Great Literature

Big plans are afoot! Butterbean is going to become a therapist. The white cat is going to do a commercial for caviar-flavored pet treats. And Wallace is moving into a great new apartment. But these plans don't include a group of rowdy raccoons taking over the loading dock and throwing the building into turmoil. Now residents from the whole building are coming to the Strathmore Seven for help—from Second Floor Biscuit, a Yorkie with an unfortunate haircut who faces eviction for barking at the intruders, to the loading dock rats, who are feeling intimidated and upset.

At the end of The King’s Witch, the first book in Tracy Borman’s Stuart-era trilogy, Frances Gorges was pregnant with the child of her dead lover, Thomas Wintour, executed for his role as a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Now, in The Devil’s Slave, Frances is compelled to return to the dissolute and dangerous court where she has been suspected of witchcraft.

King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character.

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a 16-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they can only hurtle towards tragedy.

A freak thunderstorm strikes just as Gameknight999 is activating his father’s digitizer to reenter Minecraft. Sparks flash across his vision as he is sucked into the game...and when the smoke clears, he’s arrived safely. But it doesn’t take long to realize that things in the Overworld are very different. Gameknight sees the same blocky terrain and square clouds as usual, but almost everything else has changed. His friends are nowhere to be found. His castle has disappeared, and the village he calls home is missing its defenses and fortified wall.

With lyrical prose and striking verse, beloved poet Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales, Wild Embers) uses the history of Ancient Greece and beyond to explore and share the stories of the mothers, warriors, creators, survivors, and destroyers who shook the world. In pieces that burn with empathy and admiration for these women, Gill unearths the power and glory of the very foundations of mythology and culture that have been too-often ignored or pushed aside. Gill's poetry and stories weave old and forgotten tales of might and love into an empowering collection.

Der Aufstieg der Bene Gesserit Vor dreiundachtzig Jahren wurden die Maschinen in der Schlacht von Corrin vernichtend geschlagen. Vor dreiundachtzig Jahren ernannte sich Faykan Butler zum Imperator des neuen, Planeten umspannenden Menschenreichs, und vor dreiundachtzig Jahren verschwand der Kriegsheld Vorian Atreides.

Long ago, the great wizard Merlin planted the seed that would become the peaceful world of Avalon. Now, though, Avalon is suffering from mysterious droughts. And when the very stars begin to lose their light, it seems that the Lady of the Lake's dire predictions are about to come true.

It was 1964 in the brand-new state of Alaska, a vast land of staggering beauty and heart-stopping dangers. Eleven-year-old Jack had grown up living happily with his parents in an off-the-grid cabin, miles from their closest neighbors. Grizzlies and wolves outnumbered people, and dark winter days were 30 degrees below zero. Jack had always thought of himself as strong—“Alaska tough”. But then the most powerful earthquake in American history—the Good Friday Earthquake—struck.

An action-packed tale of betrayal and revenge set amid the war between Alexander the Great's generals and climaxing in the most spectacular battle of the ancient world. Satyrus and Melitta, twin heirs to a rich kingdom on the Black Sea, become desperate fugitives when their mother, the Scythian warrior-princess Srayanka, is cut down in a savage act of betrayal. Accompanied by their tutor, the Spartan Philokles, they must make a perilous journey west, pursued by ruthless assassins, to find sanctuary with the army of their father's closest friend, Diodorus.

The stories of King Arthur and Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan and the rest of the Knights of the Roundtable, and the search for the Holy Grail have been beloved for centuries and are the inspiration of many modern fantasy novels, films, and shows. These legends began when an obscure Celtic hero named Arthur stepped on to the stage of history sometime in the sixth century, generating a host of oral tales that would be inscribed some 900 years later by Thomas Malory in his classic Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur).

Return to the epic fantasy realm of Rokugan's samurai and magic in the collected Legend of the Five Rings novellas, featuring an all-new story of the Lion Clan. A shamed Lion Clan warrior finds a chance for redemption when she discovers a foundling with magical ancestry, whose secrets could change everything. A young monk with a mysterious tattoo must learn to embrace her destiny and become a superhuman hero of the Dragon Clan. The quest for a lost relic leads a team of bold Crab Clan samurai into a dangerous expedition through the monster-haunted depths of Shinomen forest.

Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional route. Oldfield was the voice of British Intelligence in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was largely responsible for keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War. Working his way to the top, he took on the job of rebuilding confidence in the British Secret Service in the wake of the Cambridge spies scandal.

When it comes to learning a new language, studies have actually found that memorizing words doesn't work in the long term. But then, why does the traditional education system still follow this gut-wrenching pattern of memorizing words when it only sets students up for failure? As we keep looking for an answer to that question, it’s time for you to try a new approach - one that will finally stick...

These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries are selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic, oral qualities. Listen to these 10 unabridged classics by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, O. Henry, and Willa Cather.

When headstrong Nesta Aldernay comes to Oxford, it’s to set the record straight for her father. Not to get mixed up in a tragedy, and certainly not to seduce the attractive if somewhat complicated Detective Inspector Lisle Jarvis. She’s only there to clear her father’s name. Sir Vivian Dalrymple of St Bede’s College tries to help her, but winds up dead. And Nesta was one of the last people to see Sir Vivian alive. What has she got herself into?

All you need to know about this great collection of the best mystery stories from the past century are the names of the great authors inside: Robert Bernard, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block, Anthony Boucher, Frederic Brown, James M. Cain, Max Allan Collins, Jeffery Deaver, Stanley Ellin, Harlan Ellison, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ed Gorman, Anna Katharine Green, Jeremiah Healy, Patricia Highsmith, Reginald Hill, Tony Hillerman, Evan Hunter, Stephen King, and more.

It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace.

The men and women honored in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation speak in this collection of letters from and about the Depression and World War II.

On 6 June, 1944, Britain woke up to a profound silence. Overnight, 160,000 Allied troops had vanished and an eerie emptiness settled over the country. The majority of those men would never return. This is the story of that extraordinary 24 hours. Using a wealth of first-person testimonies, renowned historian Max Arthur recounts a remarkable new oral history of D-Day, beginning with the two years leading up to the silent day that saw the UK transformed by the arrival of thousands of American and Canadian troops.