With her satire on Anglo-Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Politically risky, stylistically innovative, and wonderfully entertaining, the novel changes the focus of conflict in Ireland from religion to class, and boldly predicts the rise of the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie.

Tom, always looking for trouble, finds it when he sets out to become Hannibal's First Traveler. Tom, Huck, and Jim find themselves kidnapped by a mad inventor, sailing cross the Atlantic and into Arabian adventure on a hot-air balloon.

"In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake -- if it was a mistake -- until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn't feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support...

Excerpt: "The measure of a man's popularity is not always-or indeed seldom-the measure of his intrinsic worth. So, when the earlier work of any writer is gathered together in more enduring form, catering to the enthusiasm of his readers in his maturer years, there is always a suspicion that the venture is purely a commercial one, without literary justification. Fortunately these stories of Mr. Kipling's form their own best excuse for this, their first...

A collection of poems evoking the world and feelings of childhood. It is one of the best-loved classic poetry collections ever written and is illustrated here by the world-famous artist Michael Foreman in a beautiful new gift edition, with a foreword by Alexander McCall Smith.

Two pigeons, Sid and Midge, make their nest in the "B" of a neon sign. But when a truck comes and takes the letters of the sign down one by one, will Sid ever be able to find Midge again? And what will happen to their eggs? The heartwarming story of two birds making a home-- and then making another one-- in one of America's great cities.

Hawthorne's tale about the brooding hold of the past over the present is a complex one, twisting and turning its way back through many generations of a venerable New England family, one of whose members was accused of witchcraft in 17th century Salem. More than 200 years later, we meet the family in its decaying, gabled mansion, still haunted by the presence of dead ancestors: Hepzibah, an elderly gentlewoman fallen on had times; her ineffectual brother,...