In 1948 six-year-old Austen Kittredge III leaves his widowed father to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm in the township of Lost Nation. Escapades at the county fair, doings at the annual family reunion and Shakespeare performance, and conflicts at the one-room schoolhouse are all recounted lovingly in this enchanting coming-of-age story filled with luminous memories and the deepest of childhood secrets, as a boy is molded into a man.

    In FUNNY BOY we follow the life of the family through Arjie's eyes, as he comes to terms both with his own homosexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives. In the north of Sri Lanka there is a war going on between the army and the Tamil Tigers, and gradually it begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. Written in clear, simple prose, Syam Selvadurai's first novel is masterly in its mingling of the personal and political.

    From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling.

    Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure." Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, "In Youth Is Pleasure."

    a hideous, flesh-eating creature - part snake, part earthbound demon - that feasted on the blood of innocent children in the cold black heart of the Tennessee backwoods. But ten-year-old Jeb Sweeny knows the horrible stories are true. His best friend Mandy just up and disappeared. He also knows that no one has ever had the courage to go after the monster and put an end to its raging, bestial hunger. Until now. But Evil is well guarded. And for young Jeb Sweeny, who is about to cross over into the forbidden land of Fear County and the lair of the unknown, passage through the gates of Hell comes with a terrible price. Everlasting...FEAR!

    . . Highly recommended." -- Small Press ReviewA memoir of race and education, this is the story of a girl who grew up and out of the Cleveland projects in the 1960s and '70s.While growing up in Cleveland, young Charlise Lyles experienced turbulent events including race riots and a neighborhood murder. Yet she was inspired to appreciate literature at a young age, and she spent her days reading--and also often searching for the estranged father who taught her that love of learning.Despite starting in the "slow class" at an aging school on Cleveland's east side, Lyles had a thirst for knowledge and drive for success that would open a door to new opportunities. Granted a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in a wealthy suburb, the vibrant teenager finds herself presented with a bewildering set of new challenges--and a new direction in life.

    Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eighth-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, artistic, and unimpressed by adult authority. When Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, their collaborative comic book depicting Blessed Heart's nuns and priests gleefully breaking the seventh commandment, falls into the hands of the principal, the boys, certain that their parents will be informed, conspire to create an audacious diversion. Woven into the details of the boys' preparations for the stunt are touching, hilarious renderings of the school day routine and the initiatory rites of male adolescence, from the first serious kiss to the first serious hangover.

    The Zig Zag Kid is written in a more optimistic vein, and recounts thirteen-year-old Nonny Feuerberg's picturesque journey into adulthood. As Nonny's Bar Mitzvah year trip turns into an amazing adventure, he not only finds himself befriending a notorious criminal, and a great actress, but confronts the great mystery of his own identity.With wit and humor, The Zig Zag Kid is a novel that explores the most fundamental questions of good and evil and speaks directly to both adults and teenagers.

    Without warning, Nyle's modest world fills with protective masks, evacuations, contaminated food, disruptions, and mistrust.Nyle adjusts to the changes. As long as the fallout continues blowing to the East, Nyle, Gran, and the farm can go on. But into this uncertain haven stumble Ezra Trent and his mother, "refugees" from the heart of the accident, who take temporary shelter in the back bedroom of Nyle's house.The back bedroom is the dying room: It took her mother when Nyle was six; it stole away her grandfather just two years ago. Now Ezra is back there and Nyle doesn't want to open her heart to him. Too many times she's let people in, only to have them desert her.Karen Hesse's voice and vision are grounded in truth; she takes on a nearly unharnessable subject, contains it, and makes it resonate with honesty. Part love story, part coming of age, this is a tour de force by a gifted writer.

    Both threaten the predictable sameness of this rural, tightly knit community. And both provide irresistible temptation for thirteen-year-old Bekkah Rich, who is willing to risk hell fire in her efforts to spy on the newcomers. But then her best friend's baby sister disappears, surrounding Bekkah in a web of kidnapping and murder. Suddenly, summertime antics become deadly serious, and those who were once a curiosity are now tainted with evil.

    Writing a handbook for waitresses called The Book of Service, a compendium of lessons learned over 30 years at the Mexican restaurant El Farol, Soveida reflects on her own service in life, the interconnected lives of work and family, and the role of women in machismo culture. Evoking a rich chorus of Latino voices and a retinue of wayward husbands and lovers, estranged parents, and lovelorn managers, Soveida will learn how to celebrate her true vocation, her true love, and, ultimately, her true self.

    She is fearless, willing to say anything that comes into her mind, and everything about her is messy and a little off. It is love at first sight for Finn, but it will be almost a decade before he is ready to admit it. In graceful and seamless prose, Harry Gauley captures the world of a close-knit urban community and a way of life that exists no more.

    In 1929, due to mysterious family circumstances, Minyon is given up by her grandmother to the employment of Ariadne Fleming, a white madam in the famously elegant brothel called Hazelhedge. At the age of fourteen, she becomes a pair of eyes and hands, watching and working almost invisibly in a world where men and women leave their inhibition, and their pasts, at the door. As Minyon grows up in the household with other black people who provide behind-the-scenes support of Hazelhedge, she cannot escape her haunting childhood memories. Even while bearing witness to the events unfolding around her, Minyon seeks to find her place in the world, and her pace within herself.

    His adventure is a joyous testament to the resiliency and implicit goodness of the human spirit.

    From the landscape of her memory, Danielle Fillian paints a sensitive and wise family portrait of summers filled with fly-fishing, swimming, water-skiing, new friendships, and a deepening first love. But with the intrusion of the Vietnam War and the rumblings of the civil rights movement growing steadily nearer, this sheltered vacation community is forced to acknowledge the harsh realities of the wider world.

    Marie, the only black girl in the eighth grade willing to befriend her white classmate Lena, discovers that Lena's father is doing horrible things to her in private.

    Determined to be herself, not the "perfect" girl her mother hopes for, Julia chooses to live with her grandmother and her divorced father in a little town in the Cascade Mountains.But tiny Moon Valley lacks the one thing Julia desperately craves: a good music teacher. When a girl dressed in white appears among the cattails, singing Puccini arias in a haunting voice, Julia knows she must meet her and find out where she studies. But the girl always manages to slip away and vanish among the trees. There are hints that the people of Moon Valley may have the answer to the mystery, and surely Luke Sutherland, Julia's silent, blue-eyed neighbor, knows more about this elusive person than he will admit.With her latest novel, Cattail Moon, award-winning Jean Thesman has created a romance, a mystery, and an absorbing story of a young girl who is learning to claim her decisions and choices as her own.

    Caleb's adventures take him through Civil War battles, buffalo hunts, Indian wars and barroom shoot-outs. On his way he meets:Snake Woman--the Comanche slave woman who kidnaps him as a child in an attempt to regain her rightful place in the tribe.Kicking Dog--the renegade Arapaho who rampages through the West scalping victims from Texas to Montana.Marisol--the Mexican beauty who bears Caleb's children and wins his love.

    Olivia, almost fifteen, feels like a piece of unwanted baggage left over from her parents' broken marriage. Daddy is about to marry one of his former students, who is young enough to be his daughter; Mummy's men friends sometimes stay the night. Neither of them has room for her any more, and she feels a burden to everyone she loves. Then Nick enters her life: Nick, her mother's new lover, an amoral, street-wise photographer with an insolent, assessing gaze. Nick violates the sanctuary of Olivia's home by moving in with her mother, and before long he has violated Olivia as well, teaching her the meaning of desire. Hopelessly addicted to him, she comes at last to a shocking solution which will change forever her life and the lives of those who have denied her love.