Dave Pelzer's remarkable journey from a child who lived in terror of his unstable, violently unpredictable mother's every move, to his emergence as an inspiration the world over is a remarkable tale of survival and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

Dave Pelzer's three volumes of memoirs - A Child Called 'It', The Lost Boy and A Man Named Dave - brought this story of courage and triumph against all odds to the world, becoming global bestsellers.

My Story brings these volumes together, following Dave from a childhood spent in fear, his tempestuous teenage years haunted by the spectre of his mother, through to his adulthood, and his great achievement of not only understanding and reconciling the story of his own life, but his dedication to helping others overcome similar adversity.

It is a remarkable story of courage and survival, already embraced by millions and destined to inspire millions more.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain combines Indian myths, epic history, and the story of three college kids in search of America. This captivating narrative includes the monkey's story of an Indian poet and warrior and an American road novel of college students driving cross-country.

An Indian student, home from college in the U.S., shoots a monkey who turns out to be the reincarnation of a poet. Subsequently, the two take turns telling their stories. The poet recalls epic deeds of glory in fighting the British Raj, while the student narrates tales of materialism and boredom in America.

In this astonishing tale, the gods Hanuman, Ganesha, and Yama descend on a house in an Indian city to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey. A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live. The result is a tale of nineteenth-century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta and the birth of a luminous child; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone 'mad with poetry'.

Woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, totally modern narrative, the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends and his eventual return to his homeland.

The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."

Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

Are there other dimensions beyond our own? Is time travel possible? Can we change the past? Are there gateways to parallel universes? All of us have pondered such questions, but there was a time when scientists dismissed these notions as outlandish speculations. Not any more. Today, they are the focus of the most intense scientific activity in recent memory.

In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, author of the widely acclaimed Beyond Einstein and a leading theoretical physicist, offers the first book-length tour of the most exciting (and perhaps most bizarre) work in modern physics, work which includes research on the tenth dimension, time warps, black holes, and multiple universes.

The theory of hyperspace (or higher dimensional space)—and its newest wrinkle, superstring theory—stand at the center of this revolution, with adherents in every major research laboratory in the world, including several Nobel laureates. Beginning where Hawking's Brief History of Time left off, Kaku paints a vivid portrayal of the breakthroughs now rocking the physics establishment.

Why all the excitement? As the author points out, for over half a century, scientists have puzzled over why the basic forces of the cosmos—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—require markedly different mathematical descriptions. But if we see these forces as vibrations in a higher dimensional space, their field equations suddenly fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, perfectly snug, in an elegant, astonishingly simple form.

This may thus be our leading candidate for the Theory of Everything. If so, it would be the crowning achievement of 2,000 years of scientific investigation into matter and its forces. Already, the theory has inspired several thousand research papers, and has been the focus of over 200 international conferences.

Michio Kaku is one of the leading pioneers in superstring theory and has been at the forefront of this revolution in modern physics. With Hyperspace, he has produced a book for general readers which conveys the vitality of the field and the excitement as scientists grapple with the meaning of space and time. It is an exhilarating look at physics today and an eye-opening glimpse into the ultimate nature of the universe.

Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric—a masterpiece of suspense San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.

Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol’s classic book on life and death in the South Bronx—the poorest urban neighborhood of the United States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS.

But he also introduces us to devoted and unselfish teachers, dedicated ministers, and—at the heart and center of the book—courageous and delightful children. The children we come to meet through the friendships they have formed with Jonathan defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them.

Amidst all of the despair, it is the very young whose luminous capacity for love and transcendent sense of faith in human decency give reason for hope.

In the three novels that make up the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy collected in this omnibus edition (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road), five University of Toronto students find themselves transported to a magical land to do battle with the forces of evil. At a Celtic conference, Kimberley, Kevin, Jennifer, Dave, and Paul meet wizard Loren Silvercloak. Returning with him to the magical kingdom of Fionavar to attend a festival, they soon discover that they are being drawn into the conflict between the dark and the light as Unraveller Rakoth Maugrim breaks free of his mountain prison and threatens the continued existence of Fionavar. They join mages, elves, dwarves, and the forces of the High King of Brennin to do battle with Maugrim, where Kay's imaginative powers as a world-builder come to the fore. He stunningly weaves Arthurian legends into the fluid mix of Celtic, Nordic, and Teutonic, creating a grand fantasy that sweeps readers into a heroic struggle that the author makes all the more memorable because of the tributes he pays to past masters.

The trilogy is a grand homage to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but while the echoes of Tolkien's masterwork are very real, the books offer the wonderful taste of a new fantasy writer cutting his teeth at the foot of a master. Kay has a very real connection to Tolkien--as Christopher Tolkien's assistant, Kay was invaluable in helping to wrestle Tolkien's posthumous The Silmarillion into shape for publication. Kay is undoubtedly one of the Canadian masters of high fantasy, and The Fionavar Tapestry is one of his most enduring works.

The ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction.

Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway's career, to his father's suicide; and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a brilliant fusion of personal observation, hearsay and invention.

Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America's master storytellers at the top of his form.

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. As he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be – he comes steadily to realize he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.

Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control explores themes of identity and self-discovery. This surrealistic journey is both a mesmerizing and a thought-provoking adventure.

Verne's classic novel of global voyaging One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.

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.

From the bestselling author Ann Rule comes the true story of Bradly Morris Cunningham, a handsome and successful entrepreneur who married five different women and destroyed each of them.

Ann Rule, renowned for her riveting true crime stories, brings us the horrific account of a charismatic man adored by beautiful and brilliant women who gave him everything he desired... sex, money, and their very lives.

When attorney Cheryl Keeton's brutally bludgeoned body was found in her van on an Oregon freeway, her husband, Brad Cunningham, was the likely suspect. However, there was no solid evidence linking him to the crime. He married again, for the fifth time, and his stunning new wife, a physician named Sara, adopted his three sons. They all settled into family life on a luxurious estate, but gradually, their marriage became a nightmare.

In this gripping account of Cheryl's murder, Ann Rule takes us from Brad's troubled boyhood to one of the most bizarre trials in legal history, uncovering multiple marriages, financial manipulations, infidelities, and monstrous acts of harassment and revenge along the way. Dead By Sunset is Ann Rule at her riveting best.

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Jewish firm in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Herecounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account.

In the Appalachian community of Dark Hollow, Tennessee, some believe that the ghost of Katie Wyler, kidnapped by the Shawnee two hundred years ago, is once again roaming the hills. Only an old woman gifted with "the Sight" and policewoman Martha Ayers can put the superstitions to rest—and stop a flesh-and-blood predator as elusive as the whistling wind...

The ghost of a murdered pioneer woman wanders the Appalachian hills, searching for a way home. But others, including a city-bred scholar and an escaped killer, also roam these hills, each undertaking a very personal journey. When their paths cross, a long-hidden mystery is revealed, and with it a secret that will rock the Appalachians to their very core.

Historian Jeremy Cobb is backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, attempting to retrace the tragic journey of 18-year-old Katie Wyler, who was captured by the Shawnee after the massacre of her pioneer family.

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...

It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow. For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....

An airborne Boeing 747 is headed to London when, without any warning, passengers mysteriously disappear from their seats. Terror and chaos slowly spread not only through the plane but also worldwide as unusual events continue to unfold. For those who have been left behind, the apocalypse has just begun...

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

Brilliantly inventive, Wicked offers a radical new portrait of one of the most feared and despised villains in all of literature: the universally maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, in Maguire’s imaginative retelling, isn’t nearly as black-hearted as we imagined.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series by Douglas Adams, and serves as a sequel. The narrative continues the adventures of Arthur Dent and his companions as they navigate through space powered by pure improbability, all while seeking a place to dine. Among the characters are Ford Prefect, a long-time friend and contributor to the Guide; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the eccentric two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMilan, who has adapted to her interstellar surroundings under the name Trillian; and Marvin, the perpetually depressed robot.

The story is filled with wit, unexpected twists, and a vivid imagination that has cemented it as a favorite among fans of the genre. The titular Milliways, known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, serves as one of the key settings, offering a dining experience that is literally out of this world.

All of Waylander's instincts had screamed at him to spurn the contract from Kaem the cruel, the killer of nations. But he had ignored them. He had made his kill. And even as he went to collect his gold, he knew that he had been betrayed.

Now the Dark Brotherhood and the hounds of chaos were hunting him, even as Kaem's armies waged war on the Drenai lands, intent on killing every man, woman, and child. The Drenai soldiers were doomed to ultimate defeat, and chaos would soon reign.

Then a strange old man told Waylander that the only way to turn the tide of battle would be for Waylander himself to retrieve the legendary Armor of Bronze from its hiding place deep within a shadow-haunted land. He would be hunted. He was certain to fail. But he must try, the old man commanded—commanded in the name of his son, the king, who had been slain by an assassin...

Waylander was the most unlikely of heroes—for he was a traitor, the Slayer who had killed the king...

In Osaka, in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women strive to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. The Makioka Sisters, as told by Junichiro Tanizaki, is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century. It's a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family—and an entire society—sliding into the abyss of modernity.

Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances.

Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonists, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature, offering keen social insight and unabashed sensuality that distinguish Tanizaki as a master novelist.

Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her.

Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen-turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful undead redhead walks through the door... and proceeds to rock Tommy's life—and afterlife—in ways he never imagined possible.

So begins the zany and wildly different love story that is at the heart of Bloodsucking Fiends, a romance novel like none you've ever read before, and a bloodcurdlingly funny vampire story about passion, bloodlust, and blood loss.

It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end – the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public.

There are rumors that something has survived....

The suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelation after revelation: a Mafia-like organization called Odessa, a real-life fugitive known as the "Butcher of Riga", and a young German journalist turned obsessed avenger. Ultimately, this leads to a brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish the worldwide power of SS mass murderers and to carry out Hitler's chilling "Final Solution".

Set in 1963, this gripping thriller unfolds against a background of international arms deals and Nazi war crimes. As the story leads to its final dramatic confrontation on a bleak winter's hilltop, readers are left questioning: Can this be fiction?

In Wizard's First Rule, Richard Cypher's world was turned upside down. Once a simple woods guide, Richard was forced to become the Seeker of Truth, to save the world from the vile dominance of Darken Rahl, the most viciously savage and powerful wizard the world had ever seen. He was joined on this epic quest by his beloved Kahlan, the only survivor among the Confessors, who brought a powerful but benevolent justice to the land before Rahl's evil scourge. Aided by Zedd, the last of the wizards who opposed Rahl, they were able to cast him into the underworld, saving the world from the living hell of life under Rahl.

But the veil to the underworld has been torn, and Rahl, from beyond the veil, begins to summon a sinister power more dreadful than any he has wielded before. Horrifying creatures escape through the torn veil, wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting world above.

If Rahl isn't stopped, he will free the Keeper itself, an evil entity whose power is so vast and foul that once freed, it can never again be contained.

Richard and Kahlan must face Rahl and the Keeper's terrible minions. But first, Richard must endure the ministrations of the Sisters of the Light, or die from the pain of magic that is his birthright and his curse. While Richard undertakes the arduous journey to the forbidden city of the Sisters, Kahlan must embark upon a long and dangerous mission to Aydindril, citadel of the old wizards, where she hopes to find Zedd and the help only he can lend to their desperate cause.

War, suffering, torture, and deceit lie in their paths, and nothing will save them from a destiny of violent death, unless their courage and faith are joined with luck and they find the elusive...Stone of Tears.

This volume collects, for the first time, the entire Dream Cycle created by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of twentieth-century horror, including some of his most fantastic tales:

• The Doom that Came to Sarnath - Hate, genocide, and a deadly curse.
• The Nameless City - Death lies beneath the shifting sands, in a story linking the Dream Cycle with the legendary Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Cats of Ulthar - In Ulthar, no man may kill a cat...and woe unto any who tries.
• The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath - The epic nightmare adventure with tendrils stretching throughout the entire Dream Cycle.

And twenty more tales of surreal terror.

A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenage girl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother's quest begins - to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to... THE HORSE WHISPERER

He is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heal broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of this ancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.

Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, and their wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has risked everything - her career, her marriage, her comfortable life - in her desperate belief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrim savage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should be destroyed. But Annie won't give up on him. For she feels his fate is inextricably entwined with that of her daughter, who has retreated into a heartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, something in Grace will die too.

In the weeks to come, under the massive sky of the Rocky Mountain Front, all their lives - including Tom Booker's - will be transformed forever in a way none could have foretold. At once an epic love story and a gripping adventure, The Horse Whisperer weaves an extraordinary tale of healing and redemption - a magnificent emotional journey that explores our ancient bonds with earth and sky and hearts untamed. It is a stirring elegy to the power of belief and self-discovery, to hopes lost and found again.

A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman.

A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contemporary, The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, the master "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).

A Child Called "It" is a memoir by Dave Pelzer that recounts the harrowing details of his childhood, marked by extreme abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother. The story is a testament to one child's resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity. Dave's mother subjected him to a series of tortuous and unpredictable games that almost cost him his life. Stripped of his identity, he was regarded not as her son, but as a slave, and he was referred to as an "it" rather than a boy.

With his bed being an old army cot in the basement and his clothes nothing but tattered rags, Dave's existence was a living nightmare. Food was a luxury, often just spoiled scraps that even dogs would refuse. Isolated and alone, Dave's dreams and determination to find a loving family kept him alive. This memoir is not just a tale of suffering, but also a story about the power of hope and the will to survive.

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

With this basic instruction always in mind, Anne Lamott returns to offer us a new gift: a step-by-step guide on how to write and on how to manage the writer's life. From "Getting Started," with "Short Assignments," through "Shitty First Drafts," "Character," "Plot," "Dialogue." all the way from "False Starts" to "How Do You Know When You're Done?" Lamott encourages, instructs, and inspires. She discusses "Writers Block," "Writing Groups," and "Publication." Bracingly honest, she is also one of the funniest people alive.

If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a writer, what it means to be a writer, what the contents of your school lunches said about what your parents were really like, this book is for you. From faith, love, and grace to pain, jealousy, and fear, Lamott insists that you keep your eyes open, and then shows you how to survive. And always, from the life of the artist she turns to the art of life.

Cyteen is a gripping tale of murder, politics, and genetic manipulation. Set on the distant planet of Cyteen, a brilliant young scientist rises to power, haunted by the knowledge that her predecessor and genetic duplicate met a mysterious end at the hands of a trusted advisor.

This novel provides an intricate framework of power dynamics and personal intrigue. C.J. Cherryh, the acclaimed author of Downbelow Station, showcases her talent for intense, literate storytelling. The narrative maintains a compelling interest throughout its complex and lengthy journey.

Desolation Angels is a vivid, semi-autobiographical novel by the renowned Beat Generation author, Jack Kerouac. This book is part of his celebrated Duluoz Legend series.

Kerouac takes us on a journey through a key year of his life, starting from his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade mountains of Washington state. The story follows his fictional self, Jack Duluoz, as he transitions from the isolation of the mountains to the vibrant life of bars, jazz clubs, and parties in San Francisco.

The novel captures Kerouac's travels across the world, from Mexico City to New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London, in the company of his thinly disguised Beat cohorts like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. Through their poetry, parties, mountain vigils, and spiritual contemplation, Kerouac presents a tale filled with energy and humanity.

Desolation Angels reflects Kerouac's own psychological struggles and his disillusionment with the Buddhist philosophy he once embraced. It’s a story about living, traveling, adventuring, and embracing life without regrets.

Love You Forever by Robert Munsch is a touching narrative that delves into the enduring love that a parent has for their child. The story is beautifully illustrated by Sheila McGraw with soft and colorful pastels that harmonize with the book's heartfelt sentiment.

This beloved book promises to be a staple that parents and children will read together repeatedly over the years, cherishing the message and the moments shared together.

Three young doctors—their hopes, their dreams, their unexpected desires...

Dr. Paige Taylor: She swore it was euthanasia, but when Paige inherited a million dollars from a patient, the D.A. called it murder.

Dr. Kat Hunter: She vowed never to let another man too close again—until she accepted the challenge of a deadly bet.

Dr. Honey Taft: To make it in medicine, she knew she'd need something more than the brains God gave her.

Racing from the life-and-death decisions of a big major hospital to the tension-packed fireworks of a murder trial, Nothing Lasts Forever lays bare the ambitions and fears of healers and killers, lovers and betrayers.

Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap is a groundbreaking book by Peggy Orenstein that explores the decline in confidence among young girls as they reach adolescence.

Inspired by an American Association of University Women survey, Orenstein investigates the obstacles girls face in school, at home, and within our culture. Through months of observation and interviews with eighth-graders from diverse communities, she uncovers the causes behind traditional patterns of self-censorship and self-doubt.

Orenstein brings to life the struggles of real young women dealing with eating disorders, sexual harassment, and declining academic achievement. She skillfully highlights the adolescent roots of issues that remain significant throughout the lives of American women.

This book challenges us to rethink how we raise and educate girls, making it a must-read for anyone interested in empowerment and social change.

The Bridges of Madison County tells the story of Robert Kincaid, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood dream. This novel gives voice to the longings of men and women everywhere-and shows us what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again.

Many moons ago, the magic of Calvin and Hobbes first appeared on the funny pages and the world was introduced to a wondrous pair of friends -- a boy and his tiger, who brought new life to the comics page. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of this distinguished partnership, Bill Watterson prepared this special book, sharing his thoughts on cartooning and creating Calvin and Hobbes, illustrated throughout with favorite black-and-white and color cartoons.

One of the most important theologians of the twentieth century illuminates the relationship between ourselves and the teachings of Jesus in this classic text on ethics, humanism, and civic duty. What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." "Cheap grace," Bonhoeffer wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ourselves...grace without discipleship....Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know....It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."

The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty.

For her birthday, Vicky receives the gift of a trip to the Antarctic, where her friend Adam Eddington is working as a marine biologist. But as Vicky meets her fellow travelers, it quickly becomes clear that some of them are not what they seem. Vicki's trip into adventure becomes a journey into icy danger.

In book five of the Austin Family Chronicles, Vicky Austin experiences the difficulties and joys of growing up. After a year in New York City and a summer with her grandfather, Vicky Austin returns to the rural Connecticut village she grew up in—and feels totally out of place. Then, she meets Adam Eddington's Great Aunt Serena, who reminds her of her beloved grandfather, and she begins to find a comfortable, if not exciting, routine to her days.

At Christmas, Serena gives Vicky a trip to Antarctica, to visit Adam. Vicky can't believe her luck. But the trip is not what Vicky imagined it would be. First of all, she doesn't know where she stands with Adam. He's pulled back, saying they are just friends. But weren't they more than that, Vicky thinks. And Vicky's fellow passengers are not what they seem or they are more than she knows. Finally, even Aunt Serena's motives are suspect, as Vicky discovers a journal that belonged to Adam's famous uncle who disappeared many years earlier.

As Vicky becomes more and more caught up in a mystery involving drugs, nuclear waste, and international espionage, she discovers that her assumptions about the world are hopelessly naive and that life, hers included, is as fragile as the ecosystem of Antarctica, the world's most remote continent.

Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, The Painted Bird is a dark novel that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is the first, and the most famous, novel by a writer who is now discredited.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice, and drive for artistic truth.

As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalizingly unclear.

Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy's haunting Jewish background and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions...

Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.

Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly — or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers — Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann — stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.

Richard Rhodes takes us on that journey step by step, minute by minute, and gives us the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention.

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American.

It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Musashi is a novel in the best tradition of Japanese story telling. It is a living story, subtle and imaginative, teeming with memorable characters, many of them historical. Interweaving themes of unrequited love, misguided revenge, filial piety and absolute dedication to the Way of the Samurai, it depicts vividly a world Westerners know only vaguely.

In a remote river town deep in the Ecuadoran jungle, Antonio José Bolívar seeks refuge in amorous novels. But as tourists and opportunists begin to make inroads into the area, the delicate balance of nature is disrupted, leading to a dangerous shift.

Translated by Peter Bush, this captivating tale explores the intersection of humanity and nature, where an elderly widower finds solace in the pages of romance novels while confronting the challenges posed by the encroaching modern world.

Taltos continues the epic occult saga that began with The Witching Hour and Lasher. Taltos takes readers back through the centuries to a civilization part human and part of wholly mysterious origins, at odds with mortality and immortality, justice and guilt.

In the fifth Vampire Chronicle, Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic mortal daughter of a drug lord. Dora has moved Lestat like no other mortal ever has, and he cannot get her out of his visions. At the same time, he is increasingly aware that the Devil knows who he is and wants something from him. While torn between his vampire world and his passion for Dora, Lestat is sucked in by Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil himself. Memnoch presents Lestat with unimagined opportunities: to witness creation, to visit purgatory, to be treated like a prophet. Lestat faces a choice between the Devil or God. Whom does he believe in? Who does he serve? What are the elements of religious belief? Lestat finds himself caught in a whirlpool of the ultimate choice.

Julie Ellis and Luke Muldenhower have always been school sweethearts. Now both are in high school and deeply in love. Luke, a talented football player, is almost certain to receive an athletic scholarship to a top college. And no matter what her parents say, wherever Luke goes, Julie intends to follow.

When Luke can't shake what he thinks is a virus, Julie persuades him to see a doctor. Luke's test results are alarming, but Julie believes their love is stronger than anything. Can love survive, now and forever?

Follow Your Heart is an international bestseller with tremendous word-of-mouth appeal. This bittersweet, heartwarming novel spans generations and teaches the universal truths about life, love, and what lies within each of us.

Originally published in Italy, it begins in late autumn 1992 as an elderly Italian woman, prompted by the knowledge of her encroaching death, sits down to write a letter to her granddaughter, now grown and living in far-off America. Through these moving reflections, one life is laid bare—joys, sorrows, regrets, and all.

Through the eyes of a woman nearing the end of her days, we come to understand what life experience has taught her: that no matter what the stakes, we must look within ourselves and gather the courage to follow our hearts.

Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats. Gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise.

Valentine's journey is a long one, a tour through a series of magnificent environments. Fields of predatory plants give way to impossibly wide rivers, chalk-cliffed islands, and unforgiving deserts. The prose is unrelentingly dreamlike—no accident given that on Majipoor, dreams rule the minds of great and humble alike.

This epic tale is an imaginative fusion of action, sorcery, and science fiction, set in a wildly imaginative universe.