Dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin that Ms. Stowe prepared.

One of Voltaire's earliest tales, Zadig is set in the exotic East and is told in the comic spirit of Candide; L'Ingenu, written after Candide, is a darker tale in which an American Indian records his impressions of France

When Israel Potter leaves his plough to fight in the American Revolution, he's immediately thrown into the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he receives multiple wounds. However, this does not deter him, and after hearing a rousing speech by General George Washington, he volunteers for further duty, this time at sea, where more ill fortune awaits him. Israel is captured by the British Navy and taken to England. Yet, he makes his escape, and this triggers a series of extraordinary events and meetings with remarkable people. Along the way, Israel encounters King George III, who takes a liking to the Yankee rebel and shelters him in Kew Gardens; Benjamin Franklin, who presses Israel into service as a spy; John Paul Jones, who invites Israel to join his crew aboard The Ranger; and Ethan Allen, whom Israel attempts to free from a British prison. (from wikipedia.com)

An Atlanta ex-cop comes to sleepy Lake Sackett, Georgia, seeking peace and quiet—but he hasn’t bargained on falling for Frankie, the cutest coroner he’s ever met. Frankie McCready talks to dead people. Not like a ghost whisperer or anything—but it seems rude to embalm them and not at least say hello. Fortunately, at the McCready Family Funeral Home & Bait Shop, Frankie’s eccentricities fit right in. Lake Sackett’s embalmer and county coroner, Frankie’s goth styling and passion for nerd culture mean she’s not your typical Southern girl, but the McCreadys are hardly your typical Southern family. Led by Great-Aunt Tootie, the gambling, boozing, dog-collecting matriarch of the family, everyone looks out for one another—which usually means getting up in everyone else’s business. Maybe that’s why Frankie is so fascinated by new sheriff Eric Linden...a recent transplant from Atlanta, he sees a homicide in every hunting accident or boat crash, which seems a little paranoid for this sleepy tourist town. What’s he so worried about? And what kind of cop can get a job with the Atlanta PD but can’t stand to look at a dead body? Frankie has other questions that need answering first—namely, who’s behind the recent break-in attempts at the funeral home, and how can she stop them? This one really does seem like a job for the sheriff—and as Frankie and Eric do their best Scooby-Doo impressions to catch their man, they get closer to spilling some secrets they thought were buried forever.

When Tom Cutter hires Constantine Shaklin as an engineer in his international air freight business, he little realizes the extraordinary gifts of his new recruit. Shaklin soon proves to possess a charismatic power that inspires everyone he meets to a new faith and hope for humanity. As Cutter’s business expands across the Middle East and Asia, so does Shaklin’s fame, unifying people from a wide array of cultures and religions with his unusual blend of the practical and the spiritual.

Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home. On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

On a cruiseship bound for Buenos Aires, a wealthy passenger challenges the world chess champion to a match. He accepts with a sneer. He will beat anyone, he says. But only if the stakes are high. Soon, the chess board is surrounded. At first, the challenger crumbles before the mind of the master. But then, a soft-spoken voice from the crowd begins to whisper nervous suggestions. Perfect moves, brilliant predictions. The speaker has not played a game for more than twenty years, he says. He is wholly unknown. But somehow, he is also entirely formidable…

The only annotated edition of M. R. James's writings currently available, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as "Count Magnus," set in the wilds of Sweden; "Number 13," a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; "Casting the Runes," a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including "A Night in King's College Chapel," James's first known ghost story.

**James Jones’s saga of life in the American Midwest, newly revised five decades after it was first published After the blockbuster international success of From Here to Eternity, James Jones retreated from public life, making his home at the Handy Writers’ Colony in Illinois. His goal was to write something larger than a war novel, and the result, six years in the making, was Some Came Running, a stirring portrait of small-town life in the American Midwest at a time when our country and its people were striving to find their place in the new postwar world. Five decades later, it has been revised and reedited under the direction of the Jones estate to allow for a leaner, tighter read. The result is the masterpiece Jones intended: a tale whose brutal honesty is as shocking now as on the day it was first published. This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Dr. Edwin Spindrift has been sent home from Burma with a brain tumor. Closer to words than to people, his sense of reality is further altered by his condition. When he escapes from the hospital the night before his surgery, things and people he hardly knew existed outside of his dictionaries swoop down on him as he careens through adventures in nighttime London.

Although it may read to modern audiences like a hilarious slapstick comedy, The Inspector-General is actually much more than that. Famed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol intended it to be a veiled but pointed satire of the ineptitude, corruption, and greed that exemplified the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. The witty play was later used as the basis for a movie version starring Danny Kaye (1949).

Beckett reúne en esta obra en tres actos todos los ingredientes de la dramaturgia burguesa : trama, personajes, conflictos, situaciones, diálogos y convenciones, para someterlos a una sarcástica operación de desguace. El joven Victor Krap ha abandonado, sin motivo aparente, su hogar, su familia, su trabajo, su novia... y se ha recluido en un miserable cuartucho de pensión para alcanzar una imposible libertad (en griego, Eleutheria). Allí acudirá una insólita galería de personajes -incluidos un espectador y un torturador chino-, que intentarán que Victor se explique para que la obra tenga sentido. Eleutheria apareció de improviso en Francia en febrero de 1995, rodeada de cierto recelo. Y es que, estando vivo, Samuel Beckett jamás la quiso publicar, y dejó encargado a su albacea literario, el editor Jérôme Lindon, fundador y director de Les Editions de Minuit, que nunca sacara a la luz. Beckett jamás renegó de su primer trabajo en lengua francesa, escrito en 1947, pero sí creía que se trataba de una obra imperfecta que no debía ser presentada al público. Sin embargo, hoy, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat escribe en Libération : «En los años cincuenta, aun cuando no fuera una obra maestra, la lectura de Eleutheria habría podido ser -y lo es ahora- absolutamente excitante-. Lindon, «descubridor» de Beckett, su editor fiel, amigo y confidente, conservó, pues, respetuosamente el manuscrito original durante cuarenta años, ignorando, u olvidadando tal vez, que otro editor, que había publicado su obra en Estados Unidos, disponía de una copia que le había entregado el propio Beckett en un momento de dificultad del editor y, por lo visto, de generosa debilidad del autor. Durante dos años Lindon intentó evitar que su colega norteamericano publicara la versión inglesa de Eleutheria, pero, finalmente, al fracasar en el intento, consideró más justo que saliera primero en la lengua original.

*Can Cameron find what he’s looking for? *All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most. From the Hardcover edition.