Social Linguistics

This is the haunting tale of a Venezuelan's love for Rima, the lovely "bird girl" and descendant of a mysterious race, who he finds in the heart of the jungle. Beautiful and vivid descriptions abound in this exotic novel.

This novel tells the story of impoverished, embarrassment-prone Archibald "Archie" Moffam and his difficult relationship with his art-collecting, hotel-owning, millionaire father-in-law, Daniel Brewster, the father of Archie's new bride, Lucille. Archie's attempts to ingratiate himself with Brewster only get him further into trouble. The story takes place in New York City.

After the young Prince Edward VI of England and a peasant boy switch places, the "little king" tries to escape from a world in which he must beg for food, sleep with rodents, face ridicule, and avoid assassination. Meanwhile, the peasant, who is now the prince, dreads exposure and possible execution; members of the Court believe he has gone mad. As a result of the swap, both boys learn that social class, like so much of life, is determined by chance and random circumstance. With his caustic wit and biting irony, Twain satirizes the power of the monarchy, superstitions, and religious intolerance.

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.

Listen to Captain of the Polestar with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. The Captain of the Polestar is a collection of strange mystery tales that are independent of each other, sometimes involving ship voyages, shipwrecks, amnesia, lost love, grand thefts, comedy, and fairy tales.

A collection of short stories from such favorites as Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling are joined by others written anonymously in this anthology which will have you scratching your head and listening just a bit longer to discover the key to the mysteries.

Mr. Royston is driving his hansom through the night-time streets of Melbourne when he is hailed by a man supporting a slumped, intoxicated figure and requesting that the cabman take the unfortunate fellow home - before proceeding to drop his burden and make a rapid exit.

Tarzan the Terrible, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is the eighth book in the Tarzan series. Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author best known for his science fiction and fantasy novels. Burroughs created the characters of Tarzan and John Carter, as well as the fictional landmass in the Earth known as Pellucidar.

The action is set during World War I. While John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (Tarzan), is away from his plantation home in British East Africa, it is destroyed by invading German troops from Tanganyika. On his return, he discovers among many burned bodies one that appears to be the corpse of his wife, Jane Porter Clayton. Another fatality is the Waziri warrior Wasimbu, left crucified by the Germans. Maddened, the ape-man seeks revenge not only on the perpetrators of the tragedy, but all Germans, and he sets out for the battlefront of the war in East Africa.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of 12 loosely connected short stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs about the title character, Tarzan.

Rita Van Arsdale, a member of the high society in New York, is invited to an elegant party where she falls in love with a gentleman called Mr. Durand, who returns her feelings and proposes to her. But their plans are derailed after Mrs. Fairbrother, who has arrived at the party wearing a spectacular diamond, is discovered murdered in an alcove. The prime suspect is none other than Mr. Durand, so Miss Van Arsdale gets down to work to reconstruct the true course of events and prove that her love is indeed innocent.

A who-done-it mystery from Anna Katharine Green written in 1917 begins immediately with a murder by Native American arrow within a museum. Who is the young girl who is murdered, and why is she alone? No one knows. Who is the woman right next to her? Ms. Green develops her story and characters, and the intrigue builds. Is the murderer a man or woman?

Miss Elizabeth Mapp, magnificent grande dame and heiress, is always on the lookout lest her neighbors fall outside the bounds of perfect, exemplary manners. But her tightly controlled world is soon beset on all sides by interlopers, first in the disturbingly masculine form of two very different retired army officers, both of whom are anything but retiring in their conflicting aims upon her heart.

What was Anthony Trollope's favorite Anthony Trollope book? Which was the most difficult for him to write? When he settled down by the fire for a good read, whose books did he choose? What nonliterary profession occupied him for much of his life? Learn the answers to these and other questions as one of the great authors in literature takes you on a guided tour of his personal and literary life.

Stevenson's brooding historical romance demonstrates his most abiding theme, the elemental struggle between good and evil, as it unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid the fierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottish history.

People do bad things. They misspeak, mislead, and misbehave. They lie, cheat, steal, and kill. Often, afterward, they apologize. But what makes a successful apology? Why does Joe Biden's 2007 apology for referring to Barack Obama as "articulate and bright" succeed, whereas Mel Gibson's 2006 apology for his anti-Semitic tirade fails? Naturally, the effectiveness of an apology depends on the language used, as well as the conditions under which we offer our regrets.

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang - and all forms of nonstandard English - as integral parts of the American language.

We acquire our native language, seemingly without effort, in infancy and early childhood. Language is our constant companion throughout our lifetime, even as we age. Indeed, compared with other aspects of cognition, language seems to be fairly resilient through the process of aging. In Changing Minds, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts examine how aging affects language - and how language affects aging.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was a beloved and prolific Canadian author, best known for her Anne of Green Gables series. She was also the author of over 500 short stories, poems, and essays. This delightful collection includes 20 of her earliest short stories, ranging from tales of fated romance to school friendships to Christmas miracles, all touching on the narrative themes of class, family, belonging, and romance that characterize her work.

Years before his marriage to Olga Knipper and his self-imposed medical exile to Yalta, years before he even began writing the seminal works of dramatic literature for which he is renowned, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to support his financially and physically struggling family, wrote stories...many, many stories. Starting in his early 20s, living in Moscow, he made a name for himself by capturing the peculiarities of Russian life through satire, humor, pathos, and passion. Myriad influences inspired his eventual words for the stage.