Letters Literature

"A Letter Lost in the Mail—100 Letters for Two Loves" is a heartwarming tale of romantic misadventures, generational bonds, and the timeless quest for love in a community where everyone has a story to tell.

Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam had a great belief in the power of the youth. He met over 21 million children and young people in India and outside and spoke to them about the power of knowledge, ambition, moral behaviour and the need to bring about change in society. He travelled to almost every corner of the country meeting the youth in schools, universities and institutions and interacted with them like a committed teacher. In Learning How to Fly, some of his nearly 2,000 lectures have been compiled.

Sol has disappeared. Their Earth-born wife Lumi sets out to find them but it is no simple feat: each clue uncovers another enigma. Their disappearance leads back to underground environmental groups and a web of mystery that spans the space between the planets themselves. Told through letters and extracts, the course of Lumi’s journey takes her not only from the affluent colonies of Mars to the devastated remnants of Earth, but into the hidden depths of Sol’s past and the long-forgotten secrets of her own.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.

When an advice columnist is given a note written just before a fatal airliner crash, her search for the intended recipient carries her on a journey of faith, hope, and forgiveness.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

When genealogist Jefferson Tayte is hired to prove the identity of a black sheep in his client’s family tree, he unwillingly finds himself drawn into a murder investigation with nothing more to go on than a 150-year-old letter and a connection to a legendary ruby that has been missing for generations. As more letters are mysteriously left for him, Tayte becomes immersed in a centuries-old tale of greed, murder and forbidden love that takes his research from the wilds of the Scottish Highlands to the colour and heat of colonial India. A dark secret is buried in Jaipur. But why is it having such deadly repercussions in the present?

Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding enjoyed a fascinating if brief three-year friendship via correspondence between 1927 and 1930, and in A Description of Acquaintance, Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm make the letters available to a larger audience for the first time. Riding and Stein are important figures in twentieth-century poetry and poetics and are considered progenitors of later movements such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

> Little Women's "Marmee" is one of the most recognizable mothers in American literature. But the real woman behind the fiction - Louisa May Alcott's own mother, Abigail - has for more than a century remained shrouded in mystery. Scholars believed that her papers were burned by her daughter and husband, as they claimed, and that little additional information survived. Until now.

The pretty little streets of Montmartre are abuzz with a rumour. Apparently a mystery matchmaker, known only as ‘Paris Cupid’, has somehow helped the city’s most famous bachelor find love. But old-fashioned romantic Lilou is staying very quiet. She’d just wanted to set up her best friend, and to get on with her life selling whimsical old love letters, in Paris’s famous St. Ouen market. She hadn’t imagined her little Paris Cupid project could ever have attracted so many people looking for true, heartfelt romance.

’n Baie lang brief aan my dogter is Marita van der Vyver, een van Afrikaans se mees geliefde skrywers, se ontroerende jeugmemoires. Dit is 'n speurtog deur die skrywer se beginjare, maar dit is ook ’n liefdesbrief aan ’n dogter en ’n taal en ’n land. En bowenal is dit ’n ma se poging om sin te maak van hierdie onverskillige en wrede wêreld waarin sy haar nou begewe.

A lady's reputation is a fragile thing. If anyone ever discovered that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had received a letter from a single gentleman, she could be ruined...or forced to marry a man she detests. In this Pride & Prejudice variation, Elizabeth takes the safer course and refuses to read Mr. Darcy's letter of explanation. Returning home unaware of Wickham's true nature, Elizabeth confesses everything to him, putting both Mr. Darcy and herself in grave danger from Wickham's schemes.

It isn't that Abby Carson can't do her schoolwork, it's just that she doesn't like doing it. And that means she's pretty much failing sixth grade. When a warning letter is sent home, Abby realizes that all her slacking off could cause her to be held back -- for real! Unless she wants to repeat the sixth grade, she'll have to meet some specific conditions, including taking on an extra-credit project: find a pen pal in a foreign country. Simple enough (even for a girl who hates homework).

Meet Tilly Rabel, a proud oyster-woman, and Landon Lockwood, the troubled son of one of the wealthiest men in America. The two could not be less suited for love. But when an old legend draws Landon to a hidden river cove, Tilly and he find each other, are lured by growing attraction, and repelled by competing desires to control Tilly’s waters. The hidden pool is replete with valuable mussel beds and the source of everything that makes Tilly who she is. Landon sees the illustrious treasure as the path to proving to his parents he is worth their love and worthy of the Lockwood name.

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they live. In 1931 Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie - a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.

In the year 2051, Brother David, a Jesuit, and Sister Helen find themselves posted on the Moon's far side, there to do religious observances, but also to conduct astronomical research. Brother David works at Daedalus Station within easy reach DURT (Distant Universe Radio Telescope), the largest instrument of its kind ever constructed. Sister Helen, a Benedictine, spends her days in a monastery more than a hundred kilometres away on the rim of Icarus Crater.

Every year, over 10,000 letters addressed to Juliet Capulet arrive in Verona, Italy, the famous hometown of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. These handwritten letters come from people all over the world, seeking guidance and support from Juliet herself. Capturing the pain, joy, humor, and confusion of love, the 60 letters in this book offers encouragement, comfort, hope - and a nod to the human condition. Including responses from Juliet herself, this romantic and relatable, and perfect as a Valentine's Day gift, Dear Juliet proves that love is the universal language.

Clementine has been taken by a creature of darkness. Dorin is a fiend in love who must find Clementine before losing her forever. While on his desperate search, Dorin pens eight dark and romantic monstrous tales, written only for Clementine.