Dostoevsky's crocodile, cruelly displayed in a traveling sideshow, gobbles whole a pretentious high-ranking civil servant. But the functionary survives unscathed and seizes his new unique platform to expound to the fascinated public. Dostoevsky's Crocodile is a matchless, hilarious satire.Hernandez's Crocodile, on the other hand, while also terribly funny, is a heartbreaker. A pianist struggling to make ends meet as a salesman finds success when he begins to weep before clients and audience alike, but then he can't stop the crocodile tears.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    

    Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal.

    and the Florida Crackers -the zany but lovable folks who populated the remote hamlet that was Marjorie Rawlings’ home. With a gift for humor and a venerable ear for dialect comes the author’s personal accounts of the people, scenery and wildlife of Cross Creek.Short Stories:A Crop Of BeansBenny and the Bird DogsJacob’s LadderThe PardonVarmintsThe EnemyGal Young UnAlligatorsA Plumb Clare ConscienceA Mother In MannvilleCocks Must Crow

    *** Volume 1 plays a key role in the plot of the US movie Sex and the City. *** This Volume 2 includes love poems written by Matthew Arnold, Alfred Austin, Samuel Alfred Beadle, William Blake, Christopher Brennan, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Constable, William Cowper, Michael Drayton, George Eliot, Thomas Ford, Stephen Foster, Robert Frost, Thomas Frost, Norman Rowland Gale, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred P. Graves, Robert Herrick, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Jonson, John Keats, Richard Lovelace, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Shakespeare.

    "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.

    

    M. Forster, by E. M. Forster. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1417908599.

    A finalist for the National Book Award with her 1995 novel, The House on the Lagoon, Ferre here uses family history as a metaphor for the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in particular. The result is writing of the highest order--provocative, profound, yet delightfully readable.The "sweet diamond dust" of the title story in this debut collection is, of course, sugar. In this tale the De La Valle family's secrets, ambitions, and passions, interwoven with the fate of the local sugar mill, are recounted by various relatives, friends, and servants. As the characters struggle under the burden of privilege, the story, permeated with haunting echoes of Puerto Rico's own turbulent history, becomes a splendid allegory for a nation's past. The three accompanying stories each follow the lives of the descendants of the De La Valle family, making the book a drama in four parts, raising troubling issues of race, religion, freedom, and sex, with Ferre's trademark irony and startling imagery--a literary experience no reader would want to miss.

    

    

    Hinging on the theft of an enormous diamond originally stolen from an Indian shrine, this riveting novel features the innovative Sergeant Cuff, the hilarious house steward Gabriel Betteridge, a lovesick housemaid, and a mysterious band of Indian jugglers.The Woman in WhiteOne of the greatest mystery thrillers ever written, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White was a phenomenal bestseller in the 1860s, achieving even greater success than works by Dickens, Collins' friend and mentor. Full of surprise, intrigue, and suspense, this vastly entertaining novel continues to enthrall readers today.The story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between artist Walter Hartright and a ghostly woman dressed all in white who seems desperate to share a dark secret. The next day Hartright, engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie and her half sister, tells his pupils about the strange events of the previous evening. Determined to learn all they can about the mysterious woman in white, the three soon find themselves drawn into a chilling vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.Masterfully constructed, The Woman in White is dominated by two of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction: Marion Halcombe, dark, mannish, yet irresistibly fascinating, and Count Fosco, the sinister and flamboyant "Napoleon of Crime."

    From My Mother's Garden, the parable of an old woman who refuses to accept the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, to The Young People of Moscow, which describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging couple selling antiquated Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar, these intricately woven narratives provide unforgettable slices of a Russia that is at once both exotic and disconcertingly familiar.

    This landmark collection contains twenty-two of Hesse's finest stories in this genre, most translated into English here for the first time. Full of visionaries and seekers, princesses and wandering poets, his fairy tales speak to the place in our psyche that inspires us with deep spiritual longing; that compels us to leave home, and inevitably to return; and that harbors the greatest joys and most devastating wounds of our heart. Containing all the themes common in Hesse's great novels Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian—and mirroring events in his own life, these exquisite short pieces exhibit the same mystical and romantic impulses that contribute to the haunting brilliance of his major works. Several stories, including "The Poet," "The Fairy Tale About the Wicker Chair," and "The Painter," examine the dilemma of the artist, torn between the drive for perfection and the temptations of pleasure and social success. Other tales reflect changes and struggles within society: in "Faldum," a city is irrevocably transformed when each resident is granted his or her fondest wish; in "Strange News from Another Planet," "If the War Continues," and "The European," nightmarish landscapes convey Hesse's devastating critiques of nationalism, barbarism, and war. Illuminating and inspiring, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse will challenge and enchant readers of all ages. A distinguished and historic publication, this fine translation by Jack Zipes captures their subtlety and elegance for decades nto come.