Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away by a figure who claims to come...

Many sources of varying degrees of certainty claim that once upon meeting with the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Abraham Lincoln allegedly uttered the phrase: 'This little lady started a great war.' The novel of the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe very quickly gained worldwide fame and recognition. Written in the nineteenth-century sentimental style of 'female prose,' this book nonetheless...

The work of the famous English writer Jane Austen, the author of elegant and witty novels PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, MANSFIELD-PARK, EMMA, has had a significant impact on the development of English prose of the XIX-XX centuries and has been enjoying increasing popularity among readers for almost two hundred years. This publication publishes the novel SENSE AND SENSITIVITY, known worldwide for its...

Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off King’s Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robert’s name. There his family dwells in peace and comfort: his proud wife, Catelyn; his sons Robb, Brandon, and Rickon; his daughters Sansa and Arya; and his bastard son, Jon Snow. Far to...

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When...

The Witcher returns in this action-packed sequel to The Tower of Swallows, in the New York Times best-selling series that inspired The Witcher video games. After walking through the portal in the Tower of Swallows while narrowly escaping death, Ciri finds herself in a completely different world...an Elven world. She is trapped, with no way out. Time does not seem to exist, and there are no...

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to...

The sand-blasted world of Arrakis has become green, watered, and fertile. Old Paul Atreides, who led the desert Fremen to political and religious domination of the galaxy, is gone. But for the children of Dune, the very blossoming of their land contains the seeds of its own destruction. The altered climate is destroying the giant sandworms, and this in turn is disastrous for the planet's...

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared - 57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski....

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's...

'A poet in Russia is more than a poet' - these winged lines from the poem 'Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station' by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko, the famous poet of the 'sixties', could become an epigraph to his work. A rebel, a dreamer, an orator and a tribune, he praised the poetry that rushed 'into the attack of the streets', and was one of those whose creativity was a breath of freedom...

'There was a hole in the ground, and a hobbit lived in the hole.' These words were written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien on the back of a school exam paper he was checking one hot summer day. And who would have thought that it was from them, like from a magic seed, that one of the most famous works of world literature would grow. This is a fairy tale that captivated both children and adults,...