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My Embarrassing Dad's Gone Viral!

My Dad - the King of Cringe! What's a boy to do when his mum disappears, his dad moves him and his sister to the middle of nowhere, and his life takes a very swift downward turn . . . secretly launch his dad on the internet as the Next Big Thing, of course! 'Hi guys! I bet every one of you knows what it's like to have an embarrassing parent - right? I bet they've done something so cringey that you wanted the ground to open up and swallow you whole. But let me tell you, my friend, NOBODY has a dad like mine. He takes embarrassing to a whole new level. If embarrassing was an Olympic sport, my dad would have, like, a gazillion gold medals.' This hilarious story will have instant appeal to a YouTube-watching generation and is told through a series of vlogs. Combining Ben Davis's brilliantly-funny voice and Mike Lowery's amazingly-amazing illustrations is sure to make this a hit with readers everywhere. After all, everyone knows what it's like to have an embarrassing parent, don't they?

The Stronghold

A glory-starved soldier spends his life awaiting an absent, long-expected enemy in this influential Italian classic of existentialism, now newly translated and with its originally intended title restored. At the start of Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold, newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first posting: the remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassable mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the enemy, whose attack is imminent. This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his lair, to defeat once and for all, returning home in triumph. And yet time passes, and where is the enemy? As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning, they succumb to inertia, and though death occurs, it is not from bravery. Decades pass. A lifetime passes. Drogo, however, still has his lonely vigil to keep. Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his fantastical imagination and for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light. The Stronghold, previously translated as The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been read as a veiled attack on Mussolini’s fascist militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War, and an existentialist fable. Lawrence Venuti’s new translation reverts to the title that Buzzati originally intended to give his book, and seeks to bring out both the human and the historical dimensions of a story of proven power and poignancy.

Legends of the West