You know the authors’ names. You recognize the title. You'veprobably used this book yourself. And now The Elements of Style–themost widely read and employed English style manual–is available ina specially bound 50th Anniversary Edition that offers the title'svast audience an opportunity to own a more durable and elegantlybound edition of this time-tested classic. Offering the same content as the Fourth Edition, revised in 1999,the new casebound 50th Anniversary Edition includes a briefoverview of the book's illustrious history. Used extensively byindividual writers as well as high school and college students ofwriting, it has conveyed the principles of English style tomillions of readers. This new deluxe edition makes the perfect giftfor writers of any age and ability level.

Today, an entomologist in a laboratory can gaze at a butterflypupa with a microscope so powerful that the swirling cells on thepupas skin look like a galaxy. She can activate a single gene orknock it out. What she cant do is discover how the insect behavesin its natural habitatwhich means she doesnt know what steps totake to preserve it from extinction, nor how any particular genemay interact with the environment. Four hundred years ago, afifty-year-old Dutch woman set sail on a solo scientific expeditionto study insect metamorphosis. She could not have imagined theroutine magic that scientists perform todaybut her absoluteinsistence on studying insects in their natural habitats was so farahead of its time that it is only now coming back into favor.Chrysalis restores Maria Sibylla Merian to her rightful place inthe history of science, taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to theSurinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merians insights fuelnew approaches to both ecology and genetics.

Whether you are working on the novel that's been in the back ofyour mind for years or simply facing an increasing demand to writewell at work or school, the fact remains: more and more of us arewriting more often these days-reports, e-mails, faxes, andnewsletters. But despite the increase in written communication,something has been lost-the fundamentals of good writing. Grammarmaven Patricia T. O'Conner comes to the rescue with the mostpainless, practical, and funny writing book ever written. In short,snappy chapters filled with crystal-clear examples, amusingcomparisons, and humorous allegories that cover everything from"Pronoun Pileups" and "Verbs That Zing" to "What to Do When You'reStuck," O'Conner provides simple, straightforward tips to help yousort your thoughts and make sentences that make sense. Push asidethose stuffy old-fashioned rule books, because O'Conner has writtenthe most accessible and enjoyable book yet for today's writer.

Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenantfarmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to headNorth. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, hereturns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield,imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of thecouple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third-- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and socialenslavement.

A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me aboat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the doorfor petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at thedoor for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand),whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, hewould pretend not to hear . . ." Why the petitioner required aboat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him,the reader will discover in this delightful fable, a philosophiclove story worthy of Swift or Voltaire.

In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walkerspeaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist inthirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Amongthe contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civilrights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and herdaughters healing words.

"The Tin Drum," one of the great novels of the twentiethcentury, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translationin 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its youngauthor to the forefront of world literature.To mark the fiftiethanniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,along with Grass's publishers all over the world, is bringing out anew translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, an acclaimedtranslator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: a wealth ofdetailed scholarship, a wide range of newly available referenceworks, and the author himself. The result is a translation that ismore faithful to Grass's style and rhythm, restores omissions, andreflects more fully the complexity of the original work.After fiftyyears, "The Tin Drum" has, if anything, gained in power andrelevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, andstill amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; hisgrandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred M

Eugene wants to get on in the world. So he has come to Paris,where the streets teem with chancers, criminals and social climbers- and everyone is out for what they can get. When he finds a placeto stay at a shabby boarding house, he sees a potential plan tomake a fortune: the two beautiful, aristocratic women whomysteriously come at night to visit the lonely old lodger Goriot.Could they bring him the status and acceptance he craves? In thecity nothing is as it seems though. Soon Eugene gets out of hisdepth in a world of greed and obsession that he could never haveimagined. One that can only end in terrible tragedy.

Senhor Jose is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry,where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. Amiddle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond thecertificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are hisdaily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of ananonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, SenhorJose sets off to follow the thread that may lead him to thewoman-but as he gets closer, he discovers more about her, and abouthimself, than he would ever have wished. The loneliness of people'slives, the effects of chance, the discovery of love-all coalesce inthis extraordinary novel that displays the power and art of JoseSaramago in brilliant form.

From the moment these two legendary players took the court onopposing sides, they engaged in a fierce physical and psychologicalbattle. In Celtic green was Larry Bird, the hick from French Lick,with laser-beam focus, relentless determination, and a deadly jumpshot, a player who demanded excellence from everyone around him andwhose caustic wit left opponents quaking in their high-tops. MagicJohnson was Mr. Showtime, a magnetic personality with all the rightmoves. Young, indomitable, he was a pied piper in purple and gold.And he burned with an inextinguishable desire to win. Their uncommonly competitive relationship came to symbolize themost thrilling rivalry in the NBA—East vs. West, physical vs.finesse, old school vs. Showtime, even white vs. black. Each pushedthe other to greatness, and together Bird and Johnson collectedeight NBA Championships and six MVP awards, helping to save afloundering NBA. At the start they were bitter rivals, but alongthe way they became lifelong friends.

The first three books in von Ziegesar's Gossip Girls series are packaged together in this paperback boxed set. Includes "Gossip Girl, You Know You Love Me," and "All I Want Is Everything."

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of Dylan Ebdus growingup white and motherless in downtown Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's aneighborhood where the entertainments include muggings along withgames of stoopball. In that world, Dylan has one friend, a blackteenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. As Lethem follows theknitting and unraveling of their friendship, he creates anoverwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race andclass, superheros, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging,loyalty, and memory. The Fortress of Solitude" "is the first greaturban coming of age novel to appear in years.

From two-time Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr., comes one of the most important and influentialinvestigations of the American presidency. The Imperial Presidencytraces the growth of presidential power over two centuries, fromGeorge Washington to George W. Bush, examining how it has bothserved and harmed the Constitution and what Americans can do aboutit in years to come. The book that gave the phrase imperialpresidency to the language, this is a work of substantialscholarship written with lucidity, charm, and wit (The NewYorker).

An unconventional war requires unconventional men the Special Forces. Green Berets Navy SEALS Rangers Air Force Special Operations PsyOps Civil Affairs and other special-mission units The first two Commanders books, Every Man a Tiger and Into the Storm, provided masterly blends of history, biography, you-are-there narrative, insight into the practice of leadership, and plain old-fashioned storytelling. Shadow Warriors is all of that and more, a book of uncommon timeliness, for, in the words of Lieutenant General Bill Yarborough, there are itches that only Special Forces can scratch. Now, Carl Stiner the second commander of SOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command and Tom Clancy trace the transformation of the Special Forces from the small core of outsiders of the 1950s, through the cauldron of Vietnam, to the rebirth of the SF in the late 1980s and 1990s, and on into the new century as the bearer of the largest, most mixed, and most complex set of missions in the U.S. militar

The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demo

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comesthis compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed HumanFreakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark,count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways.Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, heworks for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cumdetective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King ofBrooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he setsthem are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatallystabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other twovie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel'sworld is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has troubleeven conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case whiletrying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklynis a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel b

The Spartans is a compelling narrative that explores theculture and civilization of the most famous "warrior people": theSpartans of ancient Greece, by the world's leading expert in thefield. Sparta has often been described as the original Utopia--aremarkably evolved society whose warrior heroes were forbidden anyother trade, profession, or business. As a people, the Spartanswere the living exemplars of such core values as duty, discipline,the nobility of arms in a cause worth dying for, sacrificing theindividual for the greater good of the community (illustrated bytheir role in the battle of Thermopylae), and the triumph of willover seemingly insuperable obstacles--qualities that today arefrequently believed to signify the ultimate heroism. Paul Cartledgeis the distinguished scholar and historian who has long been seenas the leading international authority on ancient Sparta. He tracesthe evolution of Spartan society--the culture and the people, aswell as the tremendous influence they had on their worl