General

The Best American Short Stories 2005 (The Best American Series)

The Best American Series
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane • Tom Perrotta • Alice Munro • Edward P. Jones • Joy Williams • Joyce Carol Oates • Thomas McGuane • Kelly Link • Charles D'Ambrosio • Cory Doctorow • George Saunders • and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best-selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Memoirs of Montparnasse (New York Review Books Classics)

Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco’s memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.

Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Wallace Stegner weaves together fiction and nonfiction, history and impressions, childhood remembrance and adult reflections in this unusual portrait of his boyhood. Set in Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where Stegner's family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920, Wolf Willow brings to life both the pioneer community and the magnificent landscape that surrounds it. This Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes a new introductory essay by Page Stegner.

The Cornish Trilogy

New Worlds of Literature: Writings from America's Many Cultures

Shadows on the Rock (Vintage Classics)

Francis Parkman : France and England in North America : Vol. 1: Pioneers of France in the New World, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, The Old Regime in Canada (Library of America)

This is the first of two volumes presenting all seven parts of Francis Parkman's monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman's "history of the American forest" is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the adventures he describes. This volume begins with the tragic settlement of French Huguenots in Florida, then shifts north as explorers like Samuel de Champlain map the wilderness and wage savage forest warfare against the Iroquois; resolute Jesuits attempt to convert the Indians and suffer captivity, torture, and martyrdom in the wilderness; conflict rages in French Canada between religious extremists and fur traders. Dominating all is the fiercely indomitable La Salle, whose obsession with colonizing the Mississippi Valley leads to vast treks across the western prairie and assassination in a lonely Texas swamp.

The Call of the Wild (Unabridged Classics)

Buck lives a content life. Half St. Bernard, half Shepard, he is top dog on a California ranch. But the Gold Rush in the Klondike has produced an enormous demand for sled dogs so, when a Gardner at the ranch needs to pay a gambling debt, stealing and selling Buck is a quick way to do it.
Having never been mistreated, Buck soon learns that man can be the cruelest animal. He is whipped, beaten and caged, but never broken. Confronted by the law of survival, Buck learns to fight, steal and pull a sled. He takes pride in his new strength and ferocity. Buck manages to escape this life of abuse and learns to love a new master more than his own life. He gradually discovers the skills of his forbears and finds his home in the primordial forest - eventually Buck cannot resist the call of the wild.
This classic book brings out the true spirit of the Gold Rush days at the turn of the last century. It portrays the brutality, kindness, love, and folly that Jack London experienced first hand during his time in the far north. It was his first successful book, and catapulted him to literary fame.

Origins: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin, 1822-1859. Anniversary edition. (Selected Letters of C. Darwin)

Charles Darwin changed the direction of modern thought by establishing the basis of evolutionary biology. This fascinating selection of letters, offers a glimpse of his daily experiences, scientific observations, personal concerns and friendships. Beginning with a charming set of letters at the age of twelve, through his university years in Edinburgh and Cambridge up to the publication of his most famous work, On the Origin of Species in 1859, these letters chart one of the most exciting periods of Darwin's life, including the voyage of the Beagle and subsequent studies which led him to develop his theory of natural selection. Darwin's vivid writing style enables the reader to see the world through his own eyes, as he matures from grubby schoolboy in Shropshire to one of the most controversial thinkers of modern times. This is a special Anniversary Edition of the best-selling Burkhardt: Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection, 1825-1859

Special Anniversary Edition of the best-selling Burkhardt: Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859 now with new, previously unpublished letters. This fascinating selection of the actual letters written to and from Darwin charts some of the most exciting periods in the life of one of the most controversial thinkers of modern times.

City of Glass: Doug Coupland's Vancouver