On-Sale Date: August 17, 2010

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PARACHUTE?

2011 EDITION

A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

RICHARD N. BOLLES

“Given the present state of the economy it can take you just as long to find a poor job as it can take you to find a good job. So, why not look for a good job? More than that, why not look for a job that really fits you, and gets you excited about getting up in the morning!” —Richard N. Bolles

In June, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) officially stood at 6.8 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These individuals made up nearly half of all unemployed persons, not including discouraged workers who stopped looking for work. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that it could take a decade for the national unemployment rate to reach pre-recession levels. These desperate times require the best job-hunting skills available and that’s why the world’s best-selling job-hunting book can make a world of difference.

What Color Is Your Parachute? helps job-seekers weather the storm not only with decades of experience and up-to-the-minute advice on every page but with hope, encouragement, and inspiration, too. Its gentle guidance and good humor reminds the downtrodden that the job search—with all its rejection and hard knocks—is less about the job market (and its 17 million out of work) and more about knowing what one brings to the table (because we all have unique and important gifts to offer). It’s about doing the hard work to know your talents, find a well-matched employer, and articulate why they are a perfect fit—and only one book has demonstrated the world over that it can lead the way.

What Color Is Your Parachute? is continually praised as the most complete guide for job-seekers, career-changers, and anyone in need of career advice. With more than 10 million copies sold, it remains a best seller, thanks to an annual update that allows author Richard N. Bolles (best known as Dick Bolles) to present its time-tested, well-loved approach within current economic and workplace conditions.

In good times, people use What Color Is Your Parachute? to help them change direction, switch careers, and find rewarding work. In hard times, it teaches people how to uncover jobs when supposedly there are no jobs, and provides a step-by-step plan (known as the Flower Exercise) that gives people the edge over other job-hunters. At any time, this best-selling career guide can be relied on to provide for readers sound, worthwhile advice on how to find the right job and change their lives.

The 2011 edition features new information on job clubs and improves job-hunters’ productivity by showing how to treat the job-search like a well-organized day job. Alongside innovative guidance on creativity and inventiveness are the classic job-hunting strategies that continue to stay true. This latest edition also shares why now is a great time to rethink what you want to do with your life, and how to get there whether you tend to live your life step-by-step, through intuition, or by luck.

What Color Is Your Parachute? is a proven resource for the recently laid-off, the underemployed, the unemployed, and anyone dreaming of career fulfillment. After reading this book, those in need will find themselves ready to explore different career choices, gain direction, change the course of their lives, and ultimately find rewarding work among the millions of jobs that are out there.

DICK BOLLES has led the job-hunting field for more than 35 years. A member of Mensa and the Society for Human Resource Management, he has been the keynote speaker at hundreds of conferences. Bolles holds a bachelor’s degree cum laude in physics from Harvard University, a master’s degree from General Theological (Episcopal) Seminary in New York City, and three honorary doctorates. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is available for interviews. Visit www.jobhuntersbible.com.

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2011 Edition: A Practical Manual

 for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

by Richard N. Bolles

$18.99 paper • 368 pages • 6 x 9 inches • ISBN: 978-1-58008-270-9 • E-book: 978-1-60774-038-4

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

There’s an App for That!

COMING SOON: The What Color Is Your Parachute? iPhone App, a free, author-written job interview preparation guide based on the world’s best-selling career book, featuring sample interview questions, tips from chapter 6, and other tools that put today’s best job interviewing techniques at your fingertips.

On-Sale Date: September 7, 2010

The New Job Security

REVISED

The 5 Best Strategies for Taking Control of Your Career

Pam Lassiter

In today’s volatile job market, job security seems like a thing of the past. Opportunities to stay with a company until retirement have been replaced by numerous employers in the span of a career. Yet despite today’s job economy with its sharp transitions, intense competition, and high churn rate, there is a new job security and it comes from actively managing your career.

In this revised edition of The New Job Security, veteran career management consultant Pam Lassiter draws on more than 30 years of experience to empower professionals with the five best strategies to take control of their careers.

From marketing oneself with win-win strategies to creating new jobs instead of looking for existing ones, Lassiter’s award-winning book puts job security in the hands of the worker, and arms readers with the latest research on trends, social networking, effective email, and more.

Featuring advice from thought leaders in executive search, human resources, compensation/benefits, university career planning and placement, social media, networking, retirement, and research (see reverse for a specific list), the book explains how and why: 

• Job creation is basic survival in today’s job market
• Responding to help wanted ads in a recession is self-abuse
• A social media presence is no longer optional, and a winning strategy is essential
• Approaching search firms is increasingly subtle; not knowing the drill eliminates you
• You are one handshake away from everyone
• Recruiters are looking at you online all of the time
• There is still money to be made while negotiating
• People will respond to your emails if you use the right subject line

With The New Job Security, today’s professionals command their own careers. They control and create opportunities, write their own job descriptions, move up in their current companies or transition to companies of their choice. Instead of reacting to what happens in the marketplace, they build their own success stories and not just for a single job hunt, but for the rest of their careers.

PAM LASSITER is the principal of Lassiter Consulting and a popular speaker on career management with the media, corporations, and associations. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and is available for interviews. Visit www.lassiterconsulting.com.

The New Job Security, Revised: The 5 Best Strategies for Taking Control of Your Career

by Pam Lassiter 

$14.99 paper · 224 pages · 6 x 9 inches · ISBN-13: 978-1-58008-377-5 · E-book: 978-1-58008-673-8

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

How to Survive a GARDEN GNOME ATTACK

Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (and They Will)

by Chuck Sambuchino

With an irresistible charm, gnomes seem friendly—even welcoming. By the millions, we brought them into our homes and gardens. And, in so doing, we unwittingly courted this threat. Now we must learn to defend ourselves.

Hiding in plain sight and feigning innocence and merriment,  garden gnomes are seeking world domination. THINK ABOUT IT. They have infiltrated every state in America and exist on every continent. Deceptively benign, the common garden gnome has quietly lulled citizens everywhere into a false sense of security. They hide behind their wheel-barrows and disarm unwary suburban dwellers with their rosy cheeks so that no one notices the weaponry they wield. Those rakes, shovels, and pick-axes are not harmless decorations. Alert the Garden Gnome Liberation Front: It is not the gnomes who need saving. Be aware and be afraid.  Wake up to the danger.

Chuck Sambuchino is a certified GDE (Gnome Defense Expert) with years of experience in direct combat—guerilla lawnfare style. HOW TO SURVIVE A GARDEN GNOME ATTACK outlines a proven four-step strategy—Assess, Protect, Defend, Apply—for safeguarding family, pets, and possessions against home gnome invasions. The only published handbook of its kind, this indispensable manual features detailed plans for gnomeproofing dwellings inside and out, instructions for hand-to-hand confrontations, correct gnomenclature, guidelines for compiling an effective arsenal, illuminating case studies of human vs. gnome clashes throughout history, plus ten tips that could save your life.

Would you know how to stop a gnome from tunneling under your house? Would you recognize the signs of suspicious activity or an impending infiltration in your neighborhood? If the answer is ‘no’ then you need to buy this book. The danger is real and it is here. Don’t wait until it is too late.

Chuck Sambuchino lives a guarded life in a heavily fortified residence somewhere in Ohio. He is available for interviews, consultations, and commando missions, via his publicist (that would be me). 

View the book trailer here! 

Hardcover       $14.99 full-color         112 pages        978-1-58008-463-5

Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, Inc.

On-Sale Date: August 31, 2010

Naked, Drunk, and Writing 

Shed Your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay 

Adair Lara

“Half of the people I know seem to have taken classes and workshops with San Francisco’s legendary writer and teacher Adair Lara. She is very savvy and smart and hugely entertaining.” — Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird

The award-winning author of an autobiographical newspaper column, Adair Lara has written more than ten books, including the memoir Hold Me Close, Let Me Go. Packed with insight and wit, Naked, Drunk, and Writing is the culmination of her extensive experience as a writer, editor, and teacher. In this instructive and refreshingly irreverent guide, she shows aspiring writers how to cast off self-doubt and become skilled storytellers.

Knowing that the more intensely individual a person’s thoughts are, the more they will have meaning for other people, Lara guides readers like a friend through all stages of memoir creation. Her writing is simultaneously vibrant, wise, and laugh-out-loud funny, putting even the most reserved writers at ease. Through interactive exercises and illuminating examples and anecdotes, Lara coaches writers to take small, manageable steps to break out of their shells and to write with an honesty that is deeply personal.

As the title suggests, this is not your run-of-the-mill writing book. Naked, Drunk, and Writing shows how writing about yourself is like stripping down to the flesh—a kind of “word-drunkenness” that makes you want to shed the layers between you and your reader and turn your experiences into art. 

Lara’s column for the San Francisco Chronicle enjoyed a cult following in the San Francisco Bay Area at the dawn of an era that blazed with interest in the real stories of other people’s lives. Personal essays popped up on the end pages of magazines and in newspaper features, and bestsellers like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes kicked off an avalanche of memoirs. Today, her writing courses and sold-out workshops are legendary and wildly popular.

This book’s readers will learn from a writer’s writer how to: craft exceptional essays and memoirs, keep writing when discouraged, revise to perfection, and get published. Naked, Drunk, and Writing will inspire new and veteran writers alike to shed their inhibitions and become the writers they always wanted to be.

ADAIR LARA started her career by writing for local magazines—first as managing editor of San Francisco Focus, the city magazine, and then as executive editor of SF, a design magazine. She wrote a column every Tuesday and Thursday for the San Francisco Chronicle for twelve years, winning the Associated Press Award for Best Columnist in California, and was a reporter in the paper’s books and feature department for an additional four years. She has published more than ten books and is a contributor to magazines such as MORE, Reader’s Digest, Glamour, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Lara leads sold-out writing workshops and conducts private memoir consulting in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and is available for interviews. For more information, visit Adairlara.com.

Naked, Drunk, and Writing: Shed Your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay

by Adair Lara

$14.99 paper • 256 pages • 5 ½ x 8 ¼ inches • ISBN: 978-1-58008-480-2 • E-book: 978-1-58008-656-1

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

On-Sale Date: August 10, 2010

WHAT I EAT

Around the World in 80 Diets

Peter Menzel & Faith D’Aluisio

This book provides an incomparable documentary record of the stunning diversity of foods, diets, and occupations that sustain life in today’s world. …Together, these 80 diets have more to tell us about the human condition in this century than any textbook or statistical table ever could. —from the foreword by Marion Nestle

Eighty people, 30 countries, one day’s food, and another extraordinary book. From the same dynamic husband-and-wife team that brought us Material World, Man Eating Bugs, and the 2006 James Beard Book of the Year, Hungry Planet, comes the much anticipated What I Eat. In vivid photographs and thought-provoking text, this remarkable book chronicles a three-year around-the-world journey and delivers a fascinating portrait of what individuals eat over the course of one day.

With camera and notebooks in hand, Peter and Faith visited thirty countries and a dozen U.S. states to interview, shop, cook, and eat with a wide variety of individuals—from a bike messenger in Japan and a Maasai herdswoman in Kenya to a traditional baker in Iran, a model in the U.S., and a bullfighter in Spain. They even traveled out of this world to interview a former NFL player turned astronaut, who was photographed while orbiting the Earth with his daily meal floating around him.

“You are what you eat” has never been as fully visualized as it is in What I Eat’s eighty photographic portraits, which feature the food and beverages (including vitamins, supplements, and cigarettes) that each person consumes in a day, plus demographic particulars such as age, occupation, activity level, height, and weight. The food is the focal point of each profile, which details every item consumed and the total resulting calorie count. The numbers are at times expected, at other times surprising, and always fascinating.

Adding controversy and context to the profiles are compelling essays that approach food politics and our endless obsession with diet from fresh new angles. Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham; journalists Michael Pollan, Bijal Trivedi, and Ellen Rupel Shell; nutrition consultant and NYU professor Lisa Young, and others examine such topics as portion size, the science behind calories, food taboos, and how cooking makes us human. Also included is the collective wisdom of such luminaries as Ferran Adrià, Francis Coppola, Jack LaLanne, Dr. Dean Ornish, and more who briefly describe their own relationship to food and eating habits.

The comparative nature of this project reveals the similarities as well as the extreme differences in the ways in which people approach and consume food around the world. From Australia to Ecuador, Greenland to Israel, and Kenya to Yemen, Peter and Faith have literally traveled to the ends of the earth to amass this collection of beautiful photography and sensitive reportage. What I Eat offers a look at the compelling implications of the modern diet on our health and planet while expanding our understanding of the complex relationships among individuals, culture, and food.

PETER MENZEL is an award-winning photojournalist who has been published in Time, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, among others.

FAITH D’ALUISIO is a former television news producer and the writer for their Material World books, which include Material World: A Global Family Portrait, Women in the Material World, the James Beard Award-winning Man Eating Bugs and Hungry Planet, and What the World Eats.

Peter and Faith live in Napa, California, and are available for interviews. Their Web site, www.aroundtheworldin80diets.com, will go live in August.

What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets

by Peter Menzel & Faith D’Aluisio 

$40.00 hardcover, 340 pages, 9 x 12 inches, ISBN: 978-0-9840744-0-2

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

On-Sale Date: August 24, 2010

Finding Your Way Through Cancer 

An Expert Cancer Psychologist Helps Patients and Survivors Face the Challenges of Illness

Andrew Kneier, PhD

Based on the author’s pioneering work with more than 7,500 patients

Pioneering cancer psychologist Andrew Kneier has been therapist to thousands with cancer, having met with nearly 7,500 patients in one-on-one sessions, and has devoted his career to helping people master the many challenges that come with a life-threatening illness. Finding Your Way Through Cancer is a distillation of their collective insights, questions, and concerns into ten free-standing essays that delve into the particular issues that patients (and their families) face.

This inspirational compilation is a healing guide for those who have been touched by cancer. While most people urge cancer patients to stay positive and gloss over the hardships they endure, Dr. Kneier encourages patients to honor their suffering as worthy of acknowledgment, attention, and respect.

Each essay covers the pain, the difficulties, and the dilemmas that people with cancer face day in and day out and addresses the hard questions, such as: What should I tell my family?, Can any good come from this?, and How can God exist in a world with such suffering? Patients learn to master their anxiety, adopt an approach that works for them, and even recognize the gifts that can come with this life-threatening disease. The book offers an insightful examination of how cancer can add new meaning to a person’s life story, and concludes with one woman’s remarkable journey.

Cancer has power, but those afflicted with cancer have power as well. The ability to cope and find meaning when life is at its darkest shows the force of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Finding Your Way Through Cancer serves as a “pocket therapist” for cancer patients, survivors, their families, doctors, and others whose lives have been clouded by cancer and who need the wisdom of the most experienced cancer psychologist to renew hope and to guide them on this journey.

“Dr. Kneier has written a compassionate, wise, and accessible book about living with cancer. He lets those who are on that journey illuminate your way.”

—David Spiegel, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University School of

Medicine, and author of Living Beyond Limits

ANDREW KNEIER, PhD, was the only clinical psychologist on faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1990 through 2006, and has met with more than 7,500 patients one-on-one. As the coordinator of the UCSF Psychosocial Oncology Program, he developed support services and related research. Today, Dr. Kneier is in private practice through affiliation with the Sierra Nevada Comprehensive Cancer Center. He lives with his wife in Grass Valley, California, and is available for interviews. His website, www.findingyourwaythroughcancer.com, will go live in August. 

Finding Your Way Through Cancer: An Expert Cancer Psychologist Helps Patients and Survivors Face the Challenges of Illness

by Andrew Kneier, PhD 

$14.00 paper • 176 pages • 5 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches • ISBN: 978-1-58761-356-2 • E-book: 978-1-58761-359-3

CELESTIAL ARTS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

On-Sale Date: August 3, 2010

Careers For Your Cat 

Ann Dziemianowicz

Illustrated by Ann Boyajian

With ever-growing economic pressure being felt in every strata of society, more members of the household are being asked to step up and contribute. Dogs have been assisting the human labor force since the dawn of history; hunting, herding, guiding, and guarding us for millennia. But what about cats? What have they been doing between 9 and 5 while we’ve been out working to support them?

The first of its kind, Careers for Your Cat is for the free-loading fat cat who, in these thin times, needs to get out of the house and start making down payments. This comprehensive, fully-illustrated feline career guide is geared exclusively to help streamline the kitty job search and help these feckless feline freeloaders reach their potential as fully contributing members of their households.

Cat-coaching expert Ann Dziemianowicz helps kitties navigate the increasingly competitive job market by first helping them identify their skill sets. Next is a convenient, specially adapted Meowers-Briggs Personality Quiz, which is designed to provide an accurate assessment of your cat’s personality type. Are they friendly or reserved? Whimsical or serious? Self-effacing or self-confident? Ann goes on to explore an exciting variety of employment opportunities, profiling thirty-four career options that range from opera singer to landscape architect to marine biologist. Each is vivaciously illustrated with witty line drawings by Ann Boyajian. Included is a bonus section on useful interview tips for both what to do (examples: Keep tail high / Use restroom facility at home) and what not to do (examples: Do not have anything fishy to eat before the interview / Do not rub against the interviewer at anytime).

The pairing of disarmingly sophisticated artwork with deadpan commentary on feline job aptitude makes Careers for Your Cat a refreshingly irreverent tonic for tough economic times. And who knows? Perhaps your petulant Persian princess will discover she’s a Creative Extravert with a talent for interior design; maybe your tubby Tabby is an Inert Introvert destined to test products.

So help your cats land their dream jobs and let them bring home the bacon once in a while so you can sit back, relax, and take a well-earned cat nap.

ANN DZIEMIANOWICZ is a writer and feline career counselor who is dedicated to helping cats land their dream jobs. Ann’s cats have enjoyed varied careers in the fields of law enforcement (Bibsy is a private detective), culinary excellence (Fella is a restaurant pastry chef), and entertainment (Milton is a cabaret singer). She lives with her husband and three very professional felines in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and is available for interviews.

ANN BOYAJIAN is an illustrator living and working with her husband and cats in the Boston area. Her previously published books for children include Journey to the Heart: Centering Prayer for Children; O Say Can You See? America’s Symbols, Landmarks, and Important Words; and Samantha’s Friendship Fun. Ann’s elegant, sophisticated graphics reveal a wry wit, inspiration for which she attributes to her four-footed models.

Careers for Your Cat

by Ann Dziemianowicz and illustrated by Ann Boyajian

$9.99 hardcover • 96 pages •  full color illustrations throughout

6 x 7 inches •  ISBN: 978-1-58008-124-5

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

On Sale Date: July 13, 2010

What Color Is Your Parachute? FOR RETIREMENT

SECOND EDITION

Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future

JOHN E. NELSON and RICHARD N. BOLLES

In this weak economy with its rising health care costs, declining home values, and dwindling savings, many older Americans have been forced to rethink their retirement. The need has never been greater for people to plan now for the life they want—and that’s precisely what this timely update, inspired by the world’s bestselling career book, What Color Is Your Parachute?, can help them do.

This second edition of What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement helps readers plan early and well for the next stage of their lives while addressing the tough new realities of today’s economic environment. Using current research from the fields of economics, medicine, and psychology, the book delivers a comprehensive approach to life planning and provides readers with the tools they need to map out and pursue their ideal retirement.

Most retirement books focus solely on money, health, or happiness. What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement inspires people to examine all aspects of life as they assess their situation, create a clear vision, and take action so they can enjoy a life filled with security, vitality, and community.

Updated throughout, this latest edition includes a section on Social Security; an in-depth exercise on how core values inform personal retirement decisions; the Retirement Well-Being Profile, a one-of-a-kind resource that helps readers assess if they are on track for planning their best life; as well as the Retirement Noncalculator—the qualitative component to all the quantitative retirement calculators that are readily available.

Those eager to make the most of their retirement years will find What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement an empowering resource and a guiding compass for a lifetime well-lived.

JOHN E. NELSON is a speaker and seminar facilitator on retirement and life-stage planning, well-being, and core values. He is an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also earning a PhD. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is available for interviews. Visit www.johnenelson.com.

RICHARD N. BOLLES, author of the best-selling job-hunting book in the world, What Color Is Your Parachute?, has been a leader in the job-hunting field for more than thirty-five years. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit www.JobHuntersBible.com.

What Color Is Your Parachute? For Retirement, 2^nd Edition: Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future  

by John E. Nelson and Richard N. Bolles 

$16.99 paper, 288 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN: 978-1-58008-205-1

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

On Sale Date: July 13, 2010

Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer

How to SURVIVE the College Admissions Process Without LOSING YOUR MIND

RISA LEWAK

For the 2.6 million students applying to college in this country, the admissions process is no laughing matter. With seemingly so much riding on getting into the best colleges in an increasingly competitive playing field, the pressures on students—and their parents—have risen to extremes. This smart new book changes all that.

Bringing levity and a hearty dose of humor to an otherwise stressful time, Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer packs a punch line with essential information that students and parents need to conquer the college application process with their sanity and sense of humor intact.

This indispensable handbook by former pre-admissions counselor Risa Lewak shares insider tips, laugh-out-loud anecdotes, and fresh, practical advice for every key step of admission: deciding between the SAT and ACT, scoring stellar teacher recommendations, acing the interview, choosing the right school, and crafting a standout essay—while keeping everything in perspective. Featuring insight from hundreds of interviews with students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, admissions officers, private counselors, and SAT tutors, Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer is refreshingly fun to read, covering topics such as the following:

• Enjoy high school now, avoid therapy later
• When to tell your parents it’s time to start seeing other children
• Paying for college without getting arrested
• Intelligent questions parents can ask on a college tour versus questions that make you wish you were adopted
• Dealing with loans, debt, and other depressing topics

Blending warmth with a biting wit, Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer is more than a go-to-guide—it is a much needed refuge and friend to the many anxious students (and parents) who, while driven to desperation now, will be able to look back and laugh at the college application process.

RISA LEWAK, MSEd, is a former pre-admissions counselor and recruiter at Hunter College who leads workshops to help prospective college students and their parents minimize the stress of the application process. She is an alumni interviewer for the University of Pennsylvania, a frequent speaker at high schools and college fairs, and a regular contributor to popular college prep websites, including collegebound.net and collegetoolkit.com. Lewak lives in New York, New York, and is available for interviews. For more information, visit www.admissionsangst.com.

Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer: How to Survive the College

Admissions Process Without Losing Your Mind

by Risa Lewak 

$13.99 paper, 208 pages, 5 3/16 x 8 inches, ISBN: 978-1-58008-060-6

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

Publication Date: August 2010

It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences

A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences

By June Casagrande

Author of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies

Everybody knows one: an aspiring novelist or wannabe freelancer whose writing just isn’t up to snuff. Until now, struggling writers have had nowhere to turn for help in understanding what, exactly, makes some prose so terrible.

June Cassagrande’s It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences is the first book ever to target bad writing at its very root: the sentence. Combining her grammar and editing expertise with a keen eye for quality writing, Casagrande has created a resource guaranteed to transform some frustrated writers into bona fide success stories.

Finger-wagging grammar-snobs beware: Casagrande kicks life into the fine art of writing. This smart guide to crafting a perfect sentence is not the typical “all rules” road to righteous prose. Witty and well-written, it is captivating in a way that will have a new generation of writers listening.

June Casagrande is an unlikely voice in a world that dots its i’s and crosses its t’s, but this rebel of the grammar world is making her mark. A high school dropout who began college with an eighth-grade education and then graduated with honors, Casagrande writes a syndicated grammar column, has two well-loved books under her belt, and now has a third that will redefine the way writers see sentences.

It Was the Best of Sentences goes beyond questions of commas and grammatical correctness to focus on the fundamental elements of great writing. A glance at the table of contents reveals Casagrande’s entertaining style, with chapters such as:

• Size Matters: Short versus Long Sentences
• Words Gone Wild: Sentences that say nothing—or worse
• Taking the Punk out of Punctuation: The problem with semicolons and parentheses

Whether you dabble or do it by trade, good writing is at hand. It Was the Best of Sentences is an effective resource that can forever change the way you write.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is a veteran journalist and syndicated columnist. She is the author of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies and Mortal Syntax (Penguin). She is a former Los Angeles Times Community News staff reporter, and her “A Word, Please” grammar column currently appears in several community news sections. She has also studied improvisational comedy with renowned troupes the Groundlings and ComedySportz. June lives in Pasadena, California, and is available for interviews. For more information, visit her Web site www.grammarsnobs.com or her blog ConjugateVisits.blogspot.com.

It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences

by June Casagrande 

$14 paper, 224 pages, 5 x 7 inches, ISBN: 978-1-58008-740-7

TEN SPEED PRESS, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group