"The course of true love never did run smooth."
("A Midsummer Night's Dream" — William Shakespeare)
Stand aside, Mr. Darcy. Keep walking, Rhett Butler. There's a new romantic hero in town. And, though he may not have all the ladies in the valley swooning with desire, he sure knows how to pitch the woo.
Iza Trapani does it once again in this favorite song about a lovesick frog and his search for the perfect missus with her exquisitely charming and truly funny illustrations that explore the lighter side of romance. Even Jane Austen would have to bow to this most amiable and irresistible story. After all, you might have to kiss a frog to find a prince.
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Rebecca's the tough one, always chastising the other Eights for not bucking up when trouble arises. But how will she fare when it's her turn to face her power? What kids are saying about the Sisters Eight:"The Sisters 8 is really suspenseful and funny. I can't wait for the next one!" —Indrani, age 10"I love the Sisters 8 series because I love mysteries. My cousins, friends, and my sister and I like to play the Sisters 8 and we are each a different sister. I also like that the sisters are 8 years old like me." —Claire, 8 years old"I like it! My favorite part [in Annie's Adventures] is when they go to the toy store." —Ian Richardson, age 6 Views: 8
SHE BROUGHT OUT HIS PRIMAL NEEDS...Much of Alex Shane's teen years were forgotten--but his one intimate encounter with Sara Delaney was crystalclear in his memory. Sweet Sara who'd been too good for the bad boy he used to be. But the tables had turned now: Alex was investigating a possible murder--and Sara was his prime suspect.Though she hid her share of secrets, she claimed her innocence with her every breath.What she couldn't hide was that she craved Alex as much as he wanted her.Either way Sara was a danger. Alex was either harboring a criminal...or enticing the only woman who could find her way to his hidden heart. Views: 8
In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect that all is not what it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.'Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success ... Frayn's novel excels.' John updike, New Yorker'Deeply satisfying . . . Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent Views: 8
A memoir of astonishing power–the true story of a middle-class, middle-aged man who fell into the Inferno of the American prison system, and what he has to do to survive.It is your worst nightmare. You wake up in an 8' x 6' concrete-and-steel cell designated "Suicide Watch #3." The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, formerly a suburban husband and father, and corporate strategic planner and survivor, is about to become a prison "fish," or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to begin serving a twelve-year term for voluntary manslaughter, this once nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika engraved on his neck and a serious set of issues. And if he dares complain, the guards will bluntly tell him, "You got nothing coming."Bringing us into a world of petty corruption, racial strife, and crank-addicted neo-Nazis, Jimmy Lerner gives us a fish’s progress: a brash, compelling, and darkly comic story peopled with characters who are at various times funny, violent, and surprisingly tender. His rendering of prison language is mesmerizingly vivid and exact, and his search for a way not simply to survive but to craft a new way to live, in the most unpropitious of circumstances, is a tale filled with resilience, dignity, and a profound sense of the absurd. In the book’s climax, we learn just what demonic set of circumstances–a compound of bad luck and worse judgment–led him to the lethal act of self-defense that landed him in a circle of an American hell.Electrifying, unforgettable, bracingly cynical, and perceptive, You Got Nothing Coming is impossible to put down or shake off. What the cult favorite Oz is to television, this book is to prose–and all of the events are real.Amazon.com ReviewYou Got Nothing Coming, Jimmy A. Lerner's memoir of his first year (of a possible 12) as an inmate in a Nevada state prison, is a shocking, hilarious, and heartbreaking narrative of a world both parallel to and absolutely alien from the one most readers inhabit. With deft, economical prose, Lerner, a middle-aged former marketing director for a major corporation, introduces us to his fellow inmates--swastika-tattooed skinheads, Wiccans, methamphetamine addicts, and fashion-conscious prostitutes, among others--as well as a multitude of prisoner scams, nonexistent but on-the-books rehab programs, and the life-or-death intricacies of the convict code of etiquette. Lerner's ear for prison language is pitch-perfect, and much of what we learn comes directly from the mouths of the incarcerated. Lerner has, in effect, written a nonfiction novel, one artfully laced with mordant humor and by turns tender, caustic, insightful, and relentlessly candid. --H. O'BillovitchFrom Publishers WeeklyIn the mid-1990s, Lerner killed a man in Las Vegas. Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, he's now doing time in the Nevada state prison system (he's due to be paroled in January 2002). Even so, he quickly earns, and keeps, readers' sympathies in this wholly engrossing memoir of his time behind bars in part because of the charisma of his voice, in part because of his book's clever structure, which has Lerner come clean about exactly why he's in prison only near the book's end. For 18 years an executive for Pacific Bell, Lerner employs a voice that's charming, canny, sassy, self-deprecating; a voice perhaps not to be entirely trusted, but one that's deeply magnetic. Certainly as a middle-aged, middle-class, highly educated white, Lerner brings an unusual perspective to his prison experiences, which he plays on throughout. "Curiouser and curiouser I felt like Alice fallen into the rabbit hole," he writes. Readers will share that sentiment as, along with Lerner, they negotiate prison life and culture, where you don't enter a man's house (cell) without his permission and where a usable chess set can be fashioned from wet toilet paper and stale toothpaste two examples of the hundreds of details with which Lerner grounds his tale. Curiouser still are the prison denizens he describes, misfits and malfeasants all, most notably his longtime cellmate, Kansas, a white supremacist who takes a shine to the author fortunately, as Kansas is the top "dawg" of the cons. Eventually, Lerner loses his "fish" (newcomer) status, growing adept at prison ways and slang ("And every Righteous Con in the joint knows a catcher ain't nothin' but a punk-ass bitch!"), carrying readers along with him up to the book's final chapters, that is, where he flashes back to the crime that sent him behind bars in passages that reek of self-justification. Overall, this is the most gripping, and most inviting, prison memoir in years. (Feb. 12)Forecast: Any book by a convicted killer, especially post-Jack Abbott, may face some media and public resistance, but the national radio campaign and other publicity planned by Broadway should bring this title serious attention and healthy sales.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Views: 8
After five years of battling invaders, human civilization prepares a strike to drive the aliens from the Earth. But the Clan-Lord of the Sten has learned from the defeats humans have dealt him, and has his own plan. When he squares off against Major O’Neal, the only winner will be Satan himself. Views: 8
The author of Passages, a book that changed millions of lives, now lays bare her own life passages in a captivating memoir that reveals her harrowing and ultimately triumphant path from groundbreaking 1960s "girl" journalist to fearless bestselling author who made a career of excavating cultural taboos—from sex, menopause, and midlife crisis to illness, caregiving, and death. Daring to blaze a trail in a "man's world," Gail Sheehy became one of the premier practitioners of New Journalism at the fledgling New York magazine, along with such stellar writers as Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Jimmy Breslin. Sheehy dared to walk New York City's streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British soldiers opened fire; to seek out Egypt's president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for assassination after making peace with Israel; and to break the glass ceiling in a media world fueled... Views: 8
Matiu Douglas has a bone tiki he stole from a tangi. His father′s important new client wants it. Badly. And he has some very nasty friends. When Mat is forced to flee for his life, an unexpected meeting with a girl called Pania sets his world spinning. Suddenly he′s running through the bush with a girl-clown, a dog who is way too human, and a long-dead warrior. Fearful creatures from legend are rising up around him, and Mat faces a terrifying ordeal. And there is nowhere left to hide . . . not even in another world. A breathtaking adventure set in two parallel New Zealands, from exciting new author David Hair. Views: 8
Tommy knows he’s in trouble when he goes winter camping with friend Vince Nguyen without telling his folks. But when they’re caught in a sudden blizzard, and the man they rescue from freezing to death turns out to be an escaped convict, Tommy’s troubles are only beginning. Now Tommy and Vince must not only survive the blizzard, but also find a way to keep Quinn from killing them. Views: 8
