"While a single short story may have a difficult time raisingenough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization,short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees,blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you canthink about," writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The BestAmerican Short Stories 2006. This vibrant, varied sampler of theAmerican literary scene revels in life's little absurdities,captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimatelyshares subtle insight and compassion. In "The View from CastleRock," the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictionalaccount of her Scottish ancestors' emigration to Canada in 1818.Nathan Englander's cast of young characters in "How We Avenged theBlums" confronts a bully dubbed "The Anti-Semite" to both comic andtragic ends. In "Refresh, Refresh," Benjamin Percy gives aforceful, heart-wrenching look at a young man's choices when hisfather -- along with most of the men in his small town -- isdeployed to Ir

La Bruyère livre ses réflexions sur les moeurs du XVIIesiècle, en seize chapitres dont, selon lui, ?quinze s'attachent àdécouvrir le faux et le ridicule qui se rencontrent dans l'objetdes passions et des attachements humains [et ] ne sont que lapréparation du seizième [ ... ] où l'athéisme est attaqué et où lespreuves de Dieu [ ... ] sont apportées. Satire sociale, protraits réflexions et maximes émaillent cetexte éminemment moraliste.

Los Angeles, 1953: six innocent people gunned down at anall-night diner. Three policemen arrive to investigate: Ed Exley,goaded by his father's success on the force, burning to eclipsehim; Bud White, witness to his mother's murder, a time bomb with abadge; and Jack Vincennes, former addict, a shake-down artist whoworks celebrities. Worse yet, these three see themselves as rivals.Their own rage mirrors that of the killers they seek, all playersin a game without rules or survivors.

Montmirail, Marne, 51. Antonio, un ma?on portugais, croise unjour Véronique Chambon, l'institutrice de son fils. Entre eux senoue une idylle secrète, inavouée. Pourquoi et comment tombe-t-onamoureux ? Il peut suffire d'un regard timide, d'une sonate deviolon, d'un champ de blé pour découvrir des sentiments et desémotions qu'on ne soup?onnait pas... Histoire d'une passion simple,Mademoiselle Chambon est aussi une chronique de la vieprovinciale.

Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia,Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinatingstory of the final days of Russian monarchs Nicholas and Alexandraas seen through the eyes of the Romanov's young kitchen boy,Leonka.

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).

Review 'Well presented and full of genuinely good ideas... it really is like carrying a mini Trin&Suse around with you.' HEAT Product De*ion 'It's what every woman needs today...' Trinny and Susannah There is never enough time in the day, week, month or year. Trinny and Susannah have learned how to juggle home, family and work and still have time for themselves. Their secret weapon is being organised. This book brings together everything they have learned on clothes, make-up, running a home, children, family, work and holidays - plus hundreds of essential time-saving ideas and useful day-to-day information. 作者简介： Trinny & Susannah's eighth primetime television series will be shown on ITV in the autumn. They are contributors to Heat magazine and the Sun. They are Britain's best known style experts, called upon to adjudicate on all matters sartorial. Trinny and Susannah's sixth prime time television series will be shown on ITV in autumn. They write for the Sun and are n

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.

The Bestselling New Detective Series of the Decade Just GotHotter, Deadlier, and More Suspenseful. In a deadly late-nightshowdown, San Francisco police lieutenant Lindsay Boxer fires herweapon and sets off a dramatic chain of events that leaves a policeforce disgraced, a family destroyed, and Lindsay herself at themercy of twelve jurors. During a break in the trial, she retreatsto a picturesque town that is reeling from a string of grislymurders-crimes that bear a link to a haunting, unsolved case fromher rookie years.Now, with her friends in the Women's Murder Club,Lindsay must battle for her life on two fronts: in a trial rushingto a climax, and against an unknown adversary willing to doanything to hide the truth about the homicides-including killagain?

Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and hermother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world.She is. Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worseplace than Death Row. He's wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinkssomething beyond imagination is coming. It is. THEPASSAGE.

Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Que vient faire ce chien errant dans une petite ville italienne? Pourquoi cinq frères s'évitent-ils soudain ? Qui a composé cettemusique révolutionnaire et obsédante? Trois nouvelles aux décors etaux situations sans lien apparent. Pourtant, à la lecture, toujoursla même atmosphère inquiétante et mystérieuse. L'auteur du " Désertdes Tartares " et du " K ", tout en se plaisant à détourner labanale anecdote vers le fantastique ou l'irréel, sonde ici le genrehumain à travers ses passions et ses vanités.

Passionate and perceptive, the three short novels that make upBalzac's "History of the Thirteen" are concerned in part with theactivities of a rich, powerful, sinister and unscrupulous secretsociety in nineteenth-century France. While the deeds of "TheThirteen" remain frequently in the background, however, theindividual novels are concerned with exploring various forms ofdesire. A tragic love story, Ferragus depicts a marriage destroyedby suspicion, revelation and misunderstanding. The Duchess deLangeais explores the anguish that results when a society coquettetries to seduce a heroic ex-soldier, while "The Girl with theGolden Eyes" offers a frank consideration of desire and sexuality.Together, these works provide a firm and fascinating foundation forBalzac's many later portrayals of Parisian life in his greatnovel-cycle "The Human Comedy".

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed historyteacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent acertain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But duringthe night, when he is awakened by noises in his apartment, he goesinto the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video.He watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him-or,more specifically, exactly like he did five years before,mustachioed and fuller in the face-appears on the screen. He sleepsbadly. Against his better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursuehis double. As he roots out the man's identity, what begins as awhimsical story becomes a "wonderfully twisted meditation onidentity and individuality" (The Boston Globe). Saramago displayshis remarkable talent in this haunting tale of appearance versusreality.

You only find true love once. When Werther dances with the beautiful Lotte, it seems as though he is in paradise. It is a joy, however, that can only ever be short-lived. Engaged to another man, she tolerates Werther's adoration and encourages his friendship. She can never return his love. Broken-hearted, he leaves her home in the country, trying to escape his own desire. But when he receives a letter telling him that she is finally married, his passion soon turns to destructive obsession. And as his life falls apart, Werther is haunted by one certainty. He has lost his reason for living.

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s great tragedy of a fall into evil. The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the First Folio (1623), the only authoritative text of the play. It is accompanied by an introduction, detailed explanatory annotations, and textual notes. A rich “Sources and Contexts” section provides readers with an understanding of Macbeth’s origins through the works of Seneca, Raphael Holinshed, and The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents and the Death of Herod. The cultural controversies surrounding the play—free will, predestination, witchcraft, tyrannicide, and equivocation—are debated by various authors. Adaptations of Macbeth are included for comparative reading, among them Welcome Msomi’s recent South African retelling, uMabatha. Four hundred years of critical interpretation of Macbeth are represented in seventeen judiciously-chosen essays, among them assessments by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Siddons, A. C. Bradley, Janet Adelman, Derek Jacobi, Stephen O

In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best andbrightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger -fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generousworking-class nurse. So begins a series of complications - not onlyof the heart but also of the head - as Fred and Daisy take up eachother's education and turn each other's philosophies upsidedown.