Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mundane lives, and unexpected loves. But here too is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them-the intimately personal, the fantastic, the shockingly real...whether it's what lives in a mysterious locked room or the secret feelings we all conceal. In this dramatic and far-ranging collection, Margaret Atwood proves why she is a true master of the genre.

    Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

    

    Each of them is based on something observed, something overheard, and all will provide pleasure for every mood.

    Lars Powderdry and Lilo Topchev are counterpart weapons fashion designers for a world divided into two factions - Wes-bloc and Peep-East. Since the Plowshare Protocols of 2002, their job has been to invent elaborate weapons that only seem massively lethal. But when alien satellites hostile to both sides appear in the sky, the two are brought together in the dire hope that they can create a weapon to save the world, a task made all the more difficult by Lars falling in love with Lilo even as he knows she's trying to kill him.

    In each volume an Italian text in an authoritative edition is paired with a new facing-page translation supplemented by explanatory notes and a selected bibliography. An introduction provides a historical and critical interpretation of the work. The scholars preparing these volumes hope through Biblioteca ltaliana to point a straight way to the Italian classics. GENERAL EDITOR: Louise George ClubbEDITORIAL BOARDPaul J. Alpers, Vittore BrancaGene Brucker, Fredi ChiappelliPhillip W. Damon, Robert M. DurlingGianfranco Folena, Lauro MartinesNicolas J. Perella

    In these previously unpublished gems, Vonnegut’s originality infuses a unique landscape of factories, trailers, and bars—and characters who pit their dreams and fears against a cruel and sometimes comically indifferent world.Here are stories of men and machines, art and artifice, and how ideals of fortune, fame, and love take curious twists in ordinary lives. An ambitious builder of roads, commanding an army of bulldozers, graders, and asphalt spreaders, fritters away his free time with miniature trains—until the women in his life crash his fantasy land. Trapped in a stenography pool, a young dreamer receives a call from a robber on the run, who presents her with a strange proposition. A crusty newspaperman is forced onto a committee to judge Christmas displays—a job that leads him to a suspiciously ostentatious ex-con and then a miracle. A hog farmer’s widow receives cryptic, unsolicited letters from a man in Schenectady about “the indefinable sweet aches of the spirit.” But what will she find when she goes to meet him in the flesh?These beautifully rendered works are a testament to Vonnegut’s unique blend of observation and imagination. Like a present left behind by a departed loved one, While Mortals Sleep bestows upon us a shimmering Kurt Vonnegut gift: a poignant reflection of our world as it is and as it could be.

    "Benito Cereno" -- a subversive satire -- of grows out of a true story of mutiny among the enslaved . . .1."The Piazza"2."Bartleby the Scrivener" (first published in Putnam's November and December 1853)3."Benito Cereno" (first published in Putnam's October, November and December 1855)4."The Lightning-Rod Man" (first published in Putnam's August 1854)5."The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles" (first published in Putnam's March, April, and May 1854)6."The Bell-Tower" (first published in Putnam's August 1855)

    In 1948, Pictorial Review Jackson, a ten-year-old black boy, and his brother, Slim, hitchhike from North Carolina to New York City, observing the strange life-styles of people they encounter.

    Yet little prepares him for the determination of the gauche Pamela Tarn who resolves to enter not only his world, but also his bed. Initially repelled by the enormity of the age gap between them, Fanning vows never to acquiesce, and resorts to his most boorish behavior in an attempt to break the hold he unwittingly has over her. Yet as they are inexorably drawn together, they embark upon a tempestuous—and ultimately destructive—affair.

    Even on the ship's voyage across, the Russian sensibility begins to pervade: lots of secrets and lots of vodka. When his American wife is stricken by a painful rash and he is interrogated at his hotel by Soviet agents who know that he is trying to sell stylish synthetic dresses to the masses starved for fashion, his precarious inner balance is thrown off for good. More drink follows, discoveries of his wife's illicit affair with another woman, and his own submerged sexual feelings come breaking through the surface, bubbling up in Russian champagne and caviar.

    Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.

    It was made into a play, a Broadway as well as a Hollywood musical, and a fabulous movie starring Rosalind Russell. Since then, Mame has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of Great and Important People as the world's most beloved, madcap, devastatingly sophisticated, and glamorous aunt. She is impossible to resist, and this hilarious story of an orphaned ten-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt is as delicious a read in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s.

    In the first eBook short story, there are high stakes on the high seas as the always cunning Reaver takes on a ruthless pirate king.   Captain Dread has made a deal with the port cities: They pay him for protection, and he doesn’t raid them. It’s a neat and tidy arrangement, all agree, except for one man, Reaver, the daring outlaw blessed with eternal youth, who refuses to cede his hometown of Bloodstone. After Reaver sends back one too many heads in a duffel bag, Dread decides to take matters into his own hands. To his surprise, Reaver surrenders willingly. But Dread’s new prisoner is no coward. It’s all part of Reaver’s unbelievably bold—and bloody—plan, which ultimately pits pirate against pirate in an explosive showdown that will live forever in the legendary world of Fable™.   © 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Microsoft, Fable, Lionhead, the Lionhead logo, Xbox, and the Xbox logo are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.