Born in 1902 in Salinas, California, Steinbeck attended Stanford University before working at a series of mostly blue-collar jobs and embarking on his literary career. Profoundly committed to social progress, he used his writing to raise issues of labor exploitation and the plight of the common man, penning some of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century and winning such prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He received the Nobel Prize in 1962, "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. The boxed set, containing deluxe trade paperback editions with french flaps, is being released in honor of the Steinbeck centennial being celebrated throughout 2002. Penguin Putnam Inc, in partnership with the Steinbeck Foundation and the Great Books Foundation is sponsoring numerous events throught the year.

    In true McInerney style, this new collection of stories examines post 9/11 America in all its dark and morally complex glory

    Kama is both cosmic and human energy, which animates life and holds it in place. Gurcharan Das weaves a compelling narrative soaked in philosophical, historical and literary ideas in the third volume of his trilogy on life's goals: India Unbound was the first, on artha, 'material well-being'; and The Difficulty of Being Good was the second, on dharma, 'moral well-being'. Here, in his magnificent prose, he examines how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life, arguing that if dharma is a duty to another, kama is a duty to oneself. It sheds new light on love, marriage, family, adultery and jealousy as it wrestles with questions such as these: How to nurture desire without harming others or oneself? Are the erotic and the ascetic two aspects of our same human nature? What is the relationship between romantic love and bhakti, the love of god?

    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

    His signature style is simplicity itself, but the themes he tackles are big, deep and universal—love, loss, happiness, grief, and all the shades of emotion in between. These are stories of city and small town, mountain and lowland, and of life lived slowly and lightly. For over fifty years, these tales have charmed and beguiled several generations of readers. Last year, Ruskin Bond made a selection of his favourite stories (from the several hundred that he has written) that were published in a book entitled A Gathering of Friends. It proved to be enormously popular, selling out in a matter of weeks. Encouraged by its success, the author has made a further selection of his favourite stories and non-fiction sketches, leavening the mix with several pieces that have never been published before. It is a collection that will burnish his reputation as one of the world’s great storytellers.

    Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after Fitzgerald's death, "The Crack-Up" tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at age thirty-nine from a life of success and glamor to one of emptiness and despair, and his determined recovery. This vigorous and revealing collection of essays and letters renders the tale of a man whose personality still charms us all and whose reckless gaiety and genious made him a living symbol and the Jazz Age. For those who grew up with "The Great Gatsby" or "Tender is the Night," this extraordinary autobiographical collection provides a unique personal blend of the romance and reality embodied by Fitzgerald's literature and his life.

    P. Lovecraft's greatest contribution to supernatural literature: a series of stories that evoked cosmic awe and terror through their accounts of incomprehensibly alien monsters and their horrifying incursions into our world. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales collects 23 of Lovecraft's greatest weird tales, including "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Shadow over Innsmouth," and "The Shadow out of Time." It also features six collaborative "revisions" through which Lovecraft expanded the scope of his dark mythology.In these stories, monstrous entities traverse the gulfs of time and space and humankind cowers in fright at the havoc they wreak. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is your passport to realms of unimaginable horror.Contents:1. Dagon2. Nyarlathotep3. The Nameless City4. Azathoth5. The Hound6. The Festival7. The Call of Cthulhu8. The Colour out of Space9. History of the Necronomicon10. The Curse of Yig11. The Dunwich Horror12. The Whisperer in Darkness13. The Mound14. At the Mountains of Madness15. The Shadow over Innsmouth16. The Dreams in the Witch House17. The Man of Stone18. The Horror in the Museum19. The Thing on the Doorstep20. Out of the Aeons21. The Tree on the Hill22. The Shadow out of Time23. The Haunter of the Dark

    They helped pave the way for the phenomenal success and career that made him a household name.RIDERS OF THE DAWN - When gunman Matt Sabre tries to make peace he finds the only way is through the liberal use of gunsmoke. LIT A SHUCK FOR TEXAS - A collection of the early Western tales that drew on his own intimate knowledge of the frontier. Men and women fighting to build a life in a lawless world.TRAIL TO CRAZY MAN - Honor leads Rafe Caradec into deadly danger against the greatest odds he has ever facedSHOWDOWN TRAIL - Only the lone rider they hate can save a wagon train from destruction.Filmed as The Tall Stranger with Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo and Michael Ansara.The biggest bargain in L'Amour books ever.

    Here is China by rail, as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of one of the most intrepid and insightful travel writers of our time.

    Here, for the first time is as complete a collection as can be made of the prose which reveals that relatively unknown Amitav Ghosh: the novelist as thinker, the man of ideas and as a writer of luminous, illuminating non-fiction.

    Who is it, you ask? Why, it's elementary! Sherlock Holmes, the famous gumshoe of 221B Baker Street. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--the man who made him famous in such tales as The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet--changed the world of mysteries, inspiring legions of devoted fans. Whether you're a devotee or you've yet to be awed by Holmes's powers of deduction, you'll love this Canterbury Classics edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous works, including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. The perfect book to complete any bookshelf, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories features an eye-catching leather-bound cover with gold foil stamping, as well as fine ivory paper with gilded edges. You'll be spellbound by Conan Doyle's descriptive prose, and then delight in displaying this beautiful book in your home. A classic keepsake for fans of detective novels, as well as all great literature, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories  is the perfect addition to any library.

    We read every chapter, summarize and analyze it for your convenience. This is an Instaread Summary of 'Me Before You' by JoJo Moyes. Below is a preview of the earlier sections of the summary: Chapter 1 Louisa ‘Lou’ Clark, a member of a working class family in a small English village, has just lost her job. Although both Lou’s father, Bernard, and her sister, Treena, work, neither makes enough money to help the family make ends meet without Lou’s income. For this reason, it is decided that Lou should apply for a new job at the Job Centre as soon as possible. The next day Lou goes to the gym to see her boyfriend, Patrick. He sees Lou’s lost job as an opportunity for her to improve herself and find something better. The counselor at the Job Centre suggests Lou apply as a care assistant for a man in a wheelchair. She is not interested in this job, but she is running out of options. She agrees to go for the interview. Chapter 2 Lou usually wears odd, eccentric clothes. For the job interview, Josie, her mother, insists she wear a business suit. Lou goes to Granta House, an elegant and expensive home next to the local tourist attraction, Stortfold Castle. She is interviewed by Camilla Traynor. Camilla is Will Traynor’s mother. Will became a quadriplegic after being hit by a motorcycle. He already has a nurse named Nathan to take care of his personal and medical needs. Camilla wants to hire someone to be a companion for Will and to stay with him during the day when no one else can be there. Lou thinks the interview goes badly. Therefore, she is surprised when Camilla offers her the job with a six-month contract and generous pay. Chapter 3 Lou reports for work at Granta House the following morning. Camilla shows her around the annexe, a space that was once stables but was turned into guest quarters. This is where Will lives now that he is confined to a wheelchair. Camilla explains her duties to Lou. She makes it clear that Lou is not to leave Will alone and unattended for more than 15 minutes at any one time. Camilla introduces Lou to Will and Nathan, Will’s nurse. Nathan explains Will’s medications to Lou and tells her she is there to cheer Will. Nathan leaves, and Lou and Will are left to get to know each other. It does not go well. Will is sullen, quiet, and talks very little. She keeps herself busy with cleaning and household chores to fill in the time. Lou is unhappy about the first day at her new job. She talks to her sister Treena about it. Treena asks her to stick with the job because she has decided to quit her job and go back to college. She has received a grant to help pay her tuition, but will have to quit her job. Lou feels this puts more pressure on her to earn an income.

    The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

    The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

    Now at last, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Klingon Language Institute, this powerful drama by the legendary Klingon playwright, Wil'yam Shex'pir, can be appreciated in the elegance and glory of its original tongue. This invaluable volume contains the complete text of the play, along with an English translation for easy consultation and comparison. In addition, an incisive introduction explains the play's crucial importance in Klingon culture, while copious notes illustrate how the debased English version diverges from the original, often distorting and even reversing the actual meaning of the verses.Khamlet, the Restored Klingon Version, is a work that belongs in the library of every human who hopes truly to understand what it means to be Klingon.