New Arrivals
Bedtime Stories edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
MVR 300
As Scheherezade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller’s art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire. In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between waking and dreaming. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest,” from Washington Irving’s comical “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to Ursula K....
Cat Stories edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
MVR 300
Two centuries of literary homages to the fascinating feline: stories by writers of every stripe—from P.G. Wodehouse to Doris Lessing, from Damon Runyon to Steven Millhauser.The essential unknowableness of cats has inspired many flights of fancy: Italo Calvino’s secret city of cats in “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” the disappearing feline in Ursula K. Le Guin’s mind-twisting “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser’s “Cat ’n’ Mouse.” Cats flaunt their superiority in Angela Carter’s bawdy retelling of “Puss-in-Boots” and in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The King of the Cats,” in which two impossibly suave foreigners are...
Detective Stories edited by Peter Washington
MVR 300
Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Ian Rankin, this collection works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s to the genre’s source in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the brilliant and eccentric (Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin) to the deceptively unlikely (G. K. Chesterton’s humble priest, Father Brown; and Agatha Christie’s tweedy spinster, Miss Marple); from the tough-guy private eyes created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to accidental bystanders, such as the perceptive neighbors...
Fishing Stories edited by Henry Hughes
MVR 300
Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the rollicking humor of Rudyard Kipling’s “On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art” and the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s “The Wer-Trout” to the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.”Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s “Two Friends,” Jimmy Carter’s “Fishing with My Daddy,” and an excerpt from Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s “The River God,”...
Ghost Stories edited by Peter Washington
MVR 300
The chilling classic stories gathered here offer a remarkable variety of approaches to the theme of haunting. Revenge comes from beyond the grave in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher,” while visions of the dead come between the living in Henry James’s “The Friends of the Friends.” P. G. Wodehouse gives us a farcical take on the haunted house in “Honeysuckle Cottage,” and in L. P. Hartley’s “W.S.,” a writer is fatally stalked by his own aggrieved creation. Here are ghosts of every stripe and intent in stories from writers as varied as Elizabeth Bowen and Jorge Luis Borges, Eudora Welty...
London Stories edited by Jerry White
MVR 300
London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place. Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare’s day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such...
Love Stories edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
MVR 300
An anthology of literary love stories—in a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics edition—perfect for Valentine’s Day.Here are nineteen stories from a rich array of writers. The objects of passion in these stories range from a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting “Dead Mabelle” and a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata’s “Immortality” to a heart surgeon in Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the despair of a husband and wife sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a couple brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias...
Paris Stories edited by Shaun Whiteside
MVR 300
Paris Stories gathers classic stories about the City of Light by a wide range of writers across four centuries. Perhaps no other European city has so captured the imagination of the artistically and romantically minded. Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores, and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eyewitness account of the horrors and glories of the French Revolution. Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola offer fascinating portraits of the growing metropolis’s teeming humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle its glittering literary circles; and Huysmans describes a memorable evening at the Folies...
Stories of the Sea edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
MVR 300
A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless waters. Classic adventures stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith, and J. G. Ballard. Robert Olen Butler explores the memories of a Titanic victim who has become part of the sea that swallowed him; Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” summons something primeval and lonely from the ocean...
American Political Speeches (Penguin Civic Classics) by Terry Golway
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.American Political Speeches includes the best American rhetoric from inside and outside the White House. Some of the greatest words spoken in American history have come from men and women who lacked the biggest...
Common Sense (Penguin Civic Classics) by Thomas Paine
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens. Common Sense is the book that created the modern United States, as Paine’s incendiary call for Americans to revolt against British rule converted millions to the cause of independence and set out...
The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution (Penguin Civic Classics) by Richard Beeman
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens. In one portable volume, with accessible annotations and modernizing commentary throughout, Richard Beeman presents The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Beeman has created a fascinating apparatus for understanding the most...
The Federalist Papers (Penguin Civic Classics) by Alexander Hamilton
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens. Written at a time when furious arguments were raging about the best way to govern America, The Federalist Papers had the immediate practical aim of persuading New Yorkers to accept the newly...
Lincoln Speeches (Penguin Civic Classics) by Abraham Lincoln
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his...
Supreme Court Decisions (Penguin Civic Classics) edited by Richard Beeman
MVR 150
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. These slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.The Supreme Court is one of America's leading expositors of and participants in debates about American values. Legal expert Jay M. Feinman introduces and selects some of the most important Supreme Court Decisions...
Words
A Story To Be Remembered and Treasured
This story revolves around two women, Mariam and Laila, born 20 years apart, but whose lives are intertwined through the events of the novel.
Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant named Jalil who has 3 wives and 9 “legitimate” children. Mariam’s mother, Nana, was a servant...
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Portable Magic That Mends Ties
Renowned American author Stephen King describes books as uniquely portable magic. I certainly agree.
Books are magic that you can take anywhere you wish to. It takes you to this magical universe where you...
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