In these collected stories of man against the wilderness, London lays claim to the title of greatest outdoor adventure writer of all time.Contents:- To build a fire- Love of life- Chinago- Told in the drooling ward- The Mexican- War- South of the slot- Water baby- All Gold Canyon- Koolau the leper- Apostate- Mauki- An Odyssey of the north- A piece of steak- Strength of the strong- Red one- Wit or Porportuk- God of his fathers- In a far country- To the man on trail- White silence- League of the old men- Wisdom of the trail- Batard

    Our goal is to provide the best collections in the marketplace.The Anne of Green Gables Collection includes 6 novels chronicling the story of Anne Shirley. Anne of Green Gables Anne of Avonlea Anne of the Island Anne’s House of Dreams Rainbow Valley Rilla of Ingleside

    In The Last Trail, a woman is kidnapped from Fort Henry by a band of renegades and hostile Ohio Valley Indians, and Lewis Wetzel and Jonathan Zane set out in pursuit, with little hope of survival. Finally, in The Spirit of the Border, Lewis Wetzel must single-handedly save Fort Henry, armed only with his long rifle and knife.

    Remarkably, his driver left him off at his home an hour later where he consumed a scotch and several sandwiches. Something is obviously amiss. Add an allegedly forged will, the hint of an old family scandal, and a former secretary of the murdered man whose motives are none too clear, and the mystery only deepens. J. S. Fletcher has put together an intriguing puzzle with plenty of twists and turns in . . . The Herapath Property!

    In these fourteen stories, Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, sport and sportsmanship. In "Banal Story," Hemingway offers a lasting tribute to the famed matador Maera. "In Another Country" tells of an Italian major recovering from war wounds as he mourns the untimely death of his wife. "The Killers" is the hard-edged story about two Chicago gunmen and their potential victim. Nick Adams makes an appearance in "Ten Indians," in which he is presumably betrayed by his Indian girlfriend, Prudence. And "Hills Like White Elephants" is a young couple's subtle, heartwrenching discussion of abortion. Pared down, gritty, and subtly expressive, these stories show the young Hemingway emerging as America's finest short story writer.

    The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in "Expedition," fans will be thrilled to find to see a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precursor story to Fight Club.Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant; these stories represent everything readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk. They have all the impact of a sharp blow to the solar plexus, with considerable collateral damage to the funny bone.

    Making a selection is just the beginning - these ladies are more than mere images, and getting to know them is the really fun part. But just like most things, looks can be deceiving. And while the guys who take this plunge think they're in for the adventure of a lifetime, some of them are headed for their worst nightmare.Featuring five dramatically different voices, these stories travel the tantalizing crossroads between romance and cyberspace.

    Le Guin, an icon in American literature, collected for the first time in one breathtaking volume.Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud Awards. She has had her work collected over the years, but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works as represented in the wonderful The Found and the Lost.CONTENT "Vaster Than Empires And More Slow" "Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight" "Hernes" by Ursula K. Le Guin "The Matter Of Seggri" "Another Story Or A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea" "Forgiveness Day" "A Man Of The People" "A Woman’s Liberation" "Old Music And The Slave Women" "The Finder" "On The High Marsh" "Dragonfly" "Paradises Lost"This collection is a literary treasure chest that belongs in every home library.

    The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

    But he does have the companionship of his son, who supports him in his dreams of success as an inventor.As Christmas draws near, their spirits are low--until the two begin working together on a model of a city, built with simple scraps, that leads them to a new place of hope . . .This tale, first published in 1907, has become a cherished classic--and makes for a wonderful holiday read about life's truest gifts.

    Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.

    In 1962, 'The Fine White Mist of Winter, ' composed when the author was 19 years old, appeared in The Literary Review and was selected for both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories of that year.By the north gate: Edge of the world ; The fine white mist of winter --Upon the sweeping flood, 1966: First views of the enemy ; At the seminary ; What death with love should have to do ; Upon the sweeping flood --The wheel of love: In the region of ice ; Where are you going, where have you been? ; Unmailed, unwritten letters ; Accomplished desires ; How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again ; Four summers --Marriages and infidelities: Love and death ; By the river ; Did you ever slip on red blood? ; The lady with the pet dog ; The turn of the screw ; The dead --The goddess and other women: Concerning the case of Bobby T. ; In the warehouse ; Small avalanches --Night-side: The widows ; The translation ; Bloodstains ; Daisy --Uncollected: The molesters ; Silkie.

     As usual, Maupin’s tone is both bittersweet and achingly funny in this tale of a post-catastrophic San Francisco and a young man’s resilient love for his mother. Cover Design by Darryl Vance

    While there have been exceptions, many Oprah authors are no more writer's writers than Kenny G is a saxophonist's saxophonist.The best way to find the hottest, most influential writers writing would be (1) to read every issue of every magazine that publishes new fiction, and (2) to read every good book that comes out. Which would work fine if you were Burgess Meredith in that episode of "The Twilight Zone" where everyone in the world disappears except this bookish guy who's left alone -- o, lovely briar patch -- inside a library. (Six words of advice: Take good care of your glasses.) Absent that, what do you do?I've said it before (in this very space), and I'll say it again: The best possible way to keep tabs on what's up with North American fiction is to buy, year in and year out, each year's volume of The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Both collections have been around for more than 80 years, have had their ups (mostly artistic) and downs (mostly commercial), but are both currently enjoying commercial heydays. During the 1970s, BASS's sales sank to a series-threatening 7,000 copies a year, before it hit on some bright ideas that saved it. Beginning in 1978, instead of one editor choosing everything himself (Edward O'Brien, from 1915 to 1940) or herself (Martha Foley, from 1941 to 1977), a series editor winnowed the 3,000 or so published stories each year down to a stack of 120 (a task, says current series editor Katrina Kenison that has become much harder the past couple years than it was when she began in 1991, when she had to scrape to find 120 she thought were terrific). Then a guest editor picks 20 stories to include (this year's, Amy Tan, seems to have done an especially able job and wrote a smart and delightful introduction). Beginning in 1983 (with an Anne Tyler-edited edition that was one of the series's strongest), BASS began to be published simultaneously in both hardback and paperback editions. And in 1987, it began to feature short comments by the writers, talking about their stories. BASS (better selling than O. Henry in recent years) began consistently to sell over 100,000 copies a year.O. HENRY's nadir came more recently. Coinciding with BASS's resurgence, O. Henry, in the 1980s, became the American short story's poor, quirky stepchild. (Not in a good way.) But it received a major overhaul in 1997. A single editor (now Larry Dark) still, as has typically been the case, picks the 20 stories to include. But now, O. Henry also includes a list of 50 short-listed stories (with brief synopses) and comments by the authors of each year's anointed 20. Furthermore, three guest jurors (this year, Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, and Lorrie Moore), pick from those 20 a first, second, and third prize. Sales have zoomed.You could read this year's editions of these two indispensable annuals and -- without breaking a sweat (with no effort more strenuous than feeling the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, though I did, as did Tan, read most of these stories on a StairMaster) -- glean this exemplary shorthand of whom you should be reading, circa 1998-1999.Most Valuable Player: Alice Munro. Why (aside from the fact that she's the greatest living writer in English): Her story, "Save the Reaper," certainly the best short story I read last year, is one of only two included in both the 1999 BASS and O. Henry. In awarding it third prize in O. HENRY, Moore (whose "People Like That Are the Only People Here" was the only story included in both the 1998 BASS and O. Henry) discerns the story's parallels not only with Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" but also with the myths of Eros, Demeter, and Hermes. Moore writes that, in contrast to the O'Connor masterpiece, "[a]s always in the fictional world of Munro, a character's fate pivots not on the penitential moment but on the erotic one."Neither annual allows any writer to be represented by more than one story (a custom that became a rule when both Munro and Richard Bausch landed two gems apiece in BASS 1990), but Munro's "Cortes Island" is short-listed for both and "Before the Change" is short-listed in O. Henry. All three stories are collected in her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book The Love of a Good Woman.MVP Runners-Up: Annie Proulx, Pam Houston, Lorrie Moore.Why: All three are included in both volumes. Proulx's story "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is included in BASS and short-listed in O. Henry, "The Mud Below" in O. Henry and short-listed in BASS. Both are included in Proulx's collection Close Range, which includes two other stories honored in previous years ("Brokeback Mountain" and "The Half-Skinned Steer") and, even in an amazing year for short story collections, is one of the year's most talked-about books.Houston is the year's most-cited story writer, with four: "Cataract" is included in O. Henry; "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" is included BASS; two other stories ("Then You Get Up and Have Breakfast" and "Three Lessons in Amazon Biology") are short-listed in BASS. All are included in her collection Waltzing the Cat.In addition to serving as an O. Henry juror, Moore has a story, "Real Estate," included in BASS, and her story "Lucky Ducks" is short-listed there. Both are from the exquisite Birds of America.Rookie of the Year: Jhumpa Lahiri.Why: Her funny, gentle, heartbreaking story "Interpreter of Maladies" -- about a nonjudgmental part-time translator/part-time cabdriver in India, who takes an American family sightseeing, gets a decorous crush on the woman, and leads the children into endangerment at the hands of hanuman monkeys -- is the only other story in both volumes. Although Lahiri's work has appeared in The New Yorker, this story originally ran in The Agni Review -- a good journal, but one you may not regularly read. Both annuals had picked it for inclusion before the publication of Lahiri's first book, also called Interpreter of Maladies. The book is, justly, one of the sleeper successes of the year."Our record of discovery is pretty good," says BASS's Kenison. "Chances are, year in and year out, you'll pick up a volume and read a story by someone you've never heard of. The next year, that writer's everywhere you look."This year, that's Lahiri.Also receiving votes are these 18 writers, an intriguing mix of veterans and new voices, also either short-listed or included in both volumes (and if you want to be the savviest reader on your block, you'll read more of these people's work): Poe Ballantine, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Michael Byers, Kiana Davenport, Chitra Divakaruni, Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill, Tim Gautreaux (whose "The Piano Tuner," included in BASS and collected in his new book, Welding with Children, is my favorite non-Munro story in either book), Heidi Julavitz, Sheila Kohler, David Long, Steven Millhauser, Kent Nelson, Cynthia Ozick, Melissa Pritchard, John Updike (he's very good), David Foster Wallace (he's very smart), Joy Williams.—Mark Winegardner

     Fresh from Duck Soup (1933), Julius, Leonard, Arthur and Herbert Marx - or as the world knows them, Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo - are transported by a freak electrical storm to Nacogdoches, Texas in the year 1826. Landing in the midst of the Fredonian Rebellion (the first attempt by settlers in Texas to secede from Mexico) and into the company of the only other Jewish person in town, they are in deep dreck. Falling in with Stephen F. Austin and inadvertently filling his head with knowledge of what is to come, our heroes risk tampering with the future of Texas, and perhaps the entire U.S.A., in their quest to return to their own time. Will they find their way back? Or will they be doomed to live out their lives without indoor plumbing?