The Children's Classics Collection


Book Description

Abridged and retold in modern English by respected children's authors, this collection of sixteen classic stories makes them accessible to readers as young as six, while retaining all the charm, atmosphere, and sense of adventure that made the original tales world-famous. These dramatic, easy-to-follow stories, charmingly illustrated with verve and humour by specially commissioned artists, deserve to find a home on every child's bookshelf. Included in this boxed set: 1. Alice in Wonderland 2. Treasure Island 3. The Wizard of Oz 4. The Jungle Book 5. The Secret Garden 6. Robin Hood 7. Peter Pan 8. Heidi 9. Anne of Green Gables 10. Little Women 11. Black Beauty 12. The Call of the Wild 13. Robinson Crusoe 14. Wind in the Willows 15. Tom Sawyer 16. Oliver Twist




A Guide to Collecting Everyman's Library


Book Description

Hardworking New Orleans environmental lawyer Rebecca Boudreaux's life just got substantially more complicated and dangerous because of the new case that her public interest law firm plans to file on behalf of citizens living in the Cancer Alley area of Louisiana. The focus of her case is River Road Recyclers, or Triple R, an oilfield waste recycling business that recently expanded its operations to illegally accept hazardous wastes. Rebecca must reveal how the company has doctored and falsified reports submitted to the government, spewed enormous amounts of toxic pollutants daily to the air and water near her clients' homes, and caused devastating health effects to her clients, all of which could have been avoided had the company just operated as it was required to under the law. Her efforts are hampered when her inside informants keep mysteriously dying, her clients are terrorized, her key witness is forced to hide in a rundown shack in the bayou until trial begins, and her own life is at risk. When Rebecca collapses in the courtroom and is rushed to the hospital on the first day of trial, her boss, Joe Cairns, steps in to litigate the case in her place. The drama climaxes as he exposes whether Rebecca's best friend, her steamy new love interest, the directors of the greedy and corrupt "recycling" company, or someone else has been acting . . . With Malicious Intent.







How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read


Book Description

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.




Love Poems


Book Description

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul. Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.







Plainsong


Book Description

National Book Award Finalist A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.