Alligators breeding in the sewers of New York City is an urban legend; thousands of people living in the tunnels beneath New York is not. Ms. Toth has written a compelling, compassionate and extraordinary documentary about the "Mole People."

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The series seeks to recover the entire extant corpus of Greek tragedy, quite as though the ancient tragedians wrote in the English of our own time.

Under the general editorship of William Arrowsmith and Herbert Golder, each of these three volumes, now available for the first time in paperback, includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays.

Another collection of Trillin's short pieces has hit the streets, and he just gets better and better. A Midwesterner in his soul but a New Yorker in fact, Trillin's comic take on '90s life demonstrates his perfect pitch for the absurd again and again in these short and intelligent essays.

Throughout the 1970s, as he wrote the "American Journal" feature for the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin crossed and recrossed the continent. Braver than most transients, he dined in every manner of restaurant, sampling all kinds of native cuisine. He tirelessly sniffed out plain but great joints where the local people loved to eat. "[Don't take me to the] place you took your parents on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, [but] the place you went the night you came home after fourteen months in Korea." As a result of such hard-nosed pursuit of good food, this "Walt Whitman of American eats" produced three delightful books chronicling his gastronomic journey, and they have now been collected into The Tummy Trilogy. Trillin is a marvelous writer, affable and witty under any circumstances. He's also an extremely enthusiastic eater, so the books are filled with gourmet brio. Here's a sample from the first book, American Fried:

ME: Anybody who served a milkshake like this in Kansas City would be put in jail.

ALICE: You promised not to indulge in any of that hometown nostalgia while I'm eating. You know it gives me indigestion.

ME: What nostalgia? Facts are facts. The kind of milkshake that I personally consumed six hundred gallons of at the Country Club Daily is an historical fact in three flavors. Your indigestion is not from listening to my fair-minded remarks on the food of a particular American city. It's from drinking that gray skim milk this bandit is trying to pass off as a milkshake.

This book is almost as fun as tucking into a big, delicious meal (but no substitute, of course). Trillin's family, long-suffering in the face of a father's obsessions, is as winning as always. If you're a dedicated fan—or just dipping into the writing of this good-natured maestro—The Tummy Trilogy is a wonderful book. —Michael Gerber

I wrote a story about you. Well, sort of, see, it's mostly about me. Well, entirely about me, but here's the catch: I'm you. No, really, I mean it. Not like that transcendentalism stuff we're learning in English class, but really, truly, I'm you. I know what it feels like when your heart beats so hard against your white bone ribs, when you sing in the shower with soap in your eyes, when you run until you get a side ache. I wrote this story about you because I am so in love with you, your broken-fence teeth and your tissue-paper scars. I love you when you're so exhausted it could topple you to the ground, so in love it could snap guitar strings, so sickly sweet it could make lips smile. This is a reckless love story. This is my shameless confession.

A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.' We see signs in shops every day for "Banana's" and even "Gateaux's". Competition rules remind us: "The judges decision is final." Now, many punctuation guides already exist explaining the principles of the apostrophe; the comma; the semi-colon. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! Of course they don't! They laugh at books like those! Eats, Shoots and Leaves adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes: send letters back with the punctuation corrected. Do not accept sloppy emails. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in "Video's sold here".

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Lynne Truss is the pundit of pet peeves. She's taken on the ignorance of basic grammar with Eats, Shoots & Leaves, now she bravely rallies against the abysmal state of manners. And while she uses the Jerry Springer-esque phrase of 'talk to the hand' as her title, it's obvious she'd like to have snarkily dubbed it "Learn Some Effing Manners People!"—only she's too polite to do so. (It should be noted that while she's shocked by 6-year-olds using the f -word, she's hopeful that it's so overused that it'll soon sink into obsolescence.) To hammer across her points on politesse, Truss pulls quotations from an astonishing range of sources. Sociologist Erving Goffman is a favorite, but the Simpsons (of cartoon fame, not Jessica & Ashlee), Evelyn Waugh, and W.B. Yeats are also tapped. What her rant boils down to though is unsurprising: modern communication is at the root of rude behavior. Mobile phones and iPods have left us existing in our own little "bubble worlds," she says. "It used to be just CIA agents with earpieces…who regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now it's nearly everybody." These self-produced bubbles make it easy for rudeness to rule. If someone forgets to hold a door or say "Thank you," it's because, Truss says, they're zoned out in their personal space, and will likely be offended if their lack of manners is pointed out. (The ruder the person, she says, the more easily offended.) Truss certainly earns many chuckles throughout her somewhat rambling musings, but her concern about society's decline is serious. To that end, she offers the words of Willy Loman's wife in Arthur Miller's most famous play on modern-day morality (and we all remember what happens in its last act): "Attention must be paid."—Erica Jorgensen

A Note from Lynne Truss

Dear Amazon customer and fellow stickler,

There’s an odd thing I’m finding about my new book, Talk to the Hand. The moment I start describing it to people ("Basically, it’s about the rudeness of everyday life – "), they jump straight in with stories about all the rudeness they’ve encountered in the past ten years. When I was trying to tell people about punctuation, engaging their attention was a victory. Well, not this time. "And another thing!" they say, banging the table. "What about cell phones? What about cold callers?" I make a feeble stab at outlining my six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door, also my theory of the alienation of modern life, which is that fundamentally we expect to be met half-way in our dealings with strangers and are continually shocked that this courtesy no longer pertains – but who am I kidding? I never get further than the first good reason (the decline of "please", "thank you", and "excuse me") because people are agreeing so vehemently, and I’m saying "Absolutely" and "You’re right" and "Actually, some of this is in the book." The thing is: there is nothing original in being against rudeness. Everyone is against rudeness. In fact, very, very rude people object to it strongly. But why does it matter to us so much? Are we so scared of other people? Why do we spend so much of our time saying, "Oh, that’s so RUDE"? All I can say is, you could find out from reading the book! But if you'd rather not, best wishes to all sticklers.

Your special pal,

Lynne Truss

The Lynne Truss Collection
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: 2006 Calendar
Making the Cat Laugh

Eccentrically organized, Cameron Tuttle's The Paranoid's Pocket Guide is a cautionary guidebook to take you into the millennium or, at the very least, put your worst fears in perspective. "Fright Bites!" ("In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control reported that it does not have a large enough budget to research all of the emerging pathogens") burst in on thematically arranged sections such as "Militias," "At Home," "Hypochondriac's Alert," and "At The Gym." Do you know that "every year, close to 200 exercisers fall victim to metal seat posts when the seats on their stationary bikes collapse?" More pointedly, do you need to? Lightning, in Tuttle's total scheme, glitters through the book as a significant leitmotif. It's entertaining, but probably not the best book to read on a long airplane ride.