Living by their wits in the steamy slums of Bahia, a gang of orphans and runaways, led by fifteen-year-old "Bullet," spend their time stealing from Brazil's rich and privileged until public outcry demands their capture. Views: 1 201
On the evening of 26th November 1703, a cyclone from the north Atlantic hammered into southern Britain at over seventy miles an hour, claiming the lives of over 8,000 people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing cows left stranded in the branches of trees and windmills ablaze from the friction of their whirling sails. For Defoe, bankrupt and just released from prison for seditious writings, the storm struck during one of his bleakest moments.
But it also furnished him with the material for his first book, and in his powerful depiction of private suffering and individual survival played out against a backdrop of public calamity we can trace the outlines of his later masterpieces such as A Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe. Views: 1 200
Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II
“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland. Views: 1 200
While vacationing in a seaside town, Nancy learns her father has been kidnapped. She and Ned rescue Carson Drew and help him investigate a cosmetic company’s suspicious operations. Meanwhile, the girl sleuth is captivated by another mystery. Stories about the eerie moans from a cave carved in the jagged wall of the bluff compel her to explore. Several frightened townspeople claim to have seen a ghost, accompanied by the mournful sound of a tolling bell just before water rushes from the cave. During her searches, Nancy discovers the true cause and reasons behind these mysterious occurrences! This book is the revised text. The plot of the original story (©1946) is similar with minor revisions. Views: 1 200
He is standing in the middle of the room. She is sitting by the window, staring out over the East River. The late sunlight from the opposite window touches her shoulders and hair, it casts the shadow of palm leaves across the carpet, over her arm. The chair she sits in casts a shadow before her.
There is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her.
Behind her, and cast by what light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There's no light shining upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. What is she looking at?
A round trip from present-day life in New York to war-time Intelligence work in England in 1944 and back again. Views: 1 199
With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life. Views: 1 199
Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot – entirely – leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which Mordecai Richler’s fiction is celebrated. Views: 1 199
The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world's leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, "Few writers in any age were so full of ideas," and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted. The Portable Nietzsche includes Kaufmann's definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche's four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche's development, versatility, and inexhaustibility. "In this volume, one may very conveniently have a rich review of one of the most sensitive, passionate, and misunderstood writers in Western, or any, literature." --Newsweek Views: 1 198
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world.
Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the “dangerously imaginative” child coming of age in the slums of New York. Views: 1 197
Will the four Heath children continue their family tradition and become tennis champions?
The Heath kids—Nicky, David, and twins Jim and Susan—come from a long line of ace tennis players. Now their dad has decided it’s time to teach them everything he knows about the game.
The twins are the odds-on favourites to become the next champs. Susan shows a lot of promise, winning in tournaments and getting recognition, but she secretly hates the spotlight. Jim’s a good player, but prefers swimming. David, the youngest, loves to sing. Nicky could be a natural, but she’s too busy rebelling to take the sport seriously.
Who will become champion? And will it change their family forever? Views: 1 197
*Also see: Alternate Cover Editions for this ISBN [ACE] *
ACE #1
Nancy Drew tackles a mystery professional detectives failed to solve--finding a valuable centuries-old message in a hollow oak tree in Illinois.
The story is based on the original title of the same name first published in 1935. The plot is vastly different in this extensively revised and shortened version. Views: 1 197
Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, tells a powerful tale of poverty and undying hope in his moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel.
'The Colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one spoonful left'
Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive. But on Fridays the postman comes - and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the Colonel's ageing heart.
For fifteen years he's watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he'll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season. But until then the bird - like the Colonel and his wife - must somehow be fed. . .
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushie
'Masterly. He dazzles us with powerful effect' New Statesman
'One of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler Views: 1 196
Virginia Lee Burton won the Caldecott Medal in 1943 for her memorable picture book The Little House, a poignant story of a cute country cottage that becomes engulfed by the city that grows up around it. The house has an expressive face of windows and doors, and even the feelings of a person, so she’s sad when she’s surrounded by the dirty, noisy city’s hustle and bustle: “She missed the field of daisies / and the apple trees dancing in the moonlight.” Fortunately, there’s a happy ending, as the house is taken back to the country where she belongs. Views: 1 196
