When Mrs. Putney seeks Nancy's help in recovering her stolen jewelry, the search for the thieves takes the girl detective and her friends, Bess and George, to an abandoned mansion in the River Heights vicinity known as Blackwood Hall and to the colorful French Quarter of New Orleans. When the quest is hampered by the strange behavior of Mrs. Putney and two young women who are being victimized by so-called spirits, Nancy must fight these unseen perpetrators of a cruel hoax! The resourceful young sleuth wants to help, but is hindered. The ghostly spirits have warned these gullible victims to not to have anything to do with Nancy Drew! This book is the original text. The plot of the revised story (©1967) is similar with minor revisions. Views: 440
Four hilarious and provocative stories from Boccaccio's Decameron, featuring cuckolded husbands, cross-dressing wives and very bad priests.
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375).
Boccaccio's Decameron is available in Penguin Classics in both a complete and selected edition. Views: 439
Fueled by idealism and eagerness to contribute to the war effort, Guy Crouchback becomes attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and respect must be paid to the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is soon followed by the bitterness of Crete, where chaos reigns and a difficult evacuation must be accomplished.
Officers and Gentlemen is the second novel in Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback, which also comprises Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender. Views: 439
A young man searches for meaning, creates art, and grapples with fame as he traverses the stomping grounds of the Beat Generation—from Mexico City to Manhattan—in Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel
This urgently paced yet deeply introspective novel closely tracks On the Road author Jack Kerouac’s own life. Jack Duluoz journeys from the Cascade Mountains to San Francisco, Mexico City, New York, and Tangier. While working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades, Duluoz contemplates his inner void and the distressing isolation brought on by his youthful sense of adventure. In Tangier he suffers a similar feeling of desperation during an opium overdose, and in Mexico City he meets up with a morphine-addicted philosopher and seeks an antidote to his solitude in a whorehouse.
As in Kerouac’s other novels, Desolation Angels features a lively cast of pseudonymous versions of his fellow Beat poets, including William S. Burroughs (as Bull Hubbard), Neal Cassady (as Cody Pomeray), and Allen Ginsberg (as Irwin Garden). Duluoz draws readers into the trials and tribulations of these literary iconoclasts—from drug-fueled writing frenzies and alcoholic self-realizations to frenetic international road trips and tumultuous love affairs. Achieving literary success comes with its own consequences though, as Duluoz and his friends must face the scrutiny that comes with rising to the national stage. Views: 439
EDITORIAL REVIEW:Thora and others mentioned that they are on a quest to find the Planet of Eternal Life as early as "Enterprise Stardust," but it is with this book, The Galactic Riddle, that Perry's quest for this secret begins. "The Galactic Riddle" begins to be solved when Rhodan and his allies pull the rest of the secrets from an unusual storage facility in the dungeons of Ferrol, the eighth planet of the Vega system. This vault is protected, not by locks or bars, but by time itself, truly, this is... THE GALACTIC RIDDLE! Views: 439
A young Indian girl, caught between the traditional world of her mother and the present world of the mission, is helped by her Aunt Karana, whose story was told in Island of the Blue Dolphins. Views: 439
When the Moomin family members need a change of scenery, they decide to take up residence in a lighthouse. As they discover their new home, the family also discover surprising, and wonderfully funny, new things about themselves. Views: 439
From the author of the beloved All-Of-A-Kind Family books comes a timeless story of a family's struggles and triumphs in early twentieth century Eastern Europe. Mama and her two young daughters, Szerena and Gisella, never thought they would be without Papa for five long years. Ever since he left their small farm in Czechoslovakia for America, they have been waiting for him to send for them. In the meantime, with the help of family and neighbors, Mama and the girls work on the farm. While Szerena wishes for "a papa like everyone else," Gisella can't remember their father, and wishes he had not gone away without them. Finally, the big day arrives, and Mama and the girls leave for America to reunite with Papa. What will it be like to travel on a train and a ship? And what will happen when at last they see Papa? A delightful evocation of Jewish life in the "old world," A Papa Like Everyone Else is the perfect companion to the seminal All-Of-A-Kind Family books. Views: 438
In this captivating novel, Mahfouz chronicles he dramatic history of the al-Nagi family - a family that moves, over many generations, from the heights of power and glory to the depths of decadence and decay.
The Harafish begins with the tale of Ashur al-Nagi, a man who grows from humble origins to become a great leader, a legend among the common people - the harafish of the title. Generation after generation, however, Ashur's descendants grow further from his legendary example, losing touch with their origins and squandering their large fortunes, marrying prostitutes and developing bitter and eventually fatal rivalries. And yet, a small hope always remains that one day they will produce a Nagi who can restore their name to its former glory. Views: 438
All Our Worldly Goods reads like a prequel to Suite Française, but is a perfect novel in its own right.
In haunting ways, this compelling novel prefigures Suite Française and some of the themes of Némirovsky’s great unfinished sequence of novels. All Our Worldly Goods, though, is complete, and exquisitely so — a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author’s death, it is a gripping story of family life and star-crossed lovers, set in France between 1910 and 1940.
Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. This is Balzac or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up, with Némirovsky’s characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, and telling observations of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, Némirovsky is at the height of her powers.
Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points out with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close those two wars were, how history repeated itself, tragically and shockingly. The story opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach and ends with a changed world under Nazi occupation.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 438
In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got the bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you.' And nobody in the town provides such a wealth of delicious gossip as 'Noisy' Brackett and his wife Sally. Refusing to pay her bills, chasing her errant husband around the countryside in fast cars, setting fire to the heart of Bob, the local baker, Sally is a gloriously raffish figure of fun. In these three linked novellas Bob relates how Sally finally paid his account, how Noisy got off a motoring charge by sneezing, stole a case of stuffed birds from his own house, and barricaded himself in a cottage with a cardboard Argentinean air-hostess to foil Sally's pursuit. Pritchett's effervescent love of comedy, his gift for storytelling and dialogue, his passionate interest in the seedier, droller goings-on of modern society, have never showed to better advantage than in these light-hearted tales. Views: 438
The #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Miracle of Dunkirk tells the story of the Texans who fought Santa Anna’s troops at the Battle of the Alamo. Looking out over the walls of the whitewashed Alamo, sweltering in the intense sun of a February heat wave, Colonel William Travis knew his small garrison had little chance of holding back the Mexican army. Even after a call for reinforcements brought dozens of Texans determined to fight for their fledgling republic, the cause remained hopeless. Gunpowder was scarce, food was running out, and the compound was too large to easily defend with less than two hundred soldiers. Still, given the choice, only one man opted to surrender. The rest resolved to fight and die. After thirteen days, the Mexicans charged, and the Texans were slaughtered. In exquisite detail, Walter Lord recreates the fight to uphold the Texan flag. He sheds light not just on frontier celebrities like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, but on the ordinary soldiers who died alongside them. Though the fight ended two centuries ago, the men of the Alamo will never be forgotten. Views: 438
Boleslaw Prus is often compared to Chekhov, and Prus’s masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which is also a prophetic reckoning with some of the social forces—imperialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism among them—that would soon convulse Europe as never before. But The Doll is above all a brilliant novel of character, dramatizing conflicting ideas through the various convictions, ambitions, confusions, and frustrations of an extensive and varied cast. At the center of the book are three men from three different generations. Prus’s fatally flawed hero is Wokulski, a successful businessman who yearns for recognition from Poland’s decadent aristocracy and falls desperately in love with the highborn, glacially beautiful Izabela. Wokulski’s story is intertwined with those of the incorrigibly romantic old clerk Rzecki, nostalgic for the revolutions of 1848, and of the bright young scientist Ochocki, who dreams of a future full of flying machines and other marvels, making for a book of great scope and richness that is, as Stanisław Barańczak writes in his introduction, at once “an old-fashioned yet still fascinating love story . . . , a still topical diagnosis of society’s ills, and a forceful yet subtle portrayal of a tragically doomed man. Views: 438
The rogue cop was a good cop — smart, brave, experienced. But there was dirt on his hands. The dirt came from his association with the underworld — with Ackerman, numbers king, and other racketeers. These paid the rogue cop well for the cover-up jobs he did for them.
Trouble came when they asked the rogue cop to stop his younger brother, Eddie, also on the force, from testifying against them in court. And when Eddie insisted on talking, a hired gangster shot him. The underworld the rogue cop had served had killed his own brother. Views: 438
