In this heart-pounding but touchingly romantic thriller, Detective Alex Cross pursues the most complex and brilliant killer he's ever confronted - a mysterious criminal who calls himself the Mastermind.

In a series of crimes that has stunned Washington, D.C., bank robbers have been laying out precise demands when they enter the building - and then killing the bank employees and their families if those instructions are not followed to the letter.

Detective Alex Cross takes on the case, certain that this is no ordinary bank robber at work - the pathological need for control and perfection is too great. Cross is in the midst of a personal crisis at home, but the case becomes all-consuming as he learns that the Mastermind is plotting one huge, last, perfect crime.

Forgotten Soldier recounts the horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery.

As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. Sajer's German footsoldier’s perspective makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited."

Now it has been handsomely republished containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.

Revenge - When Eugenides, the Thief of Eddis, stole Hamiathes's Gift, the Queen of Attolia lost more than a mythical relic. She lost face. Everyone knew that Eugenides had outwitted and escaped her. To restore her reputation and reassert her power, the Queen of Attolia will go to any length and accept any help that is offered... she will risk her country to execute the perfect revenge.

...but - Eugenides can steal anything. And he taunts the Queen of Attolia, moving through her strongholds seemingly at will. So Attolia waits, secure in the knowledge that the Thief will slip, that he will haunt her palace one too many times.

...at what price? - When Eugenides finds his small mountain country at war with Attolia, he must steal a man, he must steal a queen, he must steal peace. But his greatest triumph - and his greatest loss - comes in capturing something that the Queen of Attolia thought she had sacrificed long ago.

The adventures of Christopher Robin and his friends in which Pooh Bear uses a balloon to get honey, Piglet meets a Heffalump, and Eeyore has a birthday.

In 1857, Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband confiscated by British Customs. Forced to put their ship up for charter, the only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.

The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson believes the Garden of Eden was on the island of Tasmania. His traveling partner, Dr. Thomas Potter, unbeknownst to Wilson, is developing a sinister thesis about the races of men.

Meanwhile, an aboriginal in Tasmania named Peevay recounts his people’s struggles against the invading British. This story begins in 1824, moves into the present with the approach of the English passengers in 1857, and extends into the future in 1870.

These characters and many others come together in a storm of voices that vividly bring a past age to life. Full of dangerous humor, the narrative is a mesmerizing display of storytelling, combining wit, adventure, and harrowing historical detail.

Twenty-five years ago, a disillusioned young man set out on a walk across America. This is the book he wrote about that journey - a classic account of the reawakening of his faith in himself and his country.

"I started out searching for myself and my country," Peter Jenkins writes, "and found both." In this timeless classic, Jenkins describes how disillusionment with society in the 1970s drove him out onto the road on a walk across America.

His experiences remain as sharp and telling today as they were twenty-five years ago - from the timeless secrets of life, learned from a mountain-dwelling hermit, to the stir he caused by staying with a black family in North Carolina, to his hours of intense labor in Southern mills.

Many, many miles later, he learned lessons about his country and himself that resonate to this day - and will inspire a new generation to get out, hit the road and explore.

Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer travelled to a parallel universe called The Territories to save his mother and her Territories twinner from a premature and agonizing death that would have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is a retired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, WI. He has no recollection of his adventures in the Territories and was compelled to leave the police force when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken those memories.

When a series of gruesome murders occur in western Wisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decades earlier by a real-life madman named Albert Fish, the killer is dubbed The Fisherman and Jack's buddy, the local chief of police, begs Jack to help his inexperienced force find him. But is this merely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious and malignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causes Jack's inexplicable waking dreams, if that is what they are, of robins' eggs and red feathers? It's almost as if someone is trying to tell him something. As that message becomes increasingly impossible to ignore, Jack is drawn back to the Territories and to his own hidden past, where he may find the soul-strength to enter a terrifying house at the end of a deserted track of forest, there to encounter the obscene and ferocious evils sheltered within it.

Eckhart Tolle is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s most inspiring spiritual teachers, sharing the enlightenment he himself experienced after a startling personal transformation. His views go beyond any particular religion, doctrine, or guru.

This book extracts the essence from his teachings in The Power of Now, showing us how to free ourselves from “enslavement to the mind.” The aim is to be able to enter into and sustain an awakened state of consciousness throughout everyday life. Through meditations and simple techniques, Eckhart shows us how to quiet our thoughts, see the world in the present moment, and find a path to “a life of grace, ease, and lightness.”

It's September 2001 and Arthur Lakelady is a man beset by worries. It seems that his wife, Alys, is infatuated with the home renovator who is working on their new kitchen. His daughter, Gwen, is doing well at school, although with pass marks that often exceed 100%, he worries that her school doesn’t grasp the meaning of percentage. Meanwhile, his son, Lance, might never pass another exam ever again if he doesn’t soon give up sports.

These worries are soon put into perspective when Arthur’s Canadian employer is taken over by Americans, and they replace the local executives in an attempt to introduce their own initiatives. As the world changes around him and he is expected to lead a team at work, Arthur hires a young temp, Lydia, to help him. But Lydia only adds to his worry with her desire to get as up close and personal with him as possible.

And when the madness of the world spills over and thousands are killed in the World Trade Center attack, Arthur looks at the state of the planet and sees that it needs someone who can clear the confusion, make the complex simple, and package it into manageable pieces. It needs a diarist. And right now, the nobody who is Arthur Lakelady might one day become a somebody in the mold of Samuel Pepys.

A millennia-old prophecy was given when the Forbidden Ones were driven from Achar. And now, the Acharites witness its manifestation: Achar is under attack by an evil lord from the North, Gorgreal—his ice demons strike from the sky and kill hundreds of brave warriors in the blink of an eye. All Acharites believe the end is near.

One young woman, Faraday, betrothed of Duke Borneheld, learns that all she has been told about her people's history is untrue. While fleeing to safety from the dangerous land, Faraday rides with Axis, legendary leader of the Axe-Wielders—and hated half-brother of Borneheld—and a man Faraday secretly loves although it would be death to admit it. She embarks on a journey, which will change her life forever, in search of the true nature of her people.

This grand and heroic story tells the tale of one woman's plight to learn the truth of her people and change their hearts and their minds forever. She fights against oppressive forces to share this reality and will not desist until everyone knows... the truth of the Star Gate.

More than a half-century ago, the naturalist Farley Mowat was sent to investigate why wolves were killing arctic caribou. Mowat's account of the summer he lived in the frozen tundra alone—studying the wolf population and developing a deep affection for the wolves (who were of no threat to caribou or man)—is today celebrated as a classic of nature writing.

It is at once a tale of remarkable adventures and an indelible record of the myths and magic of wolves.

Jessica isn't your average teenager. Though nobody at her high school knows it, she's a published author. Her vampire novel, Tiger, Tiger, has just come out under the pen name Ash Night. Jessica often wishes she felt as comfortable with her classmates as she does among the vampires and witches of her fiction. She has always been treated as an outsider at Ramsa High.

But two new students have just arrived in Ramsa, and both want Jessica's attention. She has no patience with overly friendly Caryn, but she's instantly drawn to the handsome Alex, a cocky, mysterious boy who seems surprisingly familiar. If she didn't know better, she'd think Aubrey, the alluring villain from Tiger, Tiger, had just sprung to life. That's impossible, of course; Aubrey is a figment of her imagination. Or is he?

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Unhappy about his baby sister's illness and the chaos of moving into a dilapidated old house, Michael retreats to the garage and discovers a mysterious stranger. This being is something like a bird and something like an angel...

Michael was looking forward to moving into a new house. But now his baby sister is ill, his parents are frantic, and Doctor Death has come to call. Michael feels helpless. Then he steps into the crumbling garage. What is this thing beneath the spiders' webs and dead flies? A human being, or a strange kind of beast never before seen? The only person Michael can confide in is his new friend, Mina. Together, they carry the creature out into the light, and Michael's world changes forever...

Carmen got the jeans at a thrift shop. They didn’t look all that great: they were worn, dirty, and speckled with bleach. On the night before she and her friends part for the summer, Carmen decides to toss them. But Tibby says they’re great. She'd love to have them. Lena and Bridget also think they’re fabulous. Lena decides that they should all try them on. Whoever they fit best will get them. Nobody knows why, but the pants fit everyone perfectly. Even Carmen (who never thinks she looks good in anything) thinks she looks good in the pants. Over a few bags of cheese puffs, they decide to form a sisterhood and take the vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The next morning, they say good-bye. And then the journey of the pants — and the most memorable summer of their lives — begins.

With over 10 million copies in print, Madeleine L'Engle's Newbery Medal-winning classic, A Wrinkle in Time, along with its bestselling companions, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters, has enthralled and inspired readers of all ages. This newly designed boxed set features the stunning art of Peter Sis.

Seven stories of fantasy and fun by the fantastic Roald Dahl.

The Boy Who Talked With Animals - in which a stranded sea turtle and a small boy have more in common than meets the eye.

The Hitchhiker - proves that in a pinch, a professional pickpocket can be the perfect pal.

The Mildenhall Treasure - a true tale of fortune found and an opportunity lost.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - in which a modern-day Robin Hood brings joy to the hearts of orphans - and fear to the souls of casino owners around the world.

Make Way for Ducklings is a classic tale that has enchanted generations of readers. This delightful story follows a pair of Mallard ducks who decide to raise their family on an island in the lagoon of the Boston Public Garden, a charming park in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts. The story unfolds with Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings—Jack, Kack, Lack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack—navigating the bustling streets of Boston with a little help from the kind Boston police.

The book, awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1942, is celebrated for its unusual and stunning illustrations by Robert McCloskey, capturing both the humor and beauty of the duckling family's adventure. With its fine large pictures and wealth of detail, the story is as amusing as it is heartwarming.

This book is ideal for reading aloud and deserves a place of honor on every child's bookshelf. It captures the quaint charm of a family's search for the perfect home and is a testament to the enduring appeal of McCloskey's storytelling and artistry.

A laird trapped between centuries... Enchanted by a powerful spell, Highland laird Drustan MacKeltar slumbered for nearly five centuries hidden deep in a cave, until an unlikely savior awakened him. The enticing lass who dressed and spoke like no woman he’d ever known was from his distant future, where crumbled ruins were all that remained of his vanished world. Drustan knew he had to return to his own century if he was to save his people from a terrible fate. And he needed the bewitching woman by his side.

A woman changed forever in his arms... Gwen Cassidy had come to Scotland to shake up her humdrum life and, just maybe, meet a man. How could she have known that a tumble down a Highland ravine would send her plunging into an underground cavern — to land atop the most devastatingly seductive man she’d ever seen? Or that once he’d kissed her, he wouldn’t let her go? Bound to Drustan by a passion stronger than time, Gwen is swept back to sixteenth-century Scotland, where a treacherous enemy plots against them... and where a warrior with the power to change history will defy time itself for the woman he loves.

Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. As deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, he not only grieves for her and worries about their young son Jonah but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice. Then Miles meets Sarah Andrews, Jonah's second-grade teacher. A young woman recovering from a difficult divorce, Sarah moved to New Bern hoping to start over. Tentatively, Miles and Sarah reach out to each other...soon they are falling in love. But what neither realizes is that they are also bound together by a shocking secret, one that will force them to reexamine everything they believe in—including their love.

With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost.

Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.

To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home — the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek.

But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight...

Harry Dresden - Wizard

Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, or Other Entertainment.

Harry Dresden has faced some pretty terrifying foes during his career. Giant scorpions. Oversexed vampires. Psychotic werewolves. It comes with the territory when you're the only professional wizard in the Chicago-area phone book.

But in all Harry's years of supernatural sleuthing, he's never faced anything like this: The spirit world has gone postal. All over Chicago, ghosts are causing trouble - and not just of the door-slamming, boo-shouting variety. These ghosts are tormented, violent, and deadly. Someone - or something - is purposely stirring them up to wreak unearthly havoc. But why? And why do so many of the victims have ties to Harry? If Harry doesn't figure it out soon, he could wind up a ghost himself....

The Bottoms is narrated by Harry Collins, an old man who is obsessively reflecting on certain key experiences of his childhood. In 1933, the year that forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his family on a farm outside of Marvel Creek, Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms.

Harry's world changes forever when he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near his home. The woman, eventually identified as a local prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and mutilated. As Harry will soon discover, she is the first in a series of similar victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.

From his privileged position as the son of constable Jacob Collins, Harry watches the amateur investigation unfold. As more bodies surface, not all of them "colored," the mood of the local residents darkens. Racial tensions, never far from the surface, gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories.

With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains at large, continuing to threaten the safety and stability of the town.

Lansdale uses this murder investigation to open a window on an insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same time, he offers a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world.

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.

Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.

Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.

Precocious twelve-year-old Louisa Mae Cardinal lives in the hectic New York City of 1940 with her family. Then tragedy strikes--and Lou and her younger brother, Oz, must go with their invalid mother to live on their great-grandmother's farm in the Virginia mountains. Suddenly Lou finds herself growing up in a new landscape, making her first true friend, and experiencing adventures tragic, comic, and audacious.

When a dark, destructive force encroaches on her new home, her struggle will play out in a crowded Virginia courtroom...and determine the future of two children, an entire town, and the mountains they love.

The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression. "Little Tree" as his grandparents call him is shown how to hunt and survive in the mountains, to respect nature in the Cherokee Way, taking only what is needed, leaving the rest for nature to run its course. Little Tree also learns the often callous ways of white businessmen and tax collectors, and how Granpa, in hilarious vignettes, scares them away from his illegal attempts to enter the cash economy. Granma teaches Little Tree the joys of reading and education. But when Little Tree is taken away by whites for schooling, we learn of the cruelty meted out to Indian children in an attempt to assimilate them and of Little Tree's perception of the Anglo world and how it differs from the Cherokee Way. A classic of its era, and an enduring book for all ages, The Education of Little Tree has now been redesigned for this twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

"My parents suck ass. Banning me from the phone and restricting my computer privileges are the most tyrannical parental gestures I can think of. Don't they realize that Hope's the only one who keeps me sane? I don't see how things could get any worse."

When her best friend, Hope Weaver, moves away from Pineville, New Jersey, hyperobservant sixteen-year-old Jessica Darling is devastated. A fish out of water at school and a stranger at home, Jessica feels more lost than ever now that the only person with whom she could really communicate has gone.

How is she supposed to deal with the boy- and shopping-crazy girls at school, her dad's obsession with her track meets, her mother salivating over big sister Bethany's lavish wedding, and her nonexistent love life?

A fresh, funny, utterly compelling fiction debut by first-time novelist Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts is an insightful, true-to-life look at Jessica's predicament as she embarks on another year of teenage torment—from the dark days of Hope's departure through her months as a type-A personality turned insomniac to her completely mixed-up feelings about Marcus Flutie, the intelligent and mysterious "Dreg" who works his way into her heart.

In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as one of the most liberating books of its time. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.

By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays, now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

Deploying invulnerable twenty-fifth-century soldiers called Skins, Zantiu-Braun's corporate starships loot entire planets. But as the Skins invade bucolic Thallspring, Z-B's strategy is about to go awry, all because of:

Sgt. Lawrence Newton, a dreamer whose twenty years as a Skin have destroyed his hopes and desires; Denise Ebourn, a school teacher and resistance leader whose guerrilla tactics rival those of Che Guevara and George Washington; and Simon Roderick, the director who serves Z-B with a dedication that not even he himself can understand.

Grimly determined to steal, or protect, a mysterious treasure, the three players engage in a private war that will explode into unimaginable quests for personal grace...or galactic domination.

Gloria Whelan's National Book Award-winning novel chronicles the breathtaking story of a remarkable young woman who dares to defy fate. Like many girls her age in India, thirteen-year-old Koly faces her arranged marriage with hope and courage. But Koly's story takes a terrible turn when, in the wake of the ceremony, she discovers she's been horribly misled; her life has been sold for a dowry.

In prose both graceful and unflinching, this powerful novel relays the story of a rare young woman, who even when cast out into a brutal current of time-worn tradition, sets out to forge her own remarkable future. Inspired by a newspaper article about real teenage widows in India today, this universally acclaimed, best-selling novel, characterized by spare, lyrical language and remarkable detail, transports readers into the heart of a gripping tale of hope.

Koly's journey is a testament to the power of courage and hope, showing that fate can indeed be taken into one's own hands.

In a searing novel of love and loyalty, guilt and honor, the acclaimed author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Horse Whisperer gives his millions of readers another hero...

His name is Connor Ford and he falls like an angel of mercy from the sky, braving the flames to save the woman he loves but knows he cannot have. For Julia Bishop is the partner of his best friend and fellow “smoke jumper,” Ed Tully. Julia loves them both–until a fiery tragedy on Montana’s Snake Mountain forces her to choose between them, and burns a brand on all their hearts.

In the wake of the fire, Connor embarks on a harrowing journey to the edge of human experience, traveling the world’s worst wars and disasters to take photographs that find him fame but never happiness. Reckless of a life he no longer wants, again and again he dares death to take him, until another fateful day on another continent, he must walk through fire once more…

R.U.R.—written in 1920—garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word "Robot."

Mass-produced, efficient, and servile labor, Čapek's Robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat.

It's not until two robots fall in love and are christened "Adam" and "Eve" by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.

The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public.

Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

The Dhammapada is a revered collection of sayings of the Buddha, presented in verse form. It is one of the most widely read and well-known Buddhist scriptures. The original version is part of the Khuddaka Nikaya, a division of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.

The Buddhist scholar and commentator, Buddhaghosa, provides insights that each saying in this collection was made on different occasions, reflecting unique situations that arose during the life of the Buddha and his monastic community. His commentary, The Dhammapada Atthakatha, offers rich legends about the life and times of the Buddha.

This classic text encourages readers to reflect on their deepest nature and to live life in harmony with the profound understanding shared by the Buddha through these beautiful verses. It serves as a guide to offer insight and liberation, touching the seeds of understanding and love within us.

Ambition and jealousy all set to music. Devout court composer Antonio Salieri plots against his rival, the dissolute but supremely talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How far will Salieri go to achieve the fame that Mozart disregards?

This play features a full cast with performances by:

• Steven Brand as Baron van Swieten
• James Callis as Mozart
• Michael Emerson as Salieri
• Darren Richardson as Venticello 2
• Alan Shearman as Count Orsini-Rosenberg
• Mark Jude Sullivan as Venticello 1
• Simon Templeman as Joseph II
• Brian Tichnell as Count Johann Kilian Von Strack
• Jocelyn Towne as Constanze

Directed by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded in Los Angeles before a live audience at The James Bridges Theater, UCLA in September of 2016.

Dragonfly in Amber is the second book in the acclaimed Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, taking readers on a thrilling journey back to 18th-century Scotland. The story revolves around Claire Randall, who has kept her secrets for twenty years. Now, she is returning to the mist-shrouded hills of Scotland with her grown daughter, Brianna, to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth.

The narrative unfolds around the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones, a love that transcends the boundaries of time, and James Fraser, a gallant Scottish warrior who once drew Claire from the safety of her century to the perils of his own. As Claire's journey of self-discovery continues, she finds herself in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart, amidst a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising, and in a desperate fight to save both her child and the man she loves.

Flyy Girl is the bestselling urban classic novel about a young woman coming of age in the late 1980s. Tracy Ellison, a young knockout with tall hair and attitude, is living life as fast as she can. Motivated by the material world, she and her friends love and leave the young men who will do anything to get next to them.

It's only when the world of gratuitous sex threatens heartbreak that Tracy begins to examine her life, her goals, and her sexuality. This captivating tale, written with fluid narrative and contemporary dialect, captures the complete feel and sounds of the streets and is destined to become an urban classic.

In the land of Ingary, such things as spells, invisible cloaks, and seven-league boots were everyday things. The Witch of the Waste was another matter. After fifty years of quiet, it was rumored that the Witch was about to terrorize the country again. So when a moving black castle, blowing dark smoke from its four thin turrets, appeared on the horizon, everyone thought it was the Witch.

The castle, however, belonged to Wizard Howl, who, it was said, liked to suck the souls of young girls. The Hatter sisters--Sophie, Lettie, and Martha--and all the other girls were warned not to venture into the streets alone. But that was only the beginning. In this giant jigsaw puzzle of a fantasy, people and things are never quite what they seem. Destinies are intertwined, identities exchanged, lovers confused. The Witch has placed a spell on Howl. Does the clue to breaking it lie in a famous poem? And what will happen to Sophie Hatter when she enters Howl's castle?

Diana Wynne Jones's entrancing fantasy is filled with surprises at every turn, but when the final stormy duel between the Witch and the Wizard is finished, all the pieces fall magically into place.

Voyager, the third book in Diana Gabaldon's acclaimed Outlander saga, continues the enthralling story of Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser that began with the now-classic novel Outlander and continued in Dragonfly in Amber. Sweeping us from the battlefields of eighteenth-century Scotland to the West Indies, Gabaldon weaves magic once again in an exhilarating and utterly unforgettable novel.

He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances. Jamie Fraser is, alas, not dead—but he is in hell. Waking among the fallen on Culloden Field, he is concerned neither for his men nor his wounds but for his wife and their unborn child. "Lord, he prayed passionately, that she may be safe. She and the child." It's a prayer he'll utter many times over the next twenty years, never knowing but always hoping that Claire made it through the standing stones, back to the safety of her own time.

Safe she is, but believing Jamie gone forever, she's obliged to live without a heart, her only comfort their daughter, Brianna. But now, their daughter grown, she discovers that Jamie survived, and a fateful decision lies before her: Stay with her beloved daughter, or go back to search Scotland's dangerous past for the man who was her heart and soul, sustained only by the hope that they will still know each other if she finds him.

The small town of Paradise, Pennsylvania, is a jewel in Lancaster County - known for its picture-postcard landscapes and bucolic lifestyle. But that peace is shattered by the discovery of a dead infant in the barn of an Amish farmer. A police investigation quickly leads to two startling disclosures: the newborn's mother is an unmarried Amish woman, eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher. And the infant did not die of natural causes.

Although Katie denies the medical proof that she gave birth to the child, circumstantial evidence leads to her arrest for the murder of her baby. One hundred miles away, Philadelphia defense attorney Ellie Hathaway has achieved an enviable, high-profile career. But her latest court victory has set the sands shifting beneath her. Single at thirty-nine and unsatisfied with her relationship, Ellie doesn't look back when she turns down her chance to make partner and takes off for an open-ended stay at her great-aunt's home in Paradise.

Fate brings her to Katie Fisher. Suddenly, Ellie sees the chance to defend a client who truly needs her, not just one who can afford her. But taking on this case challenges Ellie in more ways than one. She finds herself not only in a clash of wills with a client who does not want to be defended but also in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels of justice are markedly different from her own. Immersing herself in Katie Fisher's life -- and in a world founded on faith, humility, duty, and honesty -- Ellie begins to understand the pressures and sacrifices of those who to live plain. As she peels away the layers of fact and fantasy, Ellie calls on an old friend for guidance. Now, just as this man from Ellie's past reenters her life, she must uncover the truth about a complex case, a tragic loss, the bonds of love -- and her own deepest fears and desires.

After stumbling across a haunted go board, Hikaru Shindo discovers that the spirit of a master player named Fujiwara-no-Sai has taken up residence in his consciousness. Sai awakens in Hikaru an untapped genius for the game, and soon the schoolboy is chasing his own dream--defeating the famed go prodigy Akira Toya!

Hikaru and Sai are both scheduled for matches with their greatest rivals--Akira Toya and his father, Toya Meijin. How will Sai play without revealing his secret identity? And will Akira's father stand in the way of Hikaru's long anticipated rematch with his son? The suspense is getting unbearable!

On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite US soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded.

Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Mark Bowden’s minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written—a true story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.

In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, her troubled sister, and her husband.

Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning.

It's bad enough being new on the job, but Teppic hasn't a clue as to what a pharaoh is supposed to do. After all, he's been trained at Ankh-Morpork's famed assassins' school, across the sea from the Kingdom of the Sun. First, there's the monumental task of building a suitable resting place for Dad -- a pyramid to end all pyramids. Then there are the myriad administrative duties, such as dealing with mad priests, sacred crocodiles, and marching mummies. And to top it all off, the adolescent pharaoh discovers deceit, betrayal -- not to mention a headstrong handmaiden -- at the heart of his realm.

A man broken in body and spirit, Cazaril, has returned to the noble household he once served as page, and is named, to his great surprise, as the secretary-tutor to the beautiful, strong-willed sister of the impetuous boy who is next in line to rule. It is an assignment Cazaril dreads, for it will ultimately lead him to the place he fears most, the royal court of Cardegoss, where the powerful enemies, who once placed him in chains, now occupy lofty positions.

In addition to the traitorous intrigues of villains, Cazaril and the Royesse Iselle, are faced with a sinister curse that hangs like a sword over the entire blighted House of Chalion and all who stand in their circle. Only by employing the darkest, most forbidden of magics, can Cazaril hope to protect his royal charge—an act that will mark the loyal, damaged servant as a tool of the miraculous, and trap him, flesh and soul, in a maze of demonic paradox, damnation, and death.

On a brisk autumn day, a twelve-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America--and into another realm.

One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mother's life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest begin...

Accidents happen. With ghostly consequences, if you're Susannah Simon. The RLS Angels are out for blood, and only Suze can stop them - since she's the only one who can see them. The four ghostly teenagers died in a terrible car accident, for which they blame Suze's classmate Michael... and they'll stop at nothing until he's joined them in the realm of the dead.

As Suze desperately fends off each attempt on Michael's life, she finds she can relate to the Angels' fury. Because their deaths turn out not to have been accidental at all. And their killer is only too willing to strike again.

The Bridge is a darkly brilliant novel of self-discovery, residing on the cutting edge of experimental fiction. It is set on a mysterious, world-spanning structure known only as the Bridge, where everyone seems to live from nowhere to nowhere.

The protagonist, John Orr, is rescued from the sea with no memory or personality. All he knows is the Bridge, his persistent dreams of war, and his desire for Chief Engineer Arrol's provocative daughter, Abberlaine.

As Orr explores this extraordinary world, he experiences outrageous contrasts and elegant absurdities. By day, he navigates the Bridge; by night, he dreams of desperate men driving sealed carriages across barren mountains, illiterate barbarians storming enchanted towers, and broken men walking endlessly over bridges.

This novel is frequently hilarious and consistently disturbing, challenging the boundaries between reality and dreams, day and night.