This anthology of unabridged short stories represents some of the most significant works from the most influential American authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included are Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Mermaids by Louisa May Alcott, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain, An Occurrence at Owl Cree...

These ten treasured stories from the most influential authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic, oral qualities. The following stories are included in this collection:“The One-Million-Pound Bank Note” by Mark Twain“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain“A Visit to Niagara” by Mark Twain“Mysterious Visit” by Mark Twain“The Blue Hotel” by Stephen ...

The sun shines on Tom Sawyer. The idealized childhood of this fictional hero, based on Mark Twain’s own early life along the banks of the Mississippi, is filled with robust good humor and high-spirited adventures. Yet there is also an in-depth experience of the central South of the 1840s—its dialects, superstitions, and social values. While romping through fun-filled fantasy, Tom Sawyer shows how morally complicated real life can be.This reading of Tom Sawyer is especially...

The Light in the Piazza takes place in Italy in the summer of 1953. Margaret Johnson and her beautiful, twenty-six-year-old daughter, Clara, are touring the Tuscan countryside. While sightseeing, Clara meets a good-looking young Italian man, Fabrizio, and quickly embarks on a whirlwind romance with him, despite her mother’s stern disapproval.Margaret, extremely protective of her daughter, attempts to keep Clara and Fabrizio apart, not only because of the cultural differences betwee...

The beloved #1 Essence bestselling authors of Tryin' to Sleep in the Bed You Made now deliver a novel in which you'll meet their most unforgettable characters.Carmen, Jewel, and Regina could not be more different. When they meet as freshmen at Columbia University, they are at a crossroad, and each is pretty confident that a friendship among them isn't in the cards. Jewel is Hollywood royalty. As the teenage star of the television show Daddy's Girl, her fa...

Madeline Dare, a tough-talking, shotgun-toting ex-debutante, is not your average detective. Then again, not much about her life is what she expected. Born of old money into high society, she married into a Syracuse farming family and a bottom-of-the-food-chain job writing puff pieces for the local newspaper. Her emotional barometer these days ranges from dry irony to whining exasperation.Then Madeline discovers mysterious circumstances linking her favorite cousin to a twenty-year-o...

Time Pieces is a quietly beautiful coming-of-age story from a master storyteller.Eleven-year-old Valena, her family, and dog live in rural Ohio, where she and her cousin Melinda share experiences that include seeing the aurora borealis, surviving a tornado, and going to an amazing circus.Yet Valena lives in both the present and the past as she struggles with racism in her daily life and listens to and learns from her mother’s tales of her family’s proud history. Moving back...

The most dangerous magical object in the history of the world waits quietly in the treasury of a decaying Arabian palace. It knows your name and home and history and fate: it knows the past and future of the entire human race. It is a carpet, an impossible, dazzling carpet, and though a glance at it can drive a man mad, many will risk their lives to look into its pattern and discover their destinies.And when the carpet is stolen, it is up to young King Walid to recover it. Walid be...

Former Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx brings her clever, deadpan humor to this addictively readable novel about one woman's comic obsession with her first boyfriend.A neurotic young graduate student looking for distraction from her doomed thesis is inexplicably swept off her feet by a narcissistic philosophy professor. The obsession continues even after he has dumped her for someone even needier and she has given up on school and become a television writer. Meeti...

Deemed "essential" in the canon of American literature, this audiobook masterpiece performed in its entirety by a full cast of fifty makes the classic accessible to everyone.From a cemetery in a fictional mid-American town, the dead speak the truths about their lives. Some speak of hardships and sordid affairs, while others speak of their simple, honest, happy lives. Some are elderly and others are youthful or children, but mortality has claimed them all. Their voices reach us deep...

Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, set a century apart.Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by marriage to a doctor whose care has both nourished and imprisoned her. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes through their devastating and ecstatic affair.A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia tells this story to Jerome McNaughton, a young artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body unlocks a secret in his ow...

Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard educated, African American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.For Windsor, this is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the source of it, she embarks on a journey into her o...