Part comedy of manners, part social commentary, love story, mystic narration and thriller, it is a sort of Indian version of Oliver Goldsmith's THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.

    Merwin --Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud --About marriage / Denise Levertov --from Jane Austen / Virginia Woolf --Princess and the tin box / James Thurber.

    GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS is suitable for young readers and also as a read-aloud book to babies and toddlers.

    In the cut-throat world of weekly trash mags, Nina thrives on the adrenalin of out-bidding her rivals for scandalous photo sets, scoring exclusive rights to Australia's A-list weddings and having the most influential celebrity managers on speed-dial. But in her personal life, things aren't quite as glossy. Just as she's back on the single scene, all her friends start getting up the duff faster than you can say, 'Welcome to Nappy Valley'. While Nina spends her days managing her magazine's multi-million-dollar budget and stalking Kim Kardashian's every move, they're managing their minuscule maternity leave allowance and stalking their local daycare waiting list. Suddenly she feels like she's being rejected from a club she doesn't even want to join. With a reality TV show in the works and a Facebook feed overflowing with endless baby updates, Nina heads to New York on an impromptu girls' trip to get away from it all - but little does she know that things are about to get a whole lot more complicated...

    But twenty-one-year-old Saffron Sinclair feels she has no choice but to take the place of her beautiful and timid sister and present herself to the lumberjack instead. Her hope is that he’ll find her undesirable on sight – with her tattoos and the red streaks in her black hair – and send her back home. She’d cite the no refund clause and everything would be fine.But, when Saffron arrives at the mansion in the forest, she discovers there’s not only one but three dangerously gorgeous lumberjacks. Worse, they have no plans to return her, and walking away would mean giving them their money back.Prepared to see this through for her family’s sake, Saffron stays and is determined to remain unscathed. Except their shameless examinations and their bold and intimate methods of discipline shatter her boundaries, leaving her curiously aroused and desperately craving more…A Baby for the Mountain MenShe was promised to the mysterious mountain men in order to have their baby. Now they’re ready to collect their reward.Twenty-one-year-old Soraya has lived almost her whole life under the shadow of being promised to the mysterious men in the mountain – a deal struck in return for saving her father’s life. Now the time to present herself at their door has arrived.For Soraya, this means going from the sheltered, friendless, cruel and unloving care of her grandmother to an equally daunting and strange situation in the eerie mansion hidden deep in the dark mountain. There are rumored to be hideous monsters gracing the dilapidated castle-like house, but nothing prepares Soraya for when she meets the three men determined to extract their repayment in full.For the sake of her father, she’ll pay the debt, then she’ll start living the life she was meant to live…A Baby for the BratvaThe Bychkov Bratva need an heir. Now.They wanted a woman quickly, so they chose a home where no one would ask questions. Instead, they got twenty-one-year-old American, Starla Anderson. When the Russian Mafia invades the orphanage where she lives, in the middle of the night, throwing the nuns who raised her into a petrified frenzy, it’s Starla who is chosen as the only one who could possibly survive the Bratva and their demands.In spite of her own fear of the three massive, glowering and scary men, Starla has to think and act fast. With her heart thundering in her chest, her body on fire at their mere presence, she sees an opportunity, something that might help the other girls at the impoverished home get a chance of a better life. She lays out her only condition: her body for a fee…Except… No one says no to the Bratva.

    In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.

    . . Brilliant. I advise anyone to go and read it' Louise Redknapp_______From X Factor star to Queen of the Jungle, Stacey Solomon has never been far from our screens . . .As a kid, Stacey always dreamed of becoming a star. But at 17, it looked like her dream was shattered when she unexpectedly became pregnant.Always the fighter, new single mum Stacey rallied, found a college with a crèche for her son Zachery and waitressed at night, determined that he should have the opportunities she didn't.And then the X Factor came along, where she stunned Britain with her astonishing voice. She went from hard-up single mum to X Factor favourite, Queen of the Jungle and much-loved TV presenter in just two years.Stacey Solomon's My Story So Far is a fantastic and inspirational read by a modern-day heroine who always looks on the bright side of life._______'Stacey has charmed that nation with her down-to-earth personality and irrepressible spirit' Sunday Mirror'She's hilariously dizzy yet whip-smart. She's a treat' Scotsman'She has a warm smile, an infectious laugh and a heart of gold' Love It

    For outsiders, Pyrrus usually means a quick and painful death, but DinAlt is fleeing the crooked casino masters of Cassylia - where he just broke the bank. But DinAlt is not prepared for the hellish Pyrrus, where every living thing seems bent on exterminating mankind.In DEATHWORLD 2 (originally published as THE ETHICAL ENGINEER), Jason DinAlt finds himself on a hostile, barbarian planet where technology and civilization have almost disappeared. Using his skills, DinAlt literally reinvents the wheel in his quest to escape and return to his friends on Pyrrus.

    Sir Mortimer Wheeler describes the architecture and town planning, thesculpture and painting, the silverware, glass, pottery and the otherrich artistic achievements of the era.

    "This drowsy denison of the realms of the Pharaohs will do us no harm." And he remained by the tank. What is more, he took his glove and began tickling the crocodile's nose with it, wishing, as he said afterwards, to induce him to snort.Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky is best known for his exploration of the human dark side of the psyche, but this collection shows he is equally adept at sarcastic and absurdist commentary.

    The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions' founder James Laughlin who initially presented some of Williams' verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams's poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright's collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an Introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis.The CD included with this edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads,"poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."

    Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

    

    Belet wages war against one of the worst sins of his (and our) time - backbiting - better known to us as detraction (telling the faults of others without cause). Most of us do not realize how evil this sin is. In fact, many of us don't think it's a sin at all. After ruining someone's reputation, or satisfying our anger (and yes, our hatred) by spewing out every bad thing we can say about someone, we justify ourselves by saying, "Well, it's true!" We even think we are acting justly by giving someone what they deserve.. Due to our lack of charity and also to our pride, little do we see things from God's point of view, to whom these are vile sins - a form of hatred of neighbor - a failure to do the two things necessary - to love God and our neighbor (Matt. 22:37-40). In explaining this sin of backbiting, properly called detraction, Fr. Belet quotes the best men of Western Civilization: Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Seneca, Pliny, the Roman Emperor Constantine, King David, Isaiah, Saints James, Luke, Matthew, Paul, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Augustine, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, and many others. A very helpful book for those who wish to know to meaning of backbiting---and how to avoid it.

    A luminous collection--with an introduction, notes, chronology, and bibliography--of ten of Willa Cather's short works written from 1900 to 1920.