These were among the earliest versions of some of our most familiar fairy tales ("Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Puss in Boots," and "Tom Thumb") and are still among the few classic re-tellings of these perennial stories.In addition to the five well-known tales listed above, Perrault tells three others that are sure to delight any child or adult: "The Fairies," a short and very simple tale of two sisters, one sweet and one spiteful; "Ricky of the Tuft," a very unusual story of a brilliant but ugly prince and a beautiful but stupid princess; and "Blue Beard," a suspense story perhaps more famous as a classic thriller than as a fairy tale. The witty verse morals that Perrault included in the original edition (often omitted in later reprintings) are retained here in verse translations.This edition also includes 34 extraordinary full-page engravings by Gustave Doré that show clearly why this artist became the foremost illustrator of his time. These illustrations have long been considered the ideal accompaniment to Perrault's fairy tales. In many cases they created the pictorial image that we associate with the stories.Along with the collections of Andersen, Lang, and the Brothers Grimm, this volume is among the great books of European fairy tales. These stories have been enjoyed by generation after generation of children in many countries, and are here, with magnificent Doré illustrations, waiting to be enjoyed again.

    Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant epic poem in French. The Song of Roland, written by an unknown poet, tells of Charlemagne’s warrior nephew, Lord of the Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies in the massacre, defiant to the end. In majestic verses, the battle becomes a symbolic struggle between Christianity and Islam, while Roland’s last stand is the ultimate expression of honour and feudal values of twelfth-century France.

    Then, just when he's convinced his life has passed him by, Sonny, by a stroke of fate, is given a second chance at living. Can he get it right?  Will he be able to evade the grinding loneliness that stalks him? Will he find a way to overcome the unbearable regret that haunts him? Will he ever risk loving again, to find someone with no good-byes in her heart? And, most of all, will he become the man he always could have been?

    This is the best known version of the original story that inspired Walt Disney’s classic and has been retold countless times and adapted for screen, stage, prose, and television.

    He has, however, been a disappointment to his family in several ways: In appearance he is insignificant looking both in face and figure; he went to the University of Florida instead of Harvard where his forbears had been mainstays of the varsity crew for generations, and he studied agriculture instead of pointing himself toward a career in banking, bonds, or law. To say the least he is not apparently the stuff from which heroes are fashioned.As an agricultural expert specializing in fruit farming, Arthur becomes a Peace Corps volunteer and is assigned to the Republic of San Marco in the Caribbean. This weak-chinned Don Quixote soon acquires his Sancho Panza in the person of a rascally eleven-year-old boy, Pepe, who makes a bargain to be paid 400 pesos each time he saves Arthur's life. (The payments mount alarmingly!)The island's dictator thinks he can use Arthur to obtain military supplies with which to wipe out the band of guerillas in the hills who oppose his corrupt dictatorship. Failing in this the dictator decides to murder Goodpasture and cause an international incident by blaming it on the guerillas. This, he reasons, will bring the U.S. in to help stamp out the rebels.This plan also backfires (with Pepe's help, of course) and Goodpasture is taken prisoner and when they see he is a harmless eccentric he is appointed chief cook for the guerillas. From then on Arthur's life becomes a series of misadventures through which he moves serenely and from which he generally emerges unscathed (again with Pepe's assistance) until he surprisingly finds himself the guerillas' leader.Following one of the funniest bloodless revolutions imaginable Arthur Peabody Goodpasture ends up as Arthur el Gavilan, the new dictator of San Marco. "His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure."

    Rowling (the HARRY POTTER series), Darren Shan (CIRQUE DU FREAK), R.L. Stine (the GOOSEBUMPS series), and Stephen King (IT)! Volume Three in the PETER AND THE MONSTERS series! Follow the adventures started in PETER AND THE VAMPIRES (Volume One) and PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES (Volume Two)!Tragedy has struck Peter’s best friend Dill. In his effort to help, Grandfather might have actually made things worse. But help is on the way in the form of a new ally, and important information surfaces that might explain the Curse now haunting Peter and his family. In this volume, Peter battles more supernatural mayhem, including:A scientist who pieces together a family of monstrous creations…A pack of small creatures that kill the local baker, and plan to make Peter their next victim…Peter’s own dark side, which rears its ugly head in a violent rampage…A mysterious ‘snow demon’ out of Native American legend that menaces Peter on a ski trip…And a couple of ‘walking dead’ who try to put Peter in the morgue during a visit to the hospital. The PETER AND THE VAMPIRES series is for teens and adults who, when they were kids, were looking for stories that kicked butt. The protagonist might be young, but the stories are dark, funny, and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful.PETER AND THE FRANKENSTEIN is the third in an ongoing series that includes PETER AND THE VAMPIRES (Volume 1) and PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES (Volume 2). This book is 150,000 words (450+ pages) and contains some mild language, violence, and scary situations.

    The works in the series are suitable for ages eight and up. The books are simple, retellings of the great literary classics which remain faithful to the original text.

    Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works—his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There—A Dilemma presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.

    It is sure to capture the hearts of book lovers everywhere. Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life ...Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain reads aloud. And it's this release of words into the world that starts our hero on a journey that will finally bring meaning into his life. For one morning, Guylain discovers the diary of a lonely young woman: Julie. A woman who feels as lost in the world as he does. As he reads from these pages to a rapt audience, Guylain finds himself falling hopelessly in love with their enchanting author ...The Reader on the 6.27 is a tale bursting with larger-than-life characters, each of whom touches Guylain's life for the better. This captivating novel is a warm, funny fable about literature's power to uplift even the most downtrodden of lives. 'The humanity of the characters ...the re-enchantment of everyday life, the power of words and literature, tenderness and humour ...

    This collection includes: How Wang-fo was Saved, Marko's Smile, The Milk of Death, The Last Love of Princess Genji, The Man Who Loved the Nereids, Our Lady of the Swallows, Aphrodissia; the Widow, Kali Beheaded, The End of Marko Kraljevic, The Sadness of Cornelius Berg, and a Postscript by the Author.

    The first book in Dietrich’s fabulously fun New York Times bestselling series, Napoleon’s Pyramids follows the irrepressible Gage—a brother in spirit to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman—as he travels with Napoleon’s expedition across the burning Egyptian desert in an attempt to solve a 6,000 year old riddle with the help of a mysterious medallion. Here is superior adventure fiction in the spirit of Jack London, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard, and fans of their acclaimed successors—James Rollins, David Liss, Steve Berry, Kate Mosse—will certainly want to get to know Ethan Gage.

    Interwoven with his narrative are the tumultuous lives of the family who raised and then lost him: a famed hunting guide and his wife, who runs an animal orphanage (a conflict that in time upends their marriage); their son and daughter; and the young Kikuyu who finds the orphaned elephant and becomes part of the Hathaway family. This timeless story is alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking, spanning east Africa, Great Britain and New York from 1962 to 2015.

    It’s the space race in 1869 in a kind of alternate past. … When you see the book itself, it’s this big, oversized object with this incredible watercolor comics style, and it’s this really big, epic, sweeping story of a boy following in his mother’s discovery and then opening up the solar system, but in the age of the 1800s. It’s got a kind of steampunk but also a kind of young, classic children’s story feel to it.”

    Each man’s life, his story, his situation, is as different from the others’ as can be. What unites them is heartache. Trouble, that is, with women. The meetings are held in a spirit of openness and tolerance. In an almost religious silence each man confesses while the others listen. Philippe is a philosopher of repute. Since the woman he considered to be his perfect mate left him, he has been dating one of the world’s most famous models in an effort to forget. Denis has been working as a waiter for years. Women have lost interest in him entirely and he is in a deep funk because of it. But one day a mysterious woman with a suitcase appears on his doorstep and moves into his living room without explanation, throwing his life into turmoil. Yves is a husband and a cuckold, who, after having discovered his wife’s betrayal, refuses to honor any and all forms of faithfulness. He is spending a lifetime’s worth of savings in search of pleasure.In The Thursday Night Men, Benacquista gives his readers a variety of unexpected and amusing perspectives on romance, the relationship between the sexes, and friendship between men.

    His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century—from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka—is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.