Banned Books Week

From Shel Silverstein comes an imaginative book of poems and drawings--a favorite of Shel Silverstein fans young and old. A Light in the Attic delights with remarkable characters and hilariously profound poems in a collection readers will return to again and again. Here in the attic you will find Backward Bill, Sour Face Ann, the Meehoo with an Exactlywatt, and the Polar Bear in the Frigidaire. You will talk with Broiled Face, and find out what happens when Somebody steals your knees, you get caught by the Quick-Digesting Gink, a Mountain snores, and They Put a Brassiere on the Camel. Come on up to the attic of Shel Silverstein and let the light bring you home.

Helen fears that lack of improvement in her reading may leave her stuck in the sixth grade forever, until a good teacher recognizes her reading problem.

Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their mother are having a midnight snack on a dark and stormy night when an unearthly stranger appears at their door. He claims to have been blown off course, and goes on to tell them that there is such a thing as a "tesseract," which, if you didn't know, is a wrinkle in time. Meg's father had been experimenting with time-travel when he suddenly disappeared. Will Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin outwit the forces of evil as they search through space for their father?

To a thirteen-year-old Vermont farm boy whose father slaughters pigs for a living, maturity comes early as he learns "doing what's got to be done," especially regarding his pet pig who cannot produce a litter.

A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.

A poem for each letter of the alphabet introduces a different, spooky aspect of Halloween.

After serving in the United States Army in World War II and having his face blown off by a grenade, Francis, a young soldier, returns home hoping to find--and kill--the former childhood hero he feels betrayed him.

A 12-year-old boy goes on the run after being falsely accused of murder. Pursued by police and a hired killer, he breaks into homes, steals cars, a gun -- politely leaving notes of apology -- and regularly calls a radio show to defend himself. A first novel.

In a startling, often poignant student journal, acclaimed poet and novelist Ron Koertge creates a suburban high school both familiar and terrifying. The Branston High School Class of 2001 seems familiar enough on the surface: there’s the Smart One, the Fat Kid, Social Conscience, Bad Girl, Good Girl, Jock, Anorexic, Dyke, Rich Boy, Sistah, Stud . . . and Boyd, an Angry Young Man who has just made a dangerous new friend. Now he’s making a list. The Branston High School Class of 2001. You might think you know them. You might be surprised.

The Newbery Medal-winning classic novel about the courage and faith--and the love of a dog--that give a family strength in the face of inhumanity.  The boy knows that times are tough for his family. Every night, his father goes out hunting with their great coon dog, Sounder, to try to put food on the table. But even with the little they bring back, there is still never enough for the family to eat. When the boy awakens one morning to a sweet-smelling ham on the table, it seems like a blessing. But soon, the sheriff and his deputies come to the house and take the boy's father away in handcuffs. Suddenly the boy must grow up fast in a world that isn't fair, keeping hope alive through the love he has for his father's faithful dog, Sounder.

Are you there God? It's me, Margaret. No one ever told Margaret Simon that eleven-going-on-twelve would be such a hard age.  When her family moves to New Jersey, she has to adjust to life in the suburbs, a different school, and a whole new group of friends.  Margaret knows she needs someone to talk to about growing up-and it's not long before she's found a solution. Are you there God?  It's me, Margaret. I can't wait until two o'clock God.  That's when our dance starts.  Do you think I'll get Philip Leroy for a partner?  It's not so much that I like him as a person God, but as a boy he's very handsome.  And I'd love to dance with him... just once or twice.  Thank you God.

When Deenie finds out that she has scoliosis, she’s scared. When she sees the brace for the first time, she wants to scream. But the words won’t come out. And Deenie, beautiful Deenie, who everyone says should be a model, is stuck wearing a brace from her neck to her hips. For four years—or longer. She never worried about how she looked before—how will she ever face the hard times ahead?

Increasingly alienated from his widowed father, Vernon joins his friends in ridiculing the neighborhood outcasts: Maxine, an alcoholic prone to outrageous behavior, and Ronald, her intellectually disabled son. But when a social service agency tries to put Ronald into a special home, Vernon fights against the move.

Small for his age but artistically talented, twelve-year-old Jeremy Thatcher unknowingly buys a dragon's egg.

About an unforgettable family on a road-trip during one of the most important times in the civil rights movement. When the Watson family--ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron--sets out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don't realize that they're heading toward one of the darkest moments in America's history. The Watsons' journey reminds us that even in the hardest times, laughter and family can help us get through anything.

From the author of Catherine, Called Birdy comes another spellbinding novel set in medieval England. The girl known only as Brat has no family, no home, and no future until she meets Jane the Midwife and becomes her apprentice. As she helps the sharp-tempered Jane deliver babies, Brat--who renames herself Alyce--gains knowledge, confidence, and the courage to want something from life: "A full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world." Medieval village life makes a lively backdrop for the funny, poignant story of how Alyce gets what she wants. A concluding note discusses midwifery past and present.

"Well, first of all, " said the BFG, "human beans is not really believing in giants, is they? Human beans is not thinking we exist." Sophie discovers that giants not only exist, but that there are a great many of them who like to guzzle and swallomp nice little chiddlers. But not the Big Friendly Giant. He and Sophie cook up an ingenious plot to free the world of troggle-humping -- forever.

The enormous crocodile devises secret plans and a few clever tricks to secure his lunch only to have them foiled by his neighbors. The other jungle animals thwart the ferocious crocodile's plans to eat some "nice juicy children" for lunch. The Enormous Crocodile decides that he wants a nice juicy child for lunch, horrifying the other animals in the jungle--his friend, the Notsobig One; Humpy-Rumpy, the hippopotamus; Trunky, the elephant; Muggle-Wump, the monkey; and the Roly-Poly Bird. Despite his secret plans and clever tricks, what the boastful crocodile doesn't know is that the brave jungle animals have plans of their own for him! In the end, the Enormous Crocodile gets exactly what he deserves.

How James escapes from his miserable life with two nasty aunts and becomes a hero to his new insect family, including Miss Spider, the Old-Green-Grasshopper, the Centipede (with his 21 pairs of gorgeous boots), is Dahl-icious fantasy at its best.

To her small village, she is known as Miyax; to her friend in San Francisco, she is Julie. When her life in the village becomes dangerous, Miyax runs away, only to find herself lost in the Alaskan wilderness. Miyax tries to survive by copying the ways of a pack of wolves and soon grows to love her new wolf family. Life in the wilderness is a struggle, but when she finds her way back to civilization, Miyax is torn between her old and new lives. Is she the Miyax of her human village--or Julie of the wolves?

Sixteen-year-old Mark and Bryon have been like brothers since childhood, but now, as their involvement with girls, gangs, and drugs increases, their relationship seems to gradually disintegrate.

At the same time that Matt and Parker find the body of the dead man in the creek, they recognize George Evans, the owner of the antique shop where Parker's mother works.

With the help of her teacher, Mei Mei learns that she can have the best of two worlds by learning to communicate in two languages.

Shorty and his family, along with thousands of Japanese Americans, are sent to an internment camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fighting the heat and dust of the desert, Shorty and his father decide to build a baseball diamond and form a league in order to boost the spirits of the internees. Shorty quickly learns that he is playing not only to win, but to gain dignity and self-respect as well. Baseball Saved Us is the ultimate rite of passage story. It will appeal again and again to readers who enjoy cheering for the underdog.

The life of a ten-year-old boy in rural Virginia expands when he becomes friends with a newcomer who subsequently meets an untimely death trying to reach their hideaway, Terabithia, during a storm.

"To know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got . . . . That's why they don't want us reading." -- Nightjohn "I didn't know what letters was, not what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn."--Sarny Sarny, a female slave at the Waller plantation, first sees Nightjohn when he is brought there with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars. He had escaped north to freedom, but he came back--came back to teach reading. Knowing that the penalty for reading is dismemberment Nightjohn still retumed to slavery to teach others how to read. And twelve-year-old Sarny is willing to take the risk to learn. Set in the 1850s, Gary Paulsen's groundbreaking new novel is unlike anything else the award-winning author has written. It is a meticulously researched, historically accurate, and artistically crafted portrayal of a grim time in our nation's past, brought to light through the personal history of two unforgettable characters.

A young girl dreams of flying above her Harlem home, claiming all she sees for herself and her family. Based on the author's quilt story of the same name.

And Tango Makes Three is the bestselling, heartwarming true story of two penguins who create a nontraditional family. At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo get the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own.

A perennial kids' favorite since its first publication in 1973, How to Eat Fried Worms is the story of Billy, who, because of a bet, is in the uncomfortable position of having to eat fifteen worms in fifteen days. The worms are supplied by his opponent, whose motto is, unfortunately, "The bigger and juicier, the better!"

Mickey discovers that the "night kitchen" is where the wild snacks are.

Dr. Seuss's beloved story teaches kids to treat the planet with kindness and stand up and speak up for others. Experience the beauty of the Truffula Trees and the danger of taking our earth for granted in a story that is timely, playful, and hopeful. The book's final pages teach us that just one small seed, or one small child, can make a difference.

"Give me a dollar or I'll spit on you." That's Bradley Chalkers for you. He's the oldest kid in the fifth grade. He tells enormous lies. He picks fights with girls, and the teachers say he has serious behavior problems. No one likes him--except Carla, the new school counselor. She thinks Bradley is sensitive and generous, and she even enjoys his far-fetched stories. Carla knows that Bradley could change, if only he weren't afraid to try.   But when you feel like the most hated kid in the whole school, believing in yourself can be the hardest thing in the world. . . .

The New York Times bestselling kitty boy blasts off into another hilarious adventure. Buckle up, amigos- everyone's favorite kitty boy is about to lift off. You'll want to be there when the brave Skippito gets lost in spice! That's right, spice. Skippy knows- from his big ears to his toes-that the planet Mars is red because it's covered in spicy red pepper. To prove it, he's off on a space jaunt replete with craters, crazies, and creatures from Mars. His new adventure is packed with witty wordplay, Spanish phrases, and Judy Schachner's trademark hilarity. This rollicking romp is simply out of this world.

Henry Green is a boy who loves chocolate. He likes it bitter, sweet, dark, light, and daily; for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks; in cakes, candy bars, milk, and every other form you can possibly imagine. Henry probably loves chocolate more than any boy in the history of the world. One day -- it starts off like any other day -- Henry finds that strange things are happening to him. First he makes medical history with the only case of Chocolate Fever ever. Then he finds himself caught up in a wild and hilarious chase, climaxed by a very unusual hijacking.

Jessica has read enough books to know that her cat Worm must be a witch’s cat. He’s cast a spell on her, but to whom can she turn? After all, no one will believe that Worm has bewitched her . . . or worse,

Sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met. Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when it seems she must give up, she finds a kindred spirit. But Kit's friendship with Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, proves more taboo than she could have imagined and ultimately forces Kit to choose between her heart and her duty. Elizabeth George Speare won the 1959 Newbery Medal for this portrayal of a heroine whom readers will admire for her unwavering sense of truth as well as her infinite capacity to love.

William's Steig's Abel's Island tells the story of a mouse who gets swept away from his beloved wife--a truly timeless classic about life's simple pleasures. Abel's place in his familiar, mouse world has always been secure; he had an allowance from his mother, a comfortable home, and a lovely wife, Amanda. But one stormy August day, furious flood water carry him off and dump him on an uninhabited island. Despite his determination and stubborn resourcefulness--he tried crossing the river with boats and ropes and even on stepping-stones--Abel can't find a way to get back home. Days, then weeks and months, pass. Slowly, his soft habits disappear as he forages for food, fashions a warm nest in a hollow log, models clay statues of his family for company, and continues to brood on the problem of how to get across the river--and home. Abel's time on the island brings him a new understanding of the world he's separated from. Faced with the daily adventure of survival in his solitary, somewhat hostile domain, he is moved to reexamine the easy way of life he had always accepted and discovers skills and talents in himself that hold promise of a more meaningful life, if and when he should finally return to Mossville and his dear Amanda again.

In a moment of fright Sylvester the donkey asks his magic pebble to turn him into a rock but then cannot hold the pebble to wish himself back to normal again.

When Aunt Callie sends Cassie Logan and her brothers for medicine, the four children head nervously for the Wallace store despite their parents' warnings never to go there. And sure enough they find themselves bracing for trouble as they witness Mr. Tom Bee, an old black man, calling the white storekeeper by his first name. The year is 1933, the place Mississippi, and any child knows that certain things just aren't done. What follows is shocking and unforgettable -- but not at all what the children, the former slave, or the storekeeper expect. Once again Mildred Taylor has drawn on stories her father told her about his boyhood to create a book that will leave no reader unmoved. Max Ginsberg's drawings capture all the sensations of that hot, tense, and fateful afternoon. - Back cover. Four children witness a confrontation between an elderly black man and a white storekeeper in rural Mississippi in the 1930s.

The story of one African-American family fighting to stay together and strong in the face of brutal racist attacks, illness, poverty, and betrayal in the Deep South of the 1930s.

Phillip is excited when the Germans invade the small island of Curaçao. War has always been a game to him, and he's eager to glimpse it firsthand-until the freighter he and his mother are traveling to the United States on is torpedoed. When Phillip comes to, he is on a small raft in the middle of the sea. Besides Stew Cat, his only companion is an old West Indian, Timothy. Phillip remembers his mother's warning about black people: "They are different, and they live differently." But by the time the castaways arrive on a small island, Phillip's head injury has made him blind and dependent on Timothy.

In the early twentieth century a young Chinese boy joins his father in San Francisco and helps him realize his dream of making a flying machine.

In a powerful collection of more than seventy uncensored poems and essays, more than fifty teenage boys from across the country explore their many-layered concerns: identity, love, envy, gratitude, sex, anger, competition, fear, hope. Here, unadorned and without the filter of adult sensibility, is the raw stuff of their lives, in their own words.

"Speak up for yourself--we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.

After Davey's father is killed in a hold-up, she and her mother and younger brother visit relatives in New Mexico. Here Davey is befriended by a young man who helps her find the strength to carry on and conquer her fears.

When his father killed another brave, Thomas Black Bull and his parents sought refuge in the wilderness. There they took up life as it had been in the old days, hunting and fishing, battling for survival. But an accident claimed the father's life and the grieving mother died shortly afterward. Left alone, the young Indian boy vowed never to retum to the white man's world, to the alien laws that had condemned his father.

Joel dares his best friend, Tony, to a swimming race in a dangerous river. Both boys jump in, but when Joel reaches the sandbar, he finds Tony has vanished. How can he face their parents and the terrible truth?

Six stories featuring athletes in tales of love, death, bigotry, heroism, and coming of age.

Still troubled by his older brother's violent suicide, eighteen-year-old Dillon becomes deeply involved in the terrible secret of his friend Jennifer, who feels she can tell no one what her stepfather is doing to her.Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Louie Banks isn't the boy who has everything, but  he's not complaining. In his  senior year of high school Louie has good friends, a  starting spot on the football team, and a terrific  girlfriend, Becky. Maybe it was  too good to last. All at once,everything turns  sour when Louie is tossed off the football team for  taking a stand against the coach, who ordered an  illegal hit against an opposing player. Luckily  he's supported by his parents, his bestfriend, and  Becky. Louie can face anything as long as he has  her love. The tragedy strikes. Now  everything in life seerns unfair to Louie. People  say he acting crazy. Can he let go of his anger  and reach for something new to believe in?

Sarah Byrnes and Eric Calhoune have been friends for years. When they were children, his weight and her scars made them both outcasts. Now Sarah Byrnes--the smartest, toughest person Eric has ever known--sits silent in a hospital. Eric must uncover the terrible secret she's hiding before its dark current pulls them both under.

Stotan: A cross between a Stoic and a Spartan. Walker, Nortie, Lion, and Jeff are the best of friends and members of their high school swim team. Together they pledge to accept the challenge of Stotan Week -- a series of grueling physical and emotional tests of endurance. This is one memorable week in their senior year; a time in which they live together and share their innermost feelings. Little do they know that the magic of Stotan Week is the start of something that will change their lives forever.

There's bad news and good news about the Cutter High School swim team. The bad news is that they don't have a pool. The good news is that only one of them can swim anyway. A group of misfits brought together by T. J. Jones (the J is redundant) to find their places in a school that has no place for them, the Cutter All Night Mermen struggle to carve out their own turf. T. J. is convinced that a varsity letter jacket--unattainable for most, exclusive, revered, the symbol (as far as T. J. is concerned) of all that is screwed up at Cutter High--will be an effective carving tool. He's right. He's also wrong. Still, it's always the quest that counts. And the bus on which the Mermen travel to swim meets--piloted by Icko, the permanent resident of All, Night Fitness--soon becomes the cocoon inside which they gradually allow themselves to talk, to fit, to bloom. Chris Crutcher is in top form with a cast of characters--adults, children, and teenagers--fighting for dignity in a world where tragedy and comedy dance side by side, where a moment's inattention can bring lifelong heartache, and where true acceptance is the only prescription for what ails us.

Moose Flannagan moves with his family to Alcatraz so his dad can work as a prison guard and his sister, Natalie, can attend a special school.  But Natalie has autism, and when she's denied admittance to the school, the stark setting of Alcatraz begins to unravel the tenuous coping mechanisms Moose's family has used for dealing with her disorder. When Moose meets Piper, the cute daughter of the Warden, he knows right off she's trouble.  But she's also strangely irresistible.  All Moose wants to do is protect Natalie, live up to his parents' expectations, and stay out of trouble.  But on Alcatraz, trouble is never very far away. Set in 1935, when guards actually lived on Alcatraz Island with their families.  Choldenko's second novel brings humor to the complexities of family dynamics and illuminates the real struggle of a kid trying to free himself from the "good boy" stance he's taken his whole life.

While trying to transport food to Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, fourteen-year-old Johnny is captured by a black Union soldier.

Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . . In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Eighteen-year-old Eric has just been released from juvenile detention for murdering his mother and stepfather.  Now he's looking for tenderness--tenderness he finds in caressing and killing beautiful girls. Fifteen-year-old Lori has run away from home again.  Emotionally naive but sexually precocious, she is also looking for tenderness--tenderness she finds in Eric.  Will Lori and Eric be each other's salvation or destruction?  Told from their alternating points of view, this harrowing thriller speeds to its fateful conclusion with an irresistible force, and a final twist that will not be easily forgotten.

Jane Jerome's house is trashed one evening while her family is out. The culprits are four middle-class kids from the next town--not a gang or hoods--out for action. The Avenger has seen it all and is determined to exact revenge. A superb thriller which explores the effects of random violence on a family and on one of the violators.

Read the cult-favorite coming of age story that takes a sometimes heartbreaking, often hysterical, and always honest look at high school in all its glory. The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant "wallflower" Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone, and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Talor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship, one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to "fix" her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self--even if she's not quite sure who that is.

"Where would you like to be five years from now?" Dr. B. asks. "Nowhere," America answers. By age fifteen, America has already been nowhere. Been nobody. Separated from his foster mother, Mrs. Harper. A runaway living for weeks in a mall, then for months in Central Park. A patient at Applegate, the residential treatment facility north of New York City. And now at Ridgeway, a hospital. America is a boy, he thinks to himself, who gets lost easy and is not worth the trouble of finding. But Dr. B. takes the trouble. With abiding care, he nudges America's story from him. An against-the-odds story about America's shattered past with his mother and brothers. About Browning, a man in Mrs. Harper's house who saves America, then betrays him. About a bighearted, hardheaded girl named Liza, and Ty and Fish and Wick and Marshall and Ernie and Tom and Dr. B. himself who care more than America does about whether he lives or dies.

"Because life is funny", Gingerbread tells Keisha when she asks why he laughs so much. The thing is, until she falls in love with him, Keisha doesn't see what's funny -- in her life or anyone else's in Brooklyn. In this novel, the lives of eleven teenagers intertwine, sometimes by accident, sometimes because of something more. There is Eric, fiercely protective of his little brother, Mickey. To the rest of the world he's just plain fierce. To Linnette, he is only an intruder in her life -- until a look through a keyhole reveals both Eric's past and his future. Then there are Grace and Sam, whose dreams come true because they were lucky enough to be born beautiful. And Sonia, who struggles to live the life of a good Muslim girl in a foreign America. China and Ebony, whose friendship can't bear the changes that time brings. And Monique and Molly -- sisters -- each saved by the other. There is a lot more to teenagers' lives than is found in books. Usually. This one is remarkable for the truth of its sound, the sharpness of its eyesight, the kindness of its heart.

Liza never knew that falling in love could be so wonderful . . . and so confusing. "'Liza,' Mom said, looking into my eyes, 'I want you to tell me the truth, not because I want to pry, but because I have to know. This could get very unpleasant . . . Now--have you and Annie--done any more than the usual experimenting . . . ' 'No, Mom,' I said, trying to look back at her calmly. I'm not proud of it, I make no excuses--I lied to her."

When popular Tower High English teacher Mr. Chippendale is fatally shot, everyone's a suspect. The killer could be anyone -- one of his students, a colleague, or even an ex-flame. Told in a series of interlocking poems, this suspenseful story will keep readers guessing who the killer is right up until the last page.

Based on the diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user chronicling her struggle to escape the pull of the drug world. Being fifteen is hard, but Alice seems fine. She babysits the neighbour's kids. She is doing well at school. Someday she'd even like to get married and raise a family of her own. Then she is invited to a party, a special party where the drinks are spiked with LSD and Alice is never the same again.

Deciding he has finally had enough abuse from his drunken father and is now determined to get away--any way he can--Davy discovers that he has the ability to teleport anywhere he wants. So he "jumps" to New York City. But next he finds himself desperately short on cash, so he "jumps" into a bank vault. While living the high life in the Big City and testing the limits of his power, Davey makes another startling discovery--the mother whom he thought had abandoned him. But a new tragedy and other events plunge Davy into a dangerous and mysterious world of terrorists and government espionage. This time there may be no safe place for "the Jumper."

Katherine V thought boys were gross Katherine X just wanted to be friends Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail K-19 broke his heart When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun--but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.

First drink. First prank. First friend. First love. Last words.    Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words--and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called "The Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.    Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another.

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificent Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life--summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge--he follows. When their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Margo has disappeared. But Q soon learns that there are clues--and they're for him. Embarking on an exhilarating adventure to find her, the closer Q gets, the less he sees the girl he thought he knew.

Like the other girls in her class, Tish Bonner at first resents having to keep a journal for English class--even though Mrs. Dunphrey has told them she will not read any entry marked Do not read this. But Tish finds solace in writing about those problems she can't discuss--such as the fact that her mother has abandoned Tish and her little brother, and she doesn't know how to support them with the wages from her part-time Burger Boy job.

The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society.

Russel Middlebrook is convinced he's the only gay kid at Goodkind High School. Then his online gay-chat buddy turns out to be none other than Kevin, the popular but closeted star of the school's baseball team. Soon Russel meets other gay students too. There's his best friend, Min, who reveals that she's bisexual, and her soccer-playing girlfriend, Terese. And there's Terese's politically active friend, Ike. But how can kids this diverse get together without drawing attention to themselves? We just choose a club that's so boring, nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years join it. We could call it Geography Club. Brent Hartinger's debut novel is a fastpaced, funny, and trenchant portrait of contemporary teenagers who may not learn any actual geography in their latest school club, but who learn plenty about the treacherous social terrain of a typical American high school and the even more dangerous landscape of the human heart.

A journey through a land where Milo learns the importance of words and numbers provides a cure for his boredom.

Fifteen-year-old Sara Moone, abandoned at birth and shunted from one foster home to another, finds that she cannot remain aloof from her latest family.

Sixteen-year-old Vivian Gandillon is trying to fit in to her new home in the suburbs.  But trying to act "normal" isn't always easy, since Vivian and her family are werewolves.  It's glorious to have the power to change, and Vivian is a beautiful loup-garou with all the young wolves howling for her.  But she wants no part of her squabbling pack, left leaderless by her father's recent death. Then Vivian falls in love with a human, a meat-boy.  If she reveals herself, will he relish the magic of her dual nature?  When a brutal murder threatens the pack's survival, Vivian's divided loyalties are further strained.  What is she really--human or beast?

The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community.

As he enters high school, fourteen-year-old Elvin continues to deal with his weight problem as he tries to find his place among his peers.

Feeling like she does not fit in with the other members of her family, fifteen-year-old Virginia tries to deal with her self-image, her first physical relationship, and her disillusionment with some of the people closest to her.

This 1989 Coretta Scott King Award winner is the story of one young man's tour of duty in Vietnam as well as a testament to the thousands of young people who lived and died during the war.

Stuff doesn't know anyone when he first moves to 116th Street. But all of that changes when he meets Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Gloria. Stuff and the gang grow close that eventful year, and nothing is ever like it again. That's the year modern science gets them all in jail; Stuff falls in love and is unfaithful; and Cool Clyde and Fast Sam win the dance contest-almost.

Although eighteen-year-old Bella joins the dark but seductive world of the immortals by marrying Edward the vampire, her connection to the powerful werewolf Jacob remains unsevered.

Bella must choose between her friendship with Jacob, a werewolf, and her relationship with Edward, a vampire, but when Seattle is ravaged by a mysterious string of killings, the three of them need to decide whether their personal lives are more important than the well-being of an entire city.

From evil vampires to a mysterious pack of wolves, new threats of danger and vengeance test Bella and Edward's romance in the second book of the irresistible Twilight saga. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning. Bella and Edward face a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi.

Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Isabella, the person Edward holds most dear. The lovers find themselves balanced precariously on the point of a knife -- between desire and danger. Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.

Thousand Pieces of Gold tells the fascinating story of Lalu Nathoy, later known as Polly Bemis. Born in China in the mid 1800's, Lalu was raised in a peasant village ravaged by poverty and drought. At an early age she was snatched from her family by bandits, shipped to America as a slave, and auctioned off to a Chinese saloon keeper in an Idaho mining camp. There, having gained her freedom through a poker game, her indomitable spirit took her from running her own boarding house to homesteading twenty acres on the River of No Return. Today, almost fifty years after her death, stories of her courage and acts of kindness live on. The first biography of a Chinese American pioneer woman, Thousand Pieces of Gold is an important contribution to the literature by and about minority women as well as an intriguing account of an unforgettable character.

Slim's father, a charismatic actor named Mack, is dying of AIDS.  Slim and Mack's companion, Larry, help care for Mack.  Soon Slim joins a support group for family members who live with people who have AIDS.  There she meets Isaiah, who believes their parents can be cured by the Miracle Man in the "Hungry Valley" north of Los Angeles.  Slim believes only what she sees: that her father and others are dying and no one is trying to stop it.   But Isaiah's faith in miracles rubs off on Slim, and with their family and friends they journey into the mountains to find their own moment of magic.

In a savage postnuclear world, four young fugitives attempt to overthrow the bloodthirsty rule of the Overlords with the help of Shade, their mysterious mentor.

Inge Dorenwald and Lieselotte Vessely have been best friends for most of their thirteen years. They share secrets, fears, hopes and even the same birthday. It never mattered that Inge was Jewish and that Lieselotte was the daughter of a Nazi SS officer--until now. Hitler and Nazism are infiltrating Vienna, Austria, in 1938 and suddenly it is forbidden for the girls to continue seeing each other. Despite the danger, Inge and Liselotte struggle to keep their friendship alive. But will they be able to do it? A new afterword by the author, who based the story on her own experiences during World War II, is included.

A young boy spends his tenth summer on his aunt and uncle's farm, where he is constantly involved in crazy escapades with his cousin Harris.

Chris Creed grew up as the class freak--the bullies' punching bag. After he vanished, the weirdness that had once surrounded him began spreading. It was as if a darkness reached out of his void to grab at the most normal, happy people--like some twisted joke or demented form of justice. It tore the town apart. Sixteen-year-old Torey Adams's search for answers opens his eyes to the lies, the pain, and the need to blame when tragedy strikes, and his once-safe world comes crashing down aroundhim.

When their alien spaceship lands on the roof of Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, Zorx, Klax, and Jennifer plan to take over the Earth, using school children as their zombie nerd henchmen.

Philip Pullman takes readers to a world where humans have animal familiars and where parallel universes are within reach. Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal--including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world. Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want. But what Lyra doesn't know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other...

Adventure abounds when a toy comes to life in this classic novel! It's Omri's birthday, but all he gets from his best friend, Patrick, is a little plastic warrior figure. Trying to hide his disappointment, Omri puts his present in a metal cupboard and locks the door with a mysterious skeleton key that once belonged to his great-grandmother. Little does Omri know that by turning the key, he will transform his ordinary plastic toy into a real live man from an altogether different time and place! Omri and the tiny warrior called Little Bear could hardly be more different, yet soon the two forge a very special friendship. Will Omri be able to keep Little Bear without anyone finding out and taking his new friend away?

The summer after his first year at Hogwarts is worse than ever for Harry Potter. The Dursleys of Privet Drive are more horrible to him than ever before. And just when he thinks the endless summer vacation is over, a creature named Dobby the house-elf shows up issuing a grave warning to Harry not to go back to school or disaster will happen! Of course, Harry has to go back- and he does so in grand style, in a flying-car magicked by his friends Ron and Percy Weasley. But getting back to Hogwarts isn't the cure Harry expects it to be. Almost immediately a student is found turned to stone, and then another. And somehow Harry stands accused. Could Harry Potter be the long-feared heir of Slytherin? Harry and friends Hermione and Fred are stretched to their limits in a desperate fight against Draco Malfoy and his gang, the hideously stuck-up new professor Gilderoy Lockheart, the malevolent owner of the diary of Tom Riddle, giant spiders, and perhaps even...Hagrid!

Burdened with the dark, dangerous, and seemingly impossible task of locating and destroying Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes, Harry, feeling alone and uncertain about his future, struggles to find the inner strength he needs to follow the path set out before him.

Fourteen-year-old Harry Potter joins the Weasleys at the Quidditch World Cup, then enters his fourth year at Hogwarts Academy where he is mysteriously entered in an unusual contest that challenges his wizarding skills, friendships and character, amid signs that an old enemy is growing stronger

Sixth-year Hogwarts student Harry Potter gains valuable insights into the boy Voldemort once was, even as his own world is transformed by maturing friendships, schoolwork assistance from an unexpected source, and devastating losses.

When the government of the magic world and authorities at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry refuse to believe in the growing threat of a freshly revived Lord Voldemort, fifteen-year-old Harry Potter finds support from his loyal friends in facing the evil wizard and other new terrors.

Harry Potter spent ten long years living with Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, an aunt and uncle whose outrageous favoritism of their perfectly awful son Dudley leads to some of the most inspired dark comedy since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But fortunately for Harry, he's about to be granted a scholarship to a unique boarding school called THE HOGWORTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY, where he will become a school hero at the game of Quidditch (a kind of aerial soccer played high above the ground on broomsticks), he will make some wonderful friends, and, unfortunately, a few terrible enemies. For although he seems to be getting your run-of-the-mill boarding school experience (well, ok, even that's pretty darn out of the ordinary), Harry Potter has a destiny that he was born to fulfill. A destiny that others would kill to keep him from.

For twelve long years, the dread fortress of Azkaban held an infamous prisoner named Sirius Black. Convicted of killing thirteen people with a single curse, he was said to be the heir apparent to the Dark Lord, Voldemort.Now he has escaped, leaving only two clues as to where he might be headed: Harry Potter's defeat of You-Know-Who was Black's downfall as well. And the Azkaban guards heard Black muttering in his sleep, "He's at Hogwarts . . . he's at Hogwarts."Harry Potter isn't safe, not even within the walls of his magical school, surrounded by his friends. Because on top of it all, there may well be a traitor in their midst.

Every summer, Rose goes with her mom and dad to a lake house in Awago Beach. It's their getaway, their refuge. Rosie's friend Windy is always there, too, like the little sister she never had. But this summer is different. Rose's mom and dad won't stop fighting, and when Rose and Windy seek a distraction from the drama, they find themselves with a whole new set of problems. One of the local teens - just a couple of years older than Rose and Windy - is caught up in something bad... Something life threatening. It's a summer of secrets, and sorrow, and growing up, and it's a good thing Rose and Windy have each other. This One Summer is a tremendously exciting new teen graphic novel from two creators with true literary clout. Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, the team behind Skim, have collaborated on this gorgeous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful story about a girl on the cusp of childhood - a story of renewal and revelation.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does--or does not--say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

Shawn McDaniel is an enigma and a miracle--except no one knows it, least of all his father. His life is not what it may seem to anyone looking at him. Not even those who love him best have any idea what he is truly like. In this extraordinary and powerful first novel, the reader learns to look beyond the obvious and finds a character whose spirit is rich beyond imagining and whose story is unforgettable. My life is like one of those "good news-bad news" jokes. Like, "I've got some good news and some bad news--which do you want first?" I could go on about my good news for hours, but you probably want to hear the punch line, my bad news, right? Well, there isn't that much, really, but what's here is pretty wild. First off, my parents got divorced ten years ago because of me. My being born changed everything for all of us, in every way. My dad didn't divorce my mom, or my sister, Cindy, or my brother, Paul--he divorced me. He couldn't handle my condition, so he had to leave. My condition? Well, that brings us to the guts of my bad news.

When 14-year-old Gayle gets into trouble again, Mama sends her south to live with her aunt and uncle, a minister. They'll hardly let her out of the house and she doesn't like her cousin Cookie. Then Gayle meets Great, the family matriarch. Gayle's life begins to change--perhaps she can make her own place in the world after all.

Here are stories from the legendary past of Japan: gods and warriors, woodcutters and fishermen, wicked giants and beautiful princesses. Touches of mischief and humor abound, and a deep sense of the magic, ceremony, and the wonder of life.

A brave squire, an earnest page, and a strong-willed princess set out, each for individual reasons, to try to slay the dragon created to carry out a witch's revenge.

Jambo Means Hello introduces children to the Swahili alphabet with helpful pronunciation keys, while presenting East African culture and lifestyles through an easy-to-understand narrative and vivid illustrations.

What happens when the five luckiest children in the entire world walk through the doors of Willy Wonka's famous, mysterious chocolate factory? What happens when, one by one, the children disobey Mr. Wonka's orders? In Dahl's most popular story, the nasty are punished and the good are deliciously, sumptuously rewarded.

Shel Silverstein has created a poetry collection that is outrageously funny and deeply profound. Come in . . . for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins. You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist. Shel Silverstein's masterful collection of poems and drawings stretches the bounds of imagination and will be cherished by readers of all ages.

The amazing original that set off the worldwide search for Waldo! Perfect for the youngest Waldo searcher, this special edition contains all the fun of the original but with lots of eye-boggling extras! Anyone who has found Waldo before will want to find him all over again because he's in a new place in every scene. And now readers can also search for Woof, Wenda, Wizard Whitebeard, Odlaw, and much more—all newly added to this special edition!

George and Harold are fourth-grade buddies with a penchant for practical jokes. When the boys' latest prank drives their science teacher over the edge, their clueless principal, Mr. Krupp, quickly hires a replacement: Professor Pippy P. Poopypants. Of course, George and Harold can't resist making fun of the Professor's silly name. But then the Professor retaliates by forcing everyone in town to change their own names to be equally silly, with colossal consequences!

Here is a book as joyous and painful, and as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's first memoir, published in 1969 is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." When she journeys at eight to her mother's side in St. Louis, she is attacked by a man many times her age. Years later, in San Francisco, she learns about love for herself-and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. The kindness of others, Maya's own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful-now in a beautiful keepsake edition-I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds as long as people read.

Why we are failing to protect the global environment. What we can--and must--do to succeed. This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth's environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world. The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems--climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others--don't work. He offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different government and citizen action are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as "essential," this is it.

Here are the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle as they first appeared in the famed British magazine The Strand. This periodical was the literary sensation of its time, especially with the publication of the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (which appears in its entirety in this volume), when eager readers lined up outside the magazine's London offices, waiting for each installment as it came off press.

A play in which a lawyer, Gerardo, is asked to investigate the crimes at a beach house where his wife was one of the victims.

Locke's Essay (1690) withstood an onslaught by traditional theologians, for rejecting orthodox theology and the concept of innate ideas: as he suggested that God could make matter think. The Essay quickly became one of the most influential books of the eighteenth century, and its contributions to the philosophy of space and time, matter and power were quickly hailed as formative contributions to philosophy.

Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) is Berkeley's main work of philosophical theology and a crucial source of his views on meaning and language.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work, is a classic text in modern philosophy and jurisprudence. First published in 1789, it contains the important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and a pioneering study of crime andpunishment, both of which remain at the heart of contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory.

Metaphysicians have for centuries attempted to clarify the nature of the world and how rational human beings construct their ideas of it. Materialists believed that the world (including its human component) consisted of objective matter, an irreducible substance to which qualities and characteristics could be attributed. Mindthoughts, ideas, and perceptionswas viewed as a more sophisticated material substance. Idealists, on the other hand, argued that the world acquired its reality from mind, which breathed metaphysical life into substances that had no independent existence of their own. These two camps seemed deadlocked until Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason endeavored to show that the most accurate theory of reality would be one that combined relevant aspects of each position, yet transcended both to arrive at a more fundamental metaphysical theory. Kant's synthesis sought to disclose how human reason goes about constructing its experience of the world, thus intertwining objective simuli with rational processes that arrive at an orderly view of nature.

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church.

In 1915 at the University of Vienna 60-year-old Sigmund Freud delivered these lectures on psychoanalysis, pointing to the interplay of unconscious and conscious forces within individual psyches. In reasoned progression he outlined core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, free association and libido.

A psychiatrist suggests ways in which confronting and resolving problems, a painful process most people try to avoid, can lead to greater self-understanding and spiritual growth.

It used to be that everyone read the "notorious" Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). He was a great satirist and came to have a profound impact on economics, ethics and social philosophy. "The Fable of the Bees" begins with a poem and continues with a number of essays and dialogues. It is all tied together by the startling and original idea that "private vices" (self-interest) lead to "publick benefits" (the development and operation of society).

In the first through the sixth centuries of the common era, successive circles of rabbis in the Holy Land and Babylonia developed Rabbinic Judaism. Transforming the biblical Temple-oriented form of Judaism, they shaped a vision of Judaism centered around the piety of following and studying the Torah to achieve a sense of the divine in this world. This piety entailed both an intellectual and emotional dimension that spoke to individuals and that affected the developing synagogues and local communities of Jews. The rabbinic teachings were eventually compiled into the Talmud and Midrash in a manner that perpetuated the piety of study.These works do not offer clear cut decisions but invite the reader into the text to join in a chorus of voices and alternatives pursuing a discussion on the meaning of the Torah and what the divine demands of men and women in their everyday world. This version of Judaism soon became "classical" and would remain formative until modern times.

In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.

The beginning of time. The origin of life. In our Western civilization, there are two influential accounts of beginnings. One is the biblical account, compiled more than two thousand years ago by Judean writers who based much of their thinking on the Babylonian astronomical lore of the day. The other is the account of modern science, which, in the last century, has slowly built up a coherent picture of how it all began. Both represent the best thinking of their times, and in this line-by-line annotation of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, Isaac Asimov carefully and evenhandedly compares the two accounts, pointing out where they are similar and where they are different. "There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiriting as that of the Book of Genesis," Asimov says. However, human knowledge does increase, and if the biblical writers "had written those early chapters of Genesis knowing what we know today, we can be certain that they would have written it completely differently." Isaac Asimov brings to this fascinating subject his wide-ranging knowledge of science and history--and his award-winning ability to explain the complex with accuracy, clarity, and wit.

A classic World War II survivor story based on award-winning author Johanna Reiss's own childhood during the Holocaust. When the German army occupied Holland in 1940, Annie was only eight years old. Because she was Jewish, the occupation put her in grave danger. Most people thought the war wouldn't last long, but Annie knew that if she wanted to stay alive, she would have to go into hiding. Fortunately, a Gentile family, the Oostervelds, offered refuge to Annie and her older sister, Sini. For two years they hid in the cramped upstairs room of the Oostervelds's remote farmhouse. There, Annie and Sini would struggle to hold on to hope--separated from their family and confined to one tiny room--as a frightful and seemingly endless war raged on outside their window.

In this first-person narrative, the author retells his combat experiences in Italy in a Canadian regiment during World War II.

First brought to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici as a celebrity preacher, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), a Dominican friar, would ultimately play a major role in the events that convulsed the city in the 1490s and led to the overthrow of the Medici themselves. After a period when he held close to absolute power in the great Renaissance republic, Savonarola was excommunicated by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, in 1497 and, after a further year of struggle, was hanged and burned in Florence's Piazza della Signoria in 1498. The Latin writings brought together in this volume consist of various letters, a formal apologia, and his Dialogue on the Truth of Prophecy, all written in the last year of his life. They defend his prophetic mission and work of reform in Florence while providing a fascinating window onto the mind of a religious fanatic.

Five hundred years after his death at the stake, Girolamo Savonarola remains one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance. This wide-ranging collection, with an introduction by historian Alison Brown, includes translations of his sermons and treatises on pastoral ministry, prophecy, politics, and moral reform, as well as the correspondence with Alexander VI that led to Savonarola's silencing and excommunication. Also included are first-hand accounts of religio-civic festivities instigated by Savonarola and of his last moments. This collection demonstrates the remarkable extent of Savonarola's contributions to the religious, political, and aesthetic debates of the late fifteenth century.

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

The national bestseller that tells the truth about the Vietnam War from the black soldiers' perspective. An oral history unlike any other, Bloods features twenty black men who tell the story of how members of their race were sent off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, and of the special test of patriotism they faced. Told in voices no reader will soon forget, Bloods is a must-read for anyone who wants to put the Vietnam experience in historical, cultural, and political perspective.

First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle. In 2020, it found a new readership in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the centering of narratives interrogating race by Black writers. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in spurring historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world.

Destined to become a classic of war reporting, this is a brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into a teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. The action was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they spent a long and terrible night fighting thousands of armed Somalis. By morning, eighteen Americans were dead, and more than seventy badly injured. Mark Bowdenrsquo;s gripping narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern war ever written-a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.

Nelson Mandela's speeches and political writings from his days as a leader of the African National Congress Youth League in 1944 until his release from prison in 1990.

By 1876, most of the nation's American Indians had been forcibly relocated to reservation land. In the Dakota Territory, Red Cloud had settled his people on the great Sioux Reservation, becoming wards of the government. Other Sioux leaders saw this as defeat and continued to live in the traditional way, with legendary resistance. Then an economic depression struck, and gold was discovered in the Black Hills--on Sioux land

This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

Printer and publisher, author and educator, scientist and inventor, statesman and philanthropist, Benjamin Franklin was the very embodiment of the American type of self-made man. In 1771, at the age of 65, he sat down to write his autobiography, "having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity." The result is a classic of American literature. No area of human endeavor escaped Franklin's keen attentions.

This volume covers 50 years of American history from the Great Depression to Richard Nixon's second term. A popular history of the United States which encompasses politics, military history, economics, the lively arts, science, fads, fashion, social changes, sexual mores, and communications, with brief biographies of notable Americans.

Magic, sexual tension, high comedy, and intense drama move through an enchanted yet harsh autobiography, in the story of a young girl who leaves Puerto Rico for New York's tenements and a chance for success.

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating memoir. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice.

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as "Rapunzel," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Cinderella" would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezsö. From "The Frog King" to "The Golden Key," wondrous worlds unfold--heroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions unique--they reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms' later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipes's introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms' prefaces and notes. A delight to read, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm presents these peerless stories to a whole new generation of readers.

The author discusses production, distribution of wealth, and the development of sound economic and social policies.

An intimate portrait of poverty-level working families from a range of ethnic backgrounds in America reveals their legacy of low-paying, dead-end jobs, dysfunctional parenting, and substance abuse and charges the government with failing to provide adequate housing, health care, and education. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty. As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation's capital--each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well--their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers. This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference.

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

Is what I'm feeling normal? Is what my body is doing normal? Am I normal? How do I know what are the right choices to make? How do I know how to behave? How do I fix it when I make a mistake? Let's talk about it. Growing up is complicated. How do you find the answers to all the questions you have about yourself, about your identity, and about your body? Let's Talk About Itprovides a comprehensive, thoughtful, well-researched graphic novel guide to everything you need to know. Covering relationships, friendships, gender, sexuality, anatomy, body image, safe sex, sexting, jealousy, rejection, sex education, and more, Let's Talk About It is the go-to handbook for every teen, and the first in graphic novel form.

There's a long-running joke that, after coming out as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex person, you should receive a membership card and instruction manual. This is that instruction manual. You're welcome. Inside this revised and updated edition, you'll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics, hooking up to stereotypes, coming out and more. This candid, funny, and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it's like to grow up LGBTQIA+ also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums, not to mention hilarious illustrations.

In a series of personal essays, journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means; and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Why are more American adolescent girls prey to depression, eating disorders, addictions, and suicide attempts than ever before? According to Dr. Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist who has treated girls for more than twenty years, we live in a look-obsessed, media-saturated, "girl-poisoning" culture. Despite the advances of feminism, escalating levels of sexism and violence--from undervalued intelligence to sexual harassment in elementary school--cause girls to stifle their creative spirit and natural impulses, which, ultimately, destroys their self-esteem. Yet girls often blame themselves or their families for this "problem with no name" instead of looking at the world around them. Here, for the first time, are girls' unmuted voices from the front lines of adolescence, personal and painfully honest. By laying bare their harsh day-to-day reality, Reviving Ophelia issues a call to arms and offers parents compassion, strength, and strategies with which to revive these Ophelias' lost sense of self.

In 1990, the American Association of University Women conducted a ground-breaking poll that highlighted how, as young girls reach adolescence, their self-esteem plummets. The conclusion of the study (an investigation that involved over three thousand girls and boys between the ages of nine and fifteen and cut across ethnic and regional lines) was alarming: there is a crisis in this country regarding the way we educate our daughters. In spite of the changes in women's roles in society - and in the lives of their own mothers - many American girls still fall into traditional patterns of low self-image and self-censorship. Girls begin first grade with the same levels of skill and ambition as boys, but, all too often, by the time they reach high school their doubts have crowded out their dreams. They emerge from adolescence with reduced expectations of life, and much less confidence in themselves and in their abilities than boys have. In SchoolGirls, journalist Peggy Orenstein presents the human side of the study's disturbing statistics, using an accessible, narrative approach to explore the influences of home, school, and society on adolescent female self-esteem and the difference between how boys and girls are raised to think about themselves. Through detailed and lively anecdotes - obtained during a year spent with eighth graders at two California schools, as well as interviews with their parents and teachers - Orenstein brings to life the AAUW's profoundly important findings. At Weston Middle School, we meet Lisa, who believes a girl's weight is more important than her intelligence; Suzy, who decides she is "too cute to be a lawyer"; and Evie, who proclaims herself to be a feminist yet tolerates sexual harassment by a popular boy. At Audubon Middle School, however, where the predominantly African-American and Latina girls struggle with pressures forced upon them by their gender, race, and low socioeconomic status, we meet LaRhonda and April, whose confidence in themselves outside the classroom clashes inside its walls with a hidden curriculum designed to "subdue them into disengaged silence." Marta, a Latina almost unnoticed by her teachers and overprotected by her parents, considers undergoing a sexually abusive gang initiation rite in order to gain some measure of acceptance. An essential read for everyone concerned about gender equity, SchoolGirls shows how the media and our educational system are shortchanging our children. It is a book that can inspire us to change the way we treat girls and the way we educate girls: ultimately, this is a book with the potential to improve the status of women in this country.

Journalist Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary and their four children lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family. When the money ran out, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town Rex had tried to escape. As the dysfunction escalated, the children had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they found the resources and will to leave home. Yet Walls describes her parents with deep affection in this tale of unconditional love in a family that, despite its profound flaws, gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life

The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, is one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration the authors produced this incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property or a state. They argue that increasing exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which Capitalism is overthrown. This vision provided the theoretical basis of political systems in Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe, affecting the lives of millions. The Communist Manifesto still remains a landmark text- a work that continues to influence and provoke debate on capitalism and class.

The Bill of Rights defines and defends the freedoms we enjoy as Americans--from the right to bear arms to the right to a civil jury. Using the dramatic true stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by such issues as the death penalty and the right to privacy, attorneys Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy reveal how the majestic principles of the Bill of Rights have taken shape in the lives of ordinary people, as well as the historic and legal significance of each amendment. In doing so, they shed brilliant new light on this visionary document, which remains as vital and as controversial today as it was when a great nation was newly born.

Twelve-year-old Matt is left on his own in the Maine wilderness while his father leaves to bring the rest of the family to their new settlement. When he befriends Attean, an Indian chief’s grandson, he is invited to join the Beaver tribe and move north. Should Matt abandon his hopes of ever seeing his family again and go on to a new life?

Aristophanes' great anti-war drama, with comedic overtones, glorifies the power of fertility in the face of destruction.

The internationally renowned novel about the life and death of Jesus Christ. Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ's Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible. He is a figure who is gloriously divine but earthy and human, a man like any other-subject to fear, doubt, and pain. In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God's will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ's ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men.

Perhaps the strangest--and most strikingly modern--work to survive from the ancient world, The Satyricon relates the hilarious mock epic adventures of the impotent Encolpius, and his struggle to regain virility. Here Petronius brilliantly brings to life the courtesans, legacy-hunters, pompous professors and dissolute priestesses of the age - and, above all, Trimalchio, the archetypal self-made millionaire whose pretentious vulgarity on an insanely grand scale makes him one of the great comic characters in literature. Seneca's The Apocolocyntosis, a malicious skit on 'the deification of Claudius the Clod', was designed by the author to ingratiate himself with Nero, who was Claudius' successor. Together, the two provide a powerful insight into a darkly fascinating period of Roman history. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Recovering a lost chapter of literary and political history, this fresh, multicultural reading of the work of women writers of the Progressive era situates their fiction in the context of their reform journalism and political activism. As Native, African, and Jewish American women gained access to education, developed women's clubs, and joined political organizations, they wrote to reform the nation, engaging themselves politically and creating a cross-cultural dialogue between journalism and fiction. Early in this century, writers such as Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anzia Yezierska developed their writing careers through affiliations with reform organizations. They worked for Pan-Indianism, racial uplift, immigrant aid, or social welfare. Carol Batker explores the impact of their journalism and political work on their fiction. She demonstrates points of contact among these women that suggest mutual influence and conversations across racial and ethnic lines--revealing important historical antecedents to contemporary debates about multiculturalism in America.

Erasmus' Familiar Colloquies grew from a small collection of phrases, sentences, and snatches of dialogue written in Paris about 1497 to help his private pupils improve their command of Latin. Twenty years later the material was published by Johann Froben (Basel 1518). It was an immediate success and was reprinted thirty times in the next four years. For the edition of March 1522 Erasmus began to add fully developed dialogues, and a book designed to improve boys' use of Latin (and their deportment) soon became a work of literature for adults, although it retained traces of its original purposes. The final Froben edition (March, 1533) had about sixty parts, most of them dialogues. It was in the last form that the Colloquies were read and enjoyed for four centuries. For modern readers it is one of the best introductions to European society of the Renaissance and Reformation periods, with lively descriptions of daily life and provocative discussions of political, religious, social, and literary topics, presented with Erasmus's characteristic wit and verve. Each colloquy has its own introduction and full explanatory, historical, and biographical notes.

The Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555) was born in Urbino but spent most of his life in early Tudor England. His most popular work, On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. Thirty Latin editions of this work were published in Polydore's lifetime, and by the eighteenth century more than a hundred editions had appeared in eight languages, including Russian. On Discovery became a key reference for anyone who wanted to know about "firsts" in theology, philosophy, science, technology, literature, language, law, material culture, and other fields. Polydore took his information from dozens of Greek, Roman, biblical, and Patristic authorities. His main point was to show that many Greek and Roman claims for discovery were false and that ancient Jews or other Asian peoples had priority. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil's lifetime.

Zahra, a child of the Shia community in South Lebanon, is haunted by dark memories of deception and abuse by her parents. She flees her family and takes refuge with an uncle who is in political exile in West Africa. She finds no peace there however, and desperately enters into a loveless and doomed marriage. Dispirited and emotionally unstable, she returns to Beirut where civil war is raging. She enters a world in which explosions, shootings, and arbitrary death are commonplace. In a demented effort to stem the violence, she begins an affair with a sniper to divert him from his task. It is only then that she finds redemption, a strange fulfillment of her search for ecstasy, and a dream of how life could be, should the war ever end.

Compiled by disciples of Confucius in the centuries following his death in 479 B.C.E., The Analects of Confucius is a collection of aphorisms and historical anecdotes embodying the basic values of the Confucian tradition: learning, morality, ritual decorum, and filial piety. Reflecting the model eras of Chinese antiquity, the Analects offers valuable insights into successful governance and the ideal organization of society. Filled with humor and sarcasm, it reads like a casual conversation between teacher and student, emphasizing the role of the individual in the attainment of knowledge and the value of using historical events and people to illuminate moral and political concepts. Confucius's teachings focus on cultural and peaceful pursuits and the characteristics of benevolent and culturally distinguished government. He also discusses ancestor worship and other rites performed for the spirits of the dead. The single most influential philosophical work in all of Chinese history, The Analects of Confucius has shaped the thought and customs of China and neighboring countries for centuries. Burton Watson's concise translation uses the pinyin romanization system and keeps explanatory notes to a minimum, yet his intimate knowledge of the Confucian tradition and precise attention to linguistic detail capture the original text's elegance, cogency, and wit.

Now, at last, comes the first Vietnamese novel ever translated and published in North America. Duong Thu Huong is Vietnam's most beloved and outspoken novelist. In Paradise of the Blind she has created a devastating portrait of three women fighting to maintain their dignity in a society that expects ever greater sacrifices from them. Paradise of the Blind is a rich, sensuous journey through a Vietnam never seen before. In images of astonishing grace and power, and through her unforgettable gallery of women, Duong Thu Huong dazzles the reader with her ability to evoke the colors, the foods, the smells, and the age-old rituals of her country. At the center of the novel is Hang, a young woman forced to grow up too fast in the slums of Hanoi and the turbulence of modern Vietnam. Duong Thu Huong brilliantly captures Hang's rebellion against her mother and the loneliness of her search for self. There is Hang's mother, who watches, powerless, as her life is shattered by a fanatical political campaign led by her own brother. And there is the mysterious Aunt Tam, who has accumulated wealth and bitterness in equal parts and seeks to pass on both to her niece, Hang. The intoxicating beauty of the Vietnamese countryside, the hunger, the pride, the endurance of ordinary Vietnamese people confronted with the hypocrisy and corruption that surround them - all are here in this moving and lyrical novel. With the publication of Paradise of the Blind comes the introduction of a world-class storyteller whose extraordinary sensitivity and courage have captivated a generation of Vietnamese readers.

Twenty-eight-year-old Quan has been fighting for the Communist cause in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging scraps of food to feed himself and his men. Quan seeks comfort in childhood memories as he tries to sort out his conflicting feelings of patriotism and disillusionment. Then, given the chance to return to his home, Quan undertakes a physical and mental journey that brings him face to face with figures from his past--his angry father, his childhood sweetheart, his boyhood friends now maimed or dead--and ultimately to the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably lost in the wake of the war. In a voice both lyrical and stark, Duong Thu Huong, one of Vietnam's most beloved writers, powerfully conveys the conflict that spiritually destroyed her generation.

This volume contains a translation into English of Averroes's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, an introduction to the translation in which the arguments of both Averroes and Aristotle are sketch out and their differences from Plato and other important thinkers explored, an outline analysis of the order of Averroes's commentary, annotations to the text, a bibliography, and a glossary of important terms with their English translations. Heretofore, non-Arabic readers have had to depend upon Hermannus Alemannus's Latin translation of Averroes's Middle Commentary or on its English version. Both are inadequate. They incorrectly render Averroes's various arguments and make his beautiful poetic citations read like doggerel. Moreover, they provide inaccurate and incomplete information about the sources of those citations and consequently portray Averroes's text as a curious compilation of relics from some exotic but not very learned horde. The present translation is based on a sound, critical Arabic edition prepared by the translator. Not only is it the first English translation from the Arabic original, but also the first translation of the Arabic text into any language other than medieval Hebrew or Latin. The translation is literal and eloquent, albeit more literal when eloquent when sense demands such a sacrifice. Throughout the commentary, the same English word is used for the same Arabic word unless an exception is noted. The renditions of the poetic citations are somewhat freer without reaching to unwarranted innovations.

Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "an impressive study" and written with incisive wit and searing perception--the definitive, highly acclaimed landmark work on the portrayal of homosexuality in film.

On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Five months later, thousands of Muslims inundated the newspaper with outpourings of anger and grief by phone, email, and fax; from Asia to Europe Muslims took to the streets in protest. This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the conflict that aroused impassioned debates around the world on freedom of expression, blasphemy, and the nature of modern Islam. Jytte Klausen interviewed politicians in the Middle East, Muslim leaders in Europe, the Danish editors and cartoonists, and the Danish imam who started the controversy. Following the winding trail of protests across the world, she deconstructs the arguments and motives that drove the escalation of the increasingly globalized conflict. She concludes that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not-as was commonly assumed-a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Rather it was orchestrated, first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria. Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding.

Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father.  Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.   In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Japan's output of manga is massive, accounting for a staggering forty percent of everything published each year in the country.Outside Japan, there has been a global boom in sales, with the manga aesthetic spreading from comics into all areas of Western youth culture through film, computer games, advertising, and design. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly-illustrated introduction to the development and diversity of Japanese comics from 1945 to the present. Featuring striking graphics and extracts from a wide range of manga, the book covers such themes as the specific attributes of manga in contrast to American and European comics; the life and career of Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and originator of story manga; boys' comics from the 1960s to the present; the genres and genders of girls' and women's comics; the darker, more realistic themes of gekiga -- violent samurai, disturbing horror and apocalyptic science fiction; issues of censorship and protest; and manga's role as a major Japanese export and global influence.

The acclaimed series The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau concludes with a volume centering on Emile (1762), which Rousseau called his "greatest and best book." Here Rousseau enters into critical engagement with thinkers such as Locke and Plato, giving his most comprehensive account of the relation between happiness and citizenship, teachers and students, and men and women.

The poetic masterpiece of the great nineteenth-century writer Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil is one of the most frequently read and studied works in the French language. In this compelling new translation of Baudelaire's most famous collection, Keith Waldrop recasts the poet's original French alexandrines and other poetic arrangements into versets, a form that hovers between poetry and prose. Maintaining Baudelaire's complex view of sound and structure, Waldrop's translation mirrors the intricacy of the original without attempting to replicate its inimitable verse. The result is a powerful new re-imagining, one that is, almost paradoxically, closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation. Including the six poems banned from the first edition, this Flowers of Evil preserves the complexity, eloquence, and dark humor of its author. Brought here to new life, it is hypnotic, frank, and forceful.

The Decameron (c.1351) is an entertaining series of one hundred stories written in the wake of the Black Death. The stories are told in a country villa outside the city of Florence by ten young noble men and women who are seeking to escape the ravages of the plague. Boccaccio's skill as adramatist is masterfully displayed in these vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots that revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions.

Examines in English and Spanish the lives of migrant workers moving from south Texas up through the Plains, and the experiences of all ages and sexes.

Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

One of Carlos Fuentes's greatest works, "The Old Gringo" tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa's soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future. "The House of the Spirits" is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.

One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women--brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul--this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

Prince Hamlet faces the challenge of avenging his father's murder in this tragic story of revenge.

Originally written circa 1595 by William Shakespeare, the play tells the story of the last two years of the life of King Richard II of England, from 1398-1400. After the king's decisions and actions come under criticism from some of his nobles, he is overthrown by Bolingboke (King Henry IV), imprisoned, and finally murdered.

Twelfth Night tells the tale of the beautiful young Viola who is separated from her twin brother, Sebastian, when their ship is lost at sea. Believing Sebastian to be dead, Viola poses as a man and enters service with the Duke Orisino. When Olivia, the woman that Orisino loves, falls for his messenger "boy" Viola and she in turn falls for the Duke the stage is set for a classic Shakespearean love triangle.

Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe's themes of social mobility and predestination, sin, redemption and reward.

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.

This darkly satiric indictment of the social ills of Victorian London tells the story of a young orphan who becomes involved with a gang of criminals. Oliver is a poor orphan living in 19th century London. Through a series of accidental events, he finds himself caught up with a gang of criminals, including such memorable characters as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, and Bill Sykes. The story centers around Oliver's inheritance, and is an indictment of the British Poor Laws, which allowed for the proliferation of such social evils as workhouses and child labor. As with many of Dickens's other novels, Oliver Twist is a darkly comic narrative whose sarcastic tone brings into sharp relief the social hypocrisy of the day.

Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardy' s Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned. The experience so exhausted Hardy that he never wrote a work of fiction again. Rich in symbolism, Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley and his struggle to rise from his station as a poor Wessex stonemason to that of a scholar at Christminster. It is also the story of Jude' s ill-fated relationship with his cousin Sue Bridehead, and the ultimate tragedy that causes Jude' s undoing and Sue' s transformation. Jude the Obscure explores man' s essential loneliness and remains one of Hardy' s most widely read novels.

Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. The story of two young men in pre-World War I England who meet at Cambridge and fall in love and then must struggle with the moral standards of the time. Clive bows to societal and family pressure and enters a loveless marriage, while Maurice resists and finds lasting love with a working-class man. Forster was reluctant to publish the book in his lifetime because such stories were not supposed to end happily.

At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable tale about "the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart."

First published in 1928, this timeless portrayal of lesbian love is now a classic. The thinly disguised story of Hall's own life, it was banned outright upon publication and almost ruined her literary career.

London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed - Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists - all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from thelyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called a delirium of sense enjoyment!""

Now more than ever: Aldous Huxley's enduring masterwork must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit "A masterpiece. . . . One of the most prophetic dystopian works." --Wall Street Journal  Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. "A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine" (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history's keenest observers of human nature and civilization.  Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. 

James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience.

With the fifteen stories in Dubliners Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative art to places it had never been before.

Lawrence's first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly-knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden forlong. Paul Morel is caught between his need for family and community and his efforts to define himself sexually and emotionally. Lawrence's powerful description of Paul's relationships makes this a novel as much for the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.

Four English schoolchildren find their way through the back of a wardrobe into the magic land of Narnia and assist Aslan, the golden lion, in triumphing over the White Witch, who has cursed the land with eternal winter.

One of Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels and the most famous of all twentieth-century political allegories, this story of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, is a universal drama. Taking as his starting point the betrayed promise of the Russian Revolution, Orwell lays out a vision that, in its bitter wisdom, gives us the clearest understanding we possess of the possible consequences of our social and political acts. Orwell is one of the very few modern satirists comparable to Jonathan Swift in power, artistry, and moral authority; in Animal Farm his spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy brilliantly highlight his stark message.

In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be. Lionel Trilling said of Orwell's masterpiece "1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present." Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell's novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion. When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.

Captain Charles Ryder returns to the country estate of Brideshead where he indulges in a sentimental journey that takes him back twenty years to his schoolmates at Oxford and to his memories of the Marchmains.
Set in 1920's England, the story examines the wealthy Flyte family through the eyes of Sebastian Flyte's less wealthy school friend Charles Ryder, who is eventually tempted into an extramarital affair with Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia. The novel is a story of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world.

Told through a central character, Alex, the disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism. A modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption set in a dismal dystopia whereby a juvenile deliquent undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behavior.

"Which one of you bitches is my mother?" Four elegant, successful, and sophisticated women in their forties are called to New York's Pierre Hotel to meet Lili -- a beautiful, young, and notoriously temperamental Hollywood movie star. None of the women knows exactly why she is there; each has a reason to hate Lili and each of them is astonished to see the others. They are old friends who share a guilty secret and who have for years been doing their best to keep that secret quiet. Their lives are changed forever, however, when Lili suddenly confronts them. When the women refuse to answer her, Lili proceeds to travel around the world through the playgrounds of the rich and famous, seeking to answer the question that has obsessed and almost destroyed her. From Paris to London, from the boardroom to the bedroom, "Lace" takes the reader into the rarified world of five unforgettable women who are as beautiful, as complex and as strong as...lace.

When controversial radio talk host John Truth broadcasts a terrorist threat of a man-made earthquake, few people take it seriously. Crackerjack young FBI agent Judy Maddox is assigned to track down the elusive, sinister group called the Hammer of Eden. Judy's boss, who has a grudge against her, thinks he has given her a waste-of-time assignment. But Judy's research leads her to maverick seismologist Michael Quercus, who gives her the shocking news that it might just be possible for an earthquake to be deliberately triggered. And when a tremor in a remote California desert shows evidence of being machine-generated, Judy knows the threat is terrifyingly real. Suddenly in charge of a life-or-death investigation, Judy must pinpoint the terrorists' next target, with the help of the erratic but attractive Michael. Their compelling romantic drama is played out as they race to beat the terrorist deadline and prevent an unthinkable disaster. Unknown to them, Michael's estranged wife, gorgeous but angry, has fallen under the spell of a clever, sexy cult leader called Priest--and they have stolen from Michael's computer the key data that enables the Hammer of Eden to carry out their cataclysmic threat. Worse still, Michael's son is with his wife--and under the control of Priest. All of them are in mortal jeopardy as Judy and Michael fight to save San Francisco from being brought down in ruins.

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

Trudi Montag is a Zwerg - a dwarf-short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share-from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.

First published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader is unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what once was the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead. Reacting to social unrest, and a sharply declining birthrate, the new regime has reverted to -- even gone beyond -- the repressive tolerance of the original Puritans. Offred is a Handmaid who may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant because she is only valued as long as her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now. Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

The Stone Angel, The Diviners, and A Bird in the House are three of the five books in Margaret Laurence's renowned "Manawaka series," named for the small Canadian prairie town in which they take place. Each of these books is narrated by a strong woman growing up in the town and struggling with physical and emotional isolation. In The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley, age ninety, tells the story of her life, and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintains pride in the face of senility, while recalling the life she led as a rebellious young bride, and later as a grieving mother. Laurence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant.

This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.

A startling, imaginative novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority For years, it had been what is called a "deteriorating situation." Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family--liberal whites--are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July--the shifts in character and relationships--gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.

"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. " The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . . Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen."  With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it. The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.

Edna Pontellier, a Victorian-era wife and mother, is awakened to the full force of her desire for love and freedom when she becomes enamored with Robert LeBrun, a young man she meets while on vacation.

The story of Huck and his companion Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi to escape from slavery and "sivilization" has been delighting readers around the world since Twain first published it in 1885. Simply put, it is a masterpiece: revolutionary in its narrative method, surpassingly funny, and at the same time deeply perceptive about human nature. No other American novel of the nineteenth century still commands so vast an audience, and certainly no other retains the capacity to stir controversy with its sharp satire on American racism.

Tells the stories of a saint-like slave, a religious woman's courtship in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, and life in a small Massachusetts town.

Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.

Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the Red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires. Man conquered Mars—and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. Here are the captivating chronicles of man and Mars—the modern classic by the peerless Ray Bradbury.

Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

This is the first in-depth biography of Willa Cather in thirty years, and the first ever that fully integrates her life and work. The author of such classics as Death Comes to the Archbishop and O Pioneers! was a complex, passionate and gifted woman trying to forge a new kind of identity for herself as a woman and artist before there were adequate models for this kind of self. "Voice" is the metaphor Cather used to describe her attainment of literary identity and authority, a complex attainment for a woman writer who at first viewed femininity and creativity as incompatible. O'Brien asks two central questions: How did Cather pass through a stage of male identification when she adopted male dress and posed as "William Cather" to become the first woman writer who created the first strong, autonomous and successful women heroes in American literature? How did she move from a literary apprenticeship she later associated with Jamesian imitation and inauthentic speech to a literary maturity in which she took "the road home" to her Nebraska past? The book makes full use of biographical and literary materials that have been slighted in previous biographies: Cather's personal and professional correspondence, family letters and documents, photographs, and the early short stories as well as the major fiction. This is the first biography to deal openly and seriously with her lesbianism, exploring the importance of female friendships in her life and work and assessing the impact Cather's need to conceal her sexual identity had on the creative process. O'Brien draws in particular on new psychoanalytic theories that stress the importance of the mother-daughter bond to the formation of female identity. The book concentrates on Cather's childhood, adolescence, young womanhood and lengthy apprenticehsip, with references to later biographical and literary patterns which are used to illuminate the early years. This is a fascinating portrait of how someone becomes a writer.

The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress, marries and moves to New York, and when her husband loses his job, returns to the stage.

Collection of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat poet, and proprietor of the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti borrowed the title from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life, to describe his feelings as he wrote, a "circus of the soul." Ferlinghetti's "material, his tone, and phrasing, are taken from everyday life, from the 'Coney Island' of ideas and feelings in all our minds...."

Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back.

The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative hardcover edition! The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL & Other Poems! HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.  A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love.  In addition to "Howl," poems in the book include: "A Supermarket in California," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," "Transcription of Organ Music," and "Wild Orphan," among others.  A History of HOWL: City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg's performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"  When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of "redeeming social significance."  The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation.  It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.

Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, "in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . ." In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my verynation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast,the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.

From one of the best writers in American literature, a classic novel about smuggling, intrigue, and love. To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtle and moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. By turns funny and tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

A classic work of American theatre, based on the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in defense of a schoolteacher accused of teaching the theory of evolution The accused was a slight, frightened man who had  deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus. The chief gladiators were two great legal giants of the century. Like two bull elephants locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American. One of the most moving and meaningful plays of our generation.

A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life makes the shocking discovery that he has African-American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white. As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.

An extraordinary book, which will delight some readers, as its cynicism--or realism--will offend others. Each poem is an autobiographical epitaph of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after a town near the author's home town, which endeavors to reveal life in rural America.

From the master of Southern Gothic, Carson McCullers's coming-of-age story like no other about a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding. Twelve-year-old Frankie is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her family maid, Berenice, and her six-year-old cousin--not to mention her own unbridled imagination--Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be a member of something larger, more accepting than herself.

A powerful, graphic World War II novel that takes place off an island in the South Pacific.

Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. None take us into the burning fields and cities of the American South as Gone With the Wind does, creating haunting scenes and thrilling portraits of characters so vivid that we remember their words and feel their fear and hunger for the rest of our lives. In the two main characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, contemptuous Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless story of survival under the harshest of circumstances, she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet.

A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community   The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft--and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can.

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."

Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as a classic not to the controversy its subject matter aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. With an introduction by Martin Amis. When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances, where the music plays late into the night and the liquor flows freely. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English-the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction. Appointment in Samarra brilliantly captures the personal politics and easy bitterness of small-town life.

The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day.

Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families -- the Trasks and the Hamiltons -- whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

In depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences.

Chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future.

First published in 1939 Dalton Trumbo's story of a young soldier horribly maimed in the First World War became an immediate best seller. The book also became the most popular anti war book of the Vietnam peace movement.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York. With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to marry the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down. This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order.

The publication of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was a landmark event that won the author a National Book Award nomination and launched her into the literary spotlight. Critics have likened Allison to Harper Lee, naming her the first writer of her generation to dramatize the lives and language of poor whites in the South. Since its appearance, the novel has inspired an award-winning film and has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics.   Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family--a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard-drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney--and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.

Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters-Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia-arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost-and what they find-is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premiere novelists of our time.

On a deserted mountain road in the Dominican Republic in 1960, three young women from a pious Catholic family were assassinated after visiting their husbands who had been jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The Mirabal sisters, thus martyred, became mythical figures in their country, where they are known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies). Three decades later, Julia Alvarez, daughter of the Dominican Republic and author of the acclaimed How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, brings the Mirabal sisters back to life in this extraordinary novel.Each of the sisters speaks in her own voice, beginning as young girls in the 1940s, their stories vary from hair ribbons to gun-running to prison torture. Their story is framed by their surviving sister who tells her own tale of suffering and dedication to the memory of Las Mariposas.This inspired portrait of four women is a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression, and is destined to take its place alongside Gabriela Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende's The House of the Spirits as one of the great 20th-century Latin American novels.

On a deserted mountain road in the Dominican Republic in 1960, three young women from a pious Catholic family were assassinated after visiting their husbands who had been jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The Mirabal sisters, thus martyred, became mythical figures in their country, where they are known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies). Three decades later, Julia Alvarez, daughter of the Dominican Republic and author of the acclaimed How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, brings the Mirabal sisters back to life in this extraordinary novel.Each of the sisters speaks in her own voice, beginning as young girls in the 1940s, their stories vary from hair ribbons to gun-running to prison torture. Their story is framed by their surviving sister who tells her own tale of suffering and dedication to the memory of Las Mariposas.This inspired portrait of four women is a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression, and is destined to take its place alongside Gabriela Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende's The House of the Spirits as one of the great 20th-century Latin American novels.

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past--a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world... and will nurture the birth of his soul.

When she moves to Boston to live with her wealthy grandmother, Heaven believes that she has found a place to belong and an opportunity to make something of herself until she begins to realize the terrible truth beneath the glamorous facade of her grandmother's life.

Ayla and Jondalar meet the Mamutoi-the Mammoth Hunters--people like Ayla. Ayla finds herself torn between the wildly jealous Jondalar and the master carver Ranec.

As Ayla and Jondalar travel across Ice Age Europe they encounter savage enemies and brave friends in their search for a place they can call home.

As one of the century's premier American writers, James Baldwin has profoundly altered the nation's social and literary consciousness. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's first novel, brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, as it starkly contrasts two generations of an embattled black family.

At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty.  Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is overpowering in its vitality and extravagant in the intensity of its feeling.

Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican immigrants Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci--clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion--a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci--and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle--while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move--the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Andrew "Ender" Wiggins is the result of a desperate breeding experiment, combined with years of harsh and unforgiving training. Ender thinks he is only playing computer simulated war games--in fact, he is commanding the last great fleet to earth. In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut. Young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training. Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister. Is Ender the general earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives

Little Tree as his grandparents call him is shown how to hunt and survive in the mountains, to respect nature in the Cherokee Way, taking only what is needed, leaving the rest for nature to run its course. Little Tree also learns the often callous ways of white businessmen and tax collectors, and how Granpa, in hilarious vignettes, scares them away from his illegal attempts to enter the cash economy. Granma teaches Little Tree the joys of reading and education. But when Little Tree is taken away by whites for schooling, we learn of the cruelty meted out to Indian children in an attempt to assimilate them and of Little Tree's perception of the Anglo world and how it differs from the Cherokee Way.

Tom Clancy's rich imagination and his remarkable grasp of the capabilities of advanced technology give this novel an amazing ring of authenticity. It is a thriller with a new twist, a "military procedural" with an ingenious, tightly woven plot that revolves around the defection of a Soviet nuclear submarine--the USSR's newest and most valuable ship, with its most trusted and skilled officer at the helm. A deadly serious game of hide-and-seek is on. The entire Soviet Atlantic Fleet is ordered to hunt down the submarine and destroy her at all costs. The Americans are determined to find her first and get her safely to port in the intelligence coups of all time. But the Red October has a million square miles of ocean to hide in and a new silent propulsion system that is impossible to detect. Or is it? Her daring and cunning captain, Marko Ramius, thinks so. The commander of the Soviet's fastest attack submarine, however, is confident that he will find his prey. And Bart Mancuso, the aggressive commander of the U.S. Navy attack sub the Dallas, is counting on the sensitive ears of his resourceful young sonar operator to identify Red October's unique sound print and track her down. The nerve-wracking hunt goes on for eighteen days as the Red October stealthily eludes her hunters across 4,000 miles of ocean. But just short of Ramius's objective, his submarine converges with the others in a rousing climax that is one of the most thrilling underwater scenes ever written. Can the start of all-out war be avoided? The outcome is clear only on the very last pages.

In his most brilliant and powerful novel, Pat Conroy tells the story of Tom Wingo, his twin sister, Savannah, and the dark and violent past of the family into which they were born. Set in New York City and the low country of South Carolina, the novel opens when Tom, a high school football coach whose marriage and career are crumbling, flies from South Carolina to New York after learning of his twin sister's suicide attempt. Savannah is one of the most gifted poets of her generation, and both the cadenced beauty of her art and the jumbled cries of her illness are clues to the too-long-hidden story of her wounded family. In the paneled offices and luxurious restaurants of New York City, Tom and Susan Lowenstein, Savannah's psychiatrist, unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment, and love. And Tom realizes that trying to save his sister is perhaps his last chance to save himself. With passion and a rare gift of language, the author moves from present to past, tracing the amazing history of the Wingos from World War II through the final days of the war in Vietnam and into the 1980's, drawing a rich range of characters: the lovable, crazy Mr. Fruit, who for decades has wordlessly directed traffic at the same intersection in the southern town of Colleton; Reese Newbury, the ruthless, patrician land speculator who threatens the Wingos' only secure worldly possession, Melrose Island; Herbert Woodruff, Susan Lowensteins's husband a world-famous violinist; Tolitha Wingo, Savannah's mentor and eccentric grandmother, the first real feminist in the Wingo family.

In 1889, immigrants Angus and Bob set off for a new land, in Montana. They live the next 30 years at the base of the Rockies, building homes and families.

Tells the story of three generations of Native American women: Rayona, who is half African-American, her mother Christine, and Christine's mother Aunt Ida. The story is told in three distinct sections, one for each woman.

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

The Beowulf story retold from the monster's point of view reveals the darker side of human nature and values.

In Ordinary People, Judith Guest's remarkable first novel, the Jarrets are a typical American family. Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one. In this memorable, moving novel, Judith Guest takes the reader into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain, and ultimate healing. Ordinary People is an extraordinary novel about an "ordinary" family divided by pain, yet bound by their struggle to heal.

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial for murder. Set in 1954 in the shadow of World War II, Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance.

In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys - best friends - are playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. Owen Meany believes he didn't hit the ball by accident. He believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after 1953 is extraordinary and terrifying. He is Irving's most heartbreaking hero.

In this classic novel, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax.

When brain surgery makes a mouse into a genius, dull-witted Charlie Gordon wonders if it might also work for him. With more than five million copies sold, Flowers for Algernon is the beloved, classic story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse. In poignant diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental procedure takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment seems to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon begins his sudden, unexpected deterioration. Will the same happen to Charlie?

A scarlet and white 1958 Plymouth Fury - salvaged over every rational dissent and objection from decay - possess its new owner and brings hellish terror to him, his friends, and his classmates.

It happens innocently enough, but doesn't it always. A big, friendly dog chases a rabbit into a hidden underground cave—and stirs a sleeping evil crueler than death itself. A terrified four-year-old boy sees his bedroom closet door swing open untouched by human hands, and screams at the unholy red eyes gleaming in the darkness. The little Maine town of Castle Rock is about to be invaded by the most hideous menace ever to savage the flesh and devour the mind.  

You are about to meet the sweetest, most irresistible little girl you've ever known--8-year-old Charlie McGee. She's everything that a proud father like Andy McGee could want--and all that he can fear. For Charlie was born with the most destructive power a human being has ever commanded--and somehow she must be saved from both herself and from those in high places who want to use her as their weapon.

A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, in a desert world, experience dreams of good and evil in confrontation and, through their choices, move toward an actual confrontation.

On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America–and into another realm. One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother’s life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest begin. . . .

"Animals dream about the things they do in the day time just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What the finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments.

Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II. Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.

In the episode that lends the book its title, the "ugly American" is Homer Atkins, a plain and plain-spoken man, who has been sent by the U.S. government to advise the Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan on engineering projects. When Atkins finds badly misplaced priorities and bluntly challenges the entrenched interests, he lays bare a foreign policy gone dangerously wrong. First published in 1958, The Ugly American became a runaway national bestseller for its slashing exposé of American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in Southeast Asia. In linked stories and vignettes, the book uses gripping storytelling to draw a devastating picture of how the United States was losing the struggle with Communism in Asia.

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

This beloved modern classic documents the lives and hardships of an African American family living in Depression-era Harlem. While 12-year-old Francie Coffin's world and family threaten to fall apart, this remarkable young heroine must call upon her own wit and endurance to survive amidst the treacheries of racism and sexism, poverty and violence.

Toni Morrison is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.

The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

"A wise and spacious novel," is how Reynold Price described Song of Solomon, Morrison's crowning literary achievement. Her third novel's generous expanse reaches across generations of family and miles of land to tell the story of the descendants of Macon Dead, a one time slave who carved a bountiful living out of the Pennsylvania forest, only to be executed by an envious white farmer. Weaving together many of the themes that characterize her work-the relevance of names, the mysteries of the soul and the mind, and the clashing cultures of the North and South--Toni Morrison has, in Song of Solomon, given us a story that is more that a coming-of-age tale. She probes the heart of the dilemma facing many African-Americans struggling to obtain prosperity and independence without severing the ancestral ties that nourish their black identities. But, most importantly, she tells us a story of the human spirit: it's strength, its endurance, and its ability to soar.

Two brothers, as different as night and day: one, charming and ruthless, buys his way into Harvard, Wall Street, and high society; the other brother remains by his mother's side and makes his way to the top without the influence of money or prestige.Raised in separate worlds, these brothers are bound by a bitter rivalry for riches and power, but mostly, for the exciting, wildly captivating woman they fight all their lives to possess, a woman whose passion for one destroys her love for the other.Their story consumes an American century, spanning decades of splendor, struggle, upheaval, and war. It's an absorbing saga of innocent dreams and green desire corrupted by gilded temptation.

On a lake deep in Minnesota's north woods, John and Kathy Wade are trying to reassemble their lives. John, a rising political star, has just suffered a devastating electoral defeat. Kathy attempts to comfort her husband, but soon it becomes apparent that something is horribly wrong between them, that they have hidden too much from each other. Then one day Kathy vanishes. Their boat is gone-did she drown or is she lost? Or did she flee, disappearing into a new life? As a massive search gets under way, the possibilities multiply in terrifying directions. Uncovering the truth requires an investigation of Wade's life, and gradually we come to see that he is a sorcerer lost inside his own magic, a Houdini capable of escaping everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

The shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by iconic American writer Sylvia Plath. Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her neurosis becomes palpably real, even rational--as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic. 

Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational 'Brooklyn Crucifixion'. Into it he poured all the torment a Jew feels when torn between the faith of his fathers and the calling of his art. Here Asher recounts the story of love and conflict which dragged him to this crossroads.

The unforgettable saga of an American crime family. Since its release in 1969, The Godfather has made an indelible mark on American crime fiction. From the mind of master storyteller Mario Puzo, it traces the Corleone family, whose brilliant and brutal portrayal illuminated the violent and seductive allure of power in American society. A tale of family and loyalty, law and order, obedience and rebellion, it has stood the test of time as the definitive novel of the Mafia underworld. With a legacy of blood and honor, it is a cultural touchstone that has resonated for generations, and still mesmerizes readers to this day.

A major American writer at the turn of this millennium, Leslie Marmon Silko has also been one of the most powerful voices in the flowering of Native American literature since the publication of her 1977 novel Ceremony. With chapters written by leading scholars of Native American literature, this guide explores Silko's major novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes as an entryway into the full body of her work that includes poetry, essays, short fiction, film, photography, and other visual artwork. In addition to placing Silko in the broad context of American literary history, the book serves to contextualize her pivotal role in unleashing the vast flood of other Native American, aboriginal, and Indigenous writers who have entered the conversations she helped to launch. Along the way, the book examines her tackling of such historical themes as land, ethnicity, race, gender, trauma, and healing, as well as her narrative forms and her mythic lyricism.

A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.

As the fierce lovemaking and fights of Nathan, a paranoiac Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish-Catholic concentration-camp survivor, intensify, Stingo, a writer who lives below them in a cheap rooming house, becomes more and more involved in their lives.

A stunning literary achievement, this book explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.

Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber's son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming "unstuck in time." An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut's writing--the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit--that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O'Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut's words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as "the kind of writer who made people--young people especially--want to write." George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be "the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves." More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era's uncertainties.

Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters--one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South--who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

A combination of black history and contemporary social conditions is the mix in this novel for mature readers that contains scenes of sexual abuse.

Harlan Brown is a tough, conservative track coach hiding from his past at a small college. Billy Sive is a brilliant young runner who is homosexual and doesn't mind who knows it. When they fall in love, they enter a race against hate and prejudice which takes them to the '76 Olympics and a shattering, shocking conclusion.

David 12, comes of age during 1948 when his uncle is accused of molesting and murdering Native Americans in his small Montana town.

During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood, is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it.

In this unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, we meet the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. Between themselves they develop an almost telepathic trust that sees them through their wanderings from Florida to a small town in Washington State. Fighting for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, Toby's growing up is at once poignant and comical. His various schemes--running away to Alaska, forging cheeks, and stealing cars--lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. But on the first day of his senior year, Greg Gaines thinks he's figured it out. The answer to the basic existential question: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad? His strategy: remain at the periphery at all times. Keep an insanely low profile. Make mediocre films with the one person who is even sort of his friend, Earl. This plan works for exactly eight hours. Then Greg's mom forces him to become friends with a girl who has cancer. This brings about the destruction of Greg's entire life. Includes a discussion with Jesse Andrews and an annotated excerpt from the screenplay!

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts of an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.  

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons--their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Ibsen's best-known play displays his genius for realistic prose drama. An expression of women's rights, the play climaxes when the central character, Nora, rejects a smothering marriage and life in "a doll's house."

A little girl went into the forest to visit her Grandma. Her mother told her not to stop and play, and not to leave the road. But the little girl met a wolf, told the wolf where she was going, and left the path to pick some flowers. The wolf ran to Grandma's house, ate her, put on one of her nightdresses, and got into Grandma's bed. Does the wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood, too? What happens when Little Red Riding Hood's father finds the wolf?

In suburban Georgetown a killer's Reeboks whisper on the front floor of a posh home... In a seedy D.C. porno house a patron is swiftly garroted to  death... The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief... To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it was political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder--a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds there is only one person she can trust--an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate--to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House's inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby's brief. Someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.

In this searing courtroom drama, best-selling author John Grisham probes the savage depths of racial violence...as he delivers a compelling tale of uncertain justice in a small southern town...Clanton, Mississippi. The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young man. The mostly white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. Until her black father acquires an assault rifle -- and takes justice into his own outraged hands. For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client's life...and then his own...

A collection of four novellas from Stephen King bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters. "The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is," hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons. This gripping collection begins with "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge--the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is "Apt Pupil," the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In "The Body," four rambunctious young boys plunge through the facade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in "The Breathing Method."

Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love. "When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival." Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching...for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don't expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words "I love you" are said for all the wrong reasons. Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story -- a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, "Can I ever feel okay about myself?"

Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal. Though she is desperately poor, her life is full of simple pleasures, like playing hopscotch with her best friend from school, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family. He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi journeys to India and arrives at "Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution. An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family's debt-then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave. Lakshmi's life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother's words--Simply to endure is to triumph--and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision-will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life?

In the summer between middle school and high school, Aiden Navarro is away at camp. While there, he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can not stop thinking about), and he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.

The 1960s San Francisco spiritual revolution - a view from inside. Memoir about a spiritual teacher and a student in 1960s San Francisco, a colorful cast - including Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Allen Ginsburg, Murshid Samuel Lewis ("Sufi Sam"), Swami Satchidananda, Ajari Warwick, Rabbi Zalman Shalomi Schachter, and many more - and lives that were changed forever. Aryae Coopersmith, a 22-year old college student in 1960s San Francisco, meets the charismatic rabbi and folk singer Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and decides to start a community for him. He rents a house and moves in with his best friends. Before long they find themselves - and their house - at the center of the San Francisco spiritual revolution as thousands of young people - Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Sufis, and followers of countless gurus - flood in through their doors. Giving concerts to packed halls all over the world, Shlomo is recognized as Judaism's most influential musician, and one of its greatest spiritual leaders, of the late 20th century. Their house - the House of Love and Prayer - becomes an historic part of the legend of 1960s San Francisco. Aryae and his fellow students who are running other spiritual communities bring their teachers and gurus together to create a big San Francisco event - the Meeting of the Ways - to celebrate the oneness of the world's spiritual traditions and all the world's people. Aryae's best friends Efraim and Leah leave San Francisco and head to Jerusalem, where they become ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. Many others from the "House" follow. Aryae stays behind and settles into a secular life as a Silicon Valley business owner. After Shlomo dies, Aryae feels compelled to tell the story. To try to understand the lives of his old friends and pull together the scattered fragments of his own, he travels to Jerusalem. This profoundly moving memoir tells a story of grace, loss, redemption, and ultimately of acceptance. It invites us to reflect on how the 1960s spiritual revolution - with its vision of the oneness of us all - has impacted each of our lives.

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore,The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.  Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.  Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?  Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Ryan White describes how he got AIDS, engaged in a legal battle to return to school, and became a celebrity and spokesman for issues concerning the deadly disease.

In Radiant Identities, photographer Jock Sturges explores issues of youth and the liberation of body and spirit. These unforgettable images are made from his own circle of acquaintances and family; the settings are their homes and stretches of naturist beaches in France and Northern California. In superb reproductions, Sturges evokes the classical spirit of Old Master paintings and late-nineteenth-century photographic tableaux, while probing concepts of emergent sexuality and psychological intimacy. Radiant Identities is the second volume in Sturges's ongoing work. Physically and psychically revealing, these deeply felt images are gloriously natural and wonderfully compelling. Elizabeth Beverly's introductory essay, drawn in part from conversations with Sturges's subjects, adds a new dimension to the photographs. These personal reflections shed light on the unique collaborative process by which Sturges's remarkable photographs are made. In the book's afterword, noted photography critic A.D. Coleman places Sturges in the context of current debates surrounding censorship in the arts, and discusses the themes of innocence and sexuality in the photographs.