Stephen King cranks up the suspense in a different kind of bedtime story. A game of seduction between a husband and wife goes horribly awry when the husband suddenly dies. But the wife's nightmare has just begun.

«On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as «The Long Walk.» If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying. Reissue.»

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them — earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder — sorely testing the young hero's optimism.

«The stories collected here, including «The Alien Corn», «Flotsam and Jetsam», and «The Vessel of Wrath», reconfirm Maugham's stature as one of the masters of the short story.»

These thirty stories — most set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings — show a master of the genre at the peak of his power.

«George Orwell's first published work, «Down and Out in Paris and London», is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, surviving only between the pawnbroker and a little teaching and writing, Orwell shocked the middle-class establishment with his observation of the misery, the hopelessness and the despair of the poor of a previously unexplored Paris and London.»

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.

In 1960, when he was almost 60 years old, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the United States, feeling he might have lost touch with its sights sounds and the essence of its people. This book decribes his travels in a pick-up truck across nearly 40 states with his dog Charlie, a French poodle.

Ethan Allen Hawley has lost the acquisitive spirit of his wealthy forebears. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery store clerk. But his wife is restless, his teenage children troubled and hungry for material comforts. Then a series of unusual events reignites Ethan's ambition.

«When Georgia Abbot`s fiance cheats on her she leaves her humdrum life in London for a job at «Glow» magazine in Sydney, Australia. At first things seem promising, as she`s swept up in a whirl of parties, dancing and debauchery. But Australian men are — oh dear — starting to look all too familiar.»

Commissioned by the Left Book club in 1936, George Orwell set out to report on working class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The experience profoundly changed him, and in Wigan Pier he unleased a brilliant and bitter polemic that has not lost its force with the passage of time. The first edition of The Road to Wigan Pier' included 32 plates. These illustrations of slum conditions, which give added resonance to Orwell's indictment, are restored in this new edition.

The triffids are a monstrous species of stinging plant; they walk, they talk, they dominate the world. The narrator of this novel wakes up in hospital to find that, by missing the end of the world, he has survived to witness a new world. But the new world that awaits him is fantastic and horrific.

String beans, spaghetti, Zoooop, roast beef, fresh fish, chicken and ice cream are the delicious fare during the week in this popular children's song. Until Sunday. Then, all the world's children are invited to come together and share in the meal. Celebrated artist Eric Carle brings new energy to these much-loved verses as lively animals parade across the page, munching on favorite dishes, and introducing young readers to the names of the days of the week. Both art and song invite children to join in the procession and sing along.

This one-volume history — from early British colonization to the fall of President Nixon — captures all the vivid personalities and events as well as the broad sweep of America's triumphant progress. Hugh Brogan looks at the period leading to Independence from the American and British points of view, explores the permanent features, both good and bad, of the American character and produces a synthesis of all the current research to show how the USA developed so rapidly from small beginnings to global dominance.

In January, 1958, America's best hope to catch up with the Russians in the space race sits on a pad at Cape Canaveral. But the launch of the Explorer I satellite is delayed due to the weather, even though it is a sunny day. The real reason rests deep in the mind of a NASA scientist who wakes that morning with his memory completely erased — he knows a dark secret someone wants him to forget.

In life she was a high-profile model, but in death she's the focus of a media firestorm that demands action from Lucas Davenport. One of his own men is a suspect in her murder. But when a series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated slayings rock the city, Davenport suspects a connection that leads to an ingenious killer more ruthless than anyone feared.