Letters Literature

Third-grader Clementine constantly has brilliant ideas popping into her brain, but sometimes they get her into trouble. Only a few people really understand her - her parents, of course, and her favorite teacher, Mr. D'Matz. When he receives an opportunity to do research in Egypt, Clementine hatches a plan to keep him at her school - but as usual, it doesn't quite work out the way she wants.

An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his fiction. Now The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of his outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart.

It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to the dead - to people like Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Winehouse - though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating the choppy waters of new friendships, learning to live with her splintering family, falling in love for the first time, and, most important, trying to grieve for May.

One of the most important novels in classic literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter tackles the subject of adultery, with the notorious Hester Prynne at the forefront of the scandal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the beginning of the novel, Hester is serving time in prison for having a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a scarlet A on her clothing at all times, so she cannot run from her sin no matter where she goes.

A daring WWII pilot who grew up among the clouds, Juliet Caron’s life was one of courage, adventure - and a love torn apart by war. Every nook of her Cornish cottage is alive with memories just waiting to be discovered. Katherine Henderson has escaped to Cornwall for Christmas, but she soon finds there is more to her holiday cottage than meets the eye. And on the eve of Juliet’s 100th birthday, Katherine is enlisted to make an old lady’s final Christmas wish come true....

In The Letter of Marque, Jack is once again aboard his beloved Surprise but stripped of his post captaincy for a crime he did not commit. Bought by Stephen, the Surprise has become a privateer. Sailing into French waters, the two concoct a desperate mission which, if successful, may redeem Aubrey from his state of disgrace.

Myfanwy Thomas awakes in a London park surrounded by dead bodies. With her memory gone, her only hope of survival is to trust the instructions left in her pocket by her former self. She quickly learns that she is a Rook, a high-level operative in a secret agency that protects the world from supernatural threats. But there is a mole inside the organization - and this person wants her dead.

The Scarlet Letter is one of the great classics of American literature. Set in the harsh Puritan environment of 17th-century Boston, it describes the plight of Hester Prynne, an independent-minded woman who stands alone against society. Having given birth to a child after an illicit affair, she refuses to name the father and is forced to wear the letter "A", for Adulteress, embroidered on her dress.

The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, are collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors, and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author's humor, generosity, and wit—a side of him many listeners have not previously seen.

Eat, Pray, Love meets Claude Monet in this epistolary ode to Paris. What started as a whim in a Latin Quarter café blossomed into Janice MacLeod’s years-long endeavor to document and celebrate life in Paris, sending monthly snippets of her paintings and writings to the mailboxes of ardent followers around the world. Now, Dear Paris collects the entirety of the Paris Letters project: 140 illustrated messages discussing everything from macarons to Montmartre.

Celebrate Christmas on Blossom Street with a brand-new romantic comedy from New York Times best-selling author Debbie Macomber. Katherine O'Connor often spends her days at a cozy cafe on Blossom Street in Seattle where she writes Christmas letters for other people. She's good at making their everyday lives sound more interesting. More humorous. More dramatic. But for Dr. Wynn Jeffries, who also frequents the cafe, Christmas means lies and deception

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.

From the first time to the wildest time, from bedroom bouts to public performances, from torrid threesomes to lesbian liaisons, from wedding nights to sinful trysts, men (and sometimes women!) everywhere meet their match in wives, bachelorettes, and the girls next door who shamelessly ride the first tremor of desire to an explosion that rocks their world.

Here is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists - Hunter S.Thompson. In letters to a who's who of luminaries, from Norman Mailer toCharles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez - not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors - Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through hisown razor-sharp perspective.

To eager students of human sexuality in all its wild and amazing forms: Welcome to Penthouse University, the premier center of higher learning in carnal knowledge. It's a place to explore - from making love in the library to steamy oral exams behind closed classroom doors. A place to experiment - with bi-curious coeds in the dorm and nubile sorority sisters at sex toy parties. A place to graduate - to shower room liaisons with the curvy phys ed teacher and thrilling threesomes with the seductive housesitter.

There is something about the number 3. The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two. Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and literary avenues that classic authors were so adept at creating.

Bella can’t wait to be married to her fiancée Sidney, and dreams of the day she will walk up the aisle to be given away by her widowed father, with her bookish sister Alice as her bridesmaid. Their lives are disturbed when they receive a letter from their fourteen-year-old cousin Millie. Taken in by her austere aunt and uncle when her parents were killed in an accident, Millie says she is being badly treated and pleads to be rescued. When the two sisters take a trip to find out the truth, things take a troubling turn.

Women love kinky sex - and they love to talk about it. They've long enjoyed the erotic confessions of ladies who crave the sweet surrender of submission, the heady thrill of domination, and the sublime pleasure of sexual fetishes. This edition of Letters to Penthouse presents these women's wildest adventures in their own words - and their torrid tales are anything but vanilla. From sex slaves with a penchant for pain to dommes wielding wicked whips, these ladies lay bare their lust and spill all the debaucherous details.

In 1959, Hollywood ingenue Mercy Welles seems to have the world at her feet. Far removed from her Nebraska roots, she has crafted herself into a glamorous Oscar-nominated actress engaged to an up-and-coming director… Until she shockingly vanishes without a trace, just as her career is taking off. Almost sixty years later, Kit O’Neill, a junior television producer in Manhattan, is packing up her recently deceased grandmother’s attic, only to discover a long-lost box of souvenirs that reveal that the grandmother who raised her and her sister was, in fact, the mysterious Mercy Welles.

Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back.