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Overview
From the master folklorist and sly wit, Jan Brunvand, comes a collection of all-new urban legends.
Did your cousin's wife's dentist's daughter go to the tanning parlor once too often and had her insides cooked? Has your husband's brother's nephew teacher try to make a dead rabbit look alive? If so, you've heard—or you yourself may have told—two of the seventy-plus legends in this collection.
Urban legends are "those bizarre but believable stories about batter-fried rats, spiders in hairdos, Cabbage Patch dolls that get funerals, and the like that pass by word of mouth as being the gospel truth." But of course, though often told as having happened to a FOAF (friend of a friend), they aren't true. Included in this collection are legends about sex, horror, cars, business, and academia. Among them are "The Bible Student's Exam," "The Pregnant Shoplifter," "The Ice Cream Cone Caper," "Don't Mess with Texas," and "Mrs. Fields' Cookie Recipe."
Synopsis
From the master folklorist and sly wit, Jan Brunvand, comes a collection of all-new urban legends.
Publishers Weekly
Syndicated columnist Brunvand here presents a collection of columns about legends that haunt the public consciousness but have little or no basis in fact, including tales of poisonous snakes in amusement parks, airline pilots locked out of their flight cabins and AIDS Mary, who intentionally spreads disease. PW found that ``much of the material is ho-hum and all too familiar.'' Illustrated. (Sept.)