Finest stories from around the world — most of them old favorites: "Sleeping Beauty," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Cinderella," "The Arabian Nights," 33 more. Includes original 138 black-and-white illustrations.

When devastating news brings an abrupt end to a romantic rendezvous, Livvy Holland struggles to accept the death of one of her closest mentors. Livvy’s artwork has always been an expression of her emotions, and avoiding the pain she feels from her recent loss makes painting seem impossible. Her inspiration gone, she devotes her attention to the future she’s planning with Jon Scott.

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano's short stories is that they can do the "work of a novel." The Insufferable Gaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolano story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolano's stories have been applauded as "bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated" (Publishers Weekly) and"complex and provocative" (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new." Two fascinating essays are also included.

'Behind me I left my youth, my middle age, my wife and my happiness. I was a general now and I had only defeat or victory to look forward to. There was no middle way any longer, and I did not care.' In the year AD 406 Rome was on the defensive everywhere, and a single Roman legion stood desperate guard on the Empire's Rhine frontier. Maximus, the legion's commander, is urged to proclaim himself emperor, but he stands by his concept of duty and holds the frontier for longer than seems possible. Then chance plays a cruel trick...

This morning I stood naked beside the icy waters of Lake Riley, high in the Appalachians of north Georgia, above the fall line where the tame Atlanta winters end and the freezing wild mountain winters begin. A mile away, in my dead mother’s hometown, Riley, people were just breaking the ice on their gravel roads and barnyards and church lots and sidewalks, stomping the mountain bedrock before little stores with mom-and-pop names, most of which belong to heavy-footed Rileys. But there I was, alone as always, Odd Alice, the daughter of a reckless young mother and an unknown father who passed along some very strange traits. I had slipped out to the lake from my secluded cabin for my morning swim, stripping off my dowdy denim, doing the impossible. It is February, with a high of about twenty-five degrees, and the lake has an apron of ice like the white iris on a dark eye, narrowing my peculiar view of the deep world beneath. Not that that scares me. The water is the only element in my life I never fear. I stood there in the cold dawn as usual, not even shivering. As I stretched and filled my body with frigid air, I looked out over the icy mountain world and heard a thin trickle of sound stroking the frosty branches of tall fir trees so far around a bend in the lake my ears shouldn’t be able to recognize it if I were like anyone else. The sound was a child screaming. And then I heard a splash. I may be a freak or a monster—some unnatural quirk of nature too odd for normal people to accept or for anyone to love—but I couldn’t let a child drown just to keep my secrets.  So there I went, into the cold, safe water, deep into the heart of the lake, faster than anyone imagines a person can swim, fluting the currents with the iridescent webbing between my bare toes, able to go farther, deeper, quicker, and for much, much longer in that netherworld than any human being possibly can. We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others. I’ve never known quite who I am, but worse than that, I’ve never known quite what I am. And after today, I won’t be the only person asking that question.

One kiss can change everything…I wished I’d known that before I’d kissed my best friend.Things are different now. We can’t go back. I’m not even sure I want to go back. I guess the question is….What happens now?

Amazon.com ReviewIn An Army at Dawn,, a comprehensive look at the 1942-1943 Allied invasion of North Africa, author Rick Atkinson posits that the campaign was, along with the battles of Stalingrad and Midway, where the "Axis ... forever lost the initiative" and the "fable of 3rd Reich invincibility was dissolved." Additionally, it forestalled a premature and potentially disastrous cross-channel invasion of France and served as a grueling "testing ground" for an as-yet inexperienced American army. Lastly, by relegating Great Britain to what Atkinson calls the status of "junior partner" in the war effort, North Africa marked the beginning of American geopolitical hegemony. Although his prose is occasionally overwrought, Atkinson's account is a superior one, an agile, well-informed mix of informed strategic overview and intimate battlefield-and-barracks anecdotes. (Tobacco-starved soldiers took to smoking cigarettes made of toilet paper and eucalyptus leaves.) Especially interesting are Atkinson's straightforward accounts of the many "feuds, tiffs and spats" among British and American commanders, politicians, and strategists and his honest assessments of their--and their soldiers'--performance and behavior, for better and for worse. This is an engrossing, extremely accessible account of a grim and too-often overlooked military campaign. --H. O'BillovichFrom Publishers WeeklyAtkinson won a Pulitzer Prize during his time as a journalist and editor at the Washington Post and is the author of The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 and of Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. In contrast to Crusade's illustrations of technomastery, this book depicts the U.S. Army's introduction to modern war. The Tunisian campaign, Atkinson shows, was undertaken by an American army lacking in training and experience alongside a British army whose primary experience had been of defeat. Green units panicked, abandoning wounded and weapons. Clashes between and within the Allies seemed at times to overshadow the battles with the Axis. Atkinson's most telling example is the relationship of II Corps commander George Patton and his subordinate, 1st Armored Division's Orlando Ward. The latter was a decent person and capable enough commander, but he lacked the final spark of ruthlessness that takes a division forward in the face of heavy casualties and high obstacles. With Dwight Eisenhower's approval, Patton fired him. The result was what Josef Goebbels called a "second Stalingrad"; after Tunisia, the tide of war rolled one way: toward Berlin. Atkinson's visceral sympathies lie with Ward; his subtext from earlier books remains unaltered: in war, they send for the hard men. Despite diction that occasionally lapses into the melodramatic, general readers and specialists alike will find worthwhile fare in this intellectually convincing and emotionally compelling narrative. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

I Heart short story: a new story starring Jenny Lopez. From the bestselling author of What a Girl Wants and I Heart Christmas. Sleighbells ring, are you listening... Who wouldn't want to escape to a cabin in snowy Vermont for Christmas? Jenny Lopez's year has gone wrong, and Vermont with champagne and a sparkly Christmas tree is going to mend everything, along with her best friend Angela. She hits a few obstacles along the way, including a major work crisis and some unexpected Christmas companions. But this is Jenny Lopez. She's determined to have the best Christmas known to man, even if it means dragging a turkey three miles in the snow. Single-handedly and in a Santa outfit Jenny Lopez is going to save Christmas - and have the best holiday season ever.

A hapless fairy godmother faces her toughest assignment yet: a perfect little girl whom she must teach to be normal Maybelle was only trying to help. Maybe that's the problem—every time she tries to help, her magic makes things worse. This time, her spell was supposed to turn a frog into a prince, but instead it turned a princess into a frog! For more than a century, every spell she's cast has backfired, and now her boss is fed up. She has one last chance to make things right—or she'll lose her wings forever. With the help of the legendary fairy godmother Edna Prim, Maybelle takes charge of a snooty young girl named Susan whose only problem is that she's too perfect. Maybelle's job is to help Susan learn to be a regular kid, but there's a mischief-loving imp working against her. Saving Susan will take a new kind of spell—and a special brand of magic that only Maybelle has to offer. This ebook features an illustrated...