely urban professional, and Addie, the down-home pharmacist's assistant, chart the course of each other's lives, while fending off incursions from the officiously bothersome fellow-poser Maureen. Through the ten scenes which comprise the play, the two women are forced to endure the constant in terruptions of the museum "promenaders" who "ooh" and "ah" at the lifelike presentations, offering up their comical comments, both kind and cruel. Though they see one another only one weekend a year, and in spite of their very different backgrounds, Beverly and Addie nurture a growing and abiding friendship. In the end, it becomes the strongest and most sustaining friendship of their lives.

Mark Dunn

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