Of Huck and Alice was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Huck Finn and Alice B. Toklas allow Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein to slip away from the cramped and smothery intentions of proper writing. Like Krazy Kat, who transforms the hurt of Ignatz Mouse's brick into humorous bliss, Huck and Alice brilliantly misrepresent painful authority. As exemplars of humorous skepticism, Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein are at the center of this far-ranging book that begins with an examination of Jacksonian dialect humor, ends with an account of the humorous style in post-modern American fiction, and considers along the way the sweet parlance of Krazy Kat, the meaning of Harpo Marx's silence, and the iconicity of Woody Allen's face. Schmitz's analysis of the humorous style explores the texture of its language, discusses its preferred forms, and shows how the humorist frames his or her question within the text.

If ever you suspected that economic humor is an oxymoron, read on. This anthology, offering over a hundred selections of economic humor in the form of essays, fables, cartoons, verses, parodies, and epigrams drawn from works ancient and modern, will disabuse you of that notion by way of laughter. The contributors, about evenly divided between economists and noneconomists, share a common urge to poke fun at economics and its practitioners. Their styles and methods, however, range from kind and gentle to mordant and misanthropic; this is not surprising given the diversity of their professions: diplomat, playwright, printer's devil, publisher, columnist, physician, inventor, minister, corporate president, radio star, New York Stock Exchange member, and philosopher, to name but a few.
Bringing economic humor into the light of day, Caroline Clotfelter gathers her collection of materials into recognizable categories: economists as others see them, the language and methods of economics, Econ 101, micro- and macroeconomics, and basic economic models and ideas. Aiding and abetting her include such luminaries as John Stuart Mill, George Bernard Shaw, Mad Magazine, Stephen Leacock, Emily Dickinson, Rube Goldberg, Pogo, and John Kenneth Galbraith. As no other, this book will challenge economists to enjoy jokes at their own expense; noneconomists may have even less difficulty finding something funny in this most dismal of sciences.
Caroline Postelle Clotfelter, former Professor of Economics, Mercer University, is now retired.

Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present. In her younger days, essayist Megan Stielstra saw Jane’s Addiction at the Aragon Ballroom and fantasized about living on the same block, right in the thick of music and revelry. As an adult, she lives in a turreted condo across the street, with her husband, a child, and an onerous mortgage. It’s just the home her young, cool self imagined. And it isn’t what she expected, either.
 
With conversational flourishes and on-the-mark descriptions, Stielstra’s essays evoke the richness of her everyday life and the memories that are never far away. She remembers learning how to shoot a gun, a cancer scare, and—in a piece that was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2013—the time she eavesdropped on another new mother using her son’s baby monitor. “I shouldn’t have listened,” she writes. “But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn’t feel alone.” Combining footnotes, electric sentences, and uproariously funny anecdotes (have you ever run into an ex while rolling on ecstasy?), Stielstra shows us that maturity is demanding, but its rewards are a gift.