Selected eBooks: 2010

Independent and spirited, Bathsheba Everdene owns the hearts of three men. Striving to win her love in different ways, their relationships with Bathsheba complicate her life in bucolic Wessex ' and cast shadows over their own. With the morals and expectations of rural society weighing heavily upon her, Bathsheba experiences the torture of unrequited love and betrayal, and discovers how random acts of chance and tragedy can dramatically alter life's course.

In That Paris Year, five smart, adventurous young women arrive on the banks of the Seine in 1962 for their junior year abroad. The young Americans discover a mythical country shaped not only by the upheavals of history, but by the great French writers of the 20th Century. Ten years later, our narrator, J. J., is asked to speak at her old college on the virtues of going abroad. Drawing on the emotionally charged tools of memory and imagination, she chronicles and re-creates the story of that momentous year.

A futuristic utopian novel, the book follows two young lovers who, as they travel from Rome to the capital of the United Planetary States to celebrate their OC mating union, OCO encounter the marvels of cultural and scientific advances along the way. Intriguing in itself, The Year 3000 is also remarkable for its vision of the future (predicting an astonishing array of phenomena from airplanes, artificial intelligence, CAT scans, and credit cards to controversies surrounding divorce, abortion, and euthanasia).

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about an Easter turkey. But when the turkey is stark white and appears on Easter Sunday on the doorstep of a Lakota medicine woman and her teenage granddaughter, it is clearly out of the ordinary. Taking turns, Stella and her grandmother, Hazel Latour, tell the story of what follows as the mysterious turkey stirs up discord on the reservation, where some greet it as wakan, holy and sacred because of its coloring and timing, and others dismiss it as inexplicable but unimportant, while a less reputable local healer views it as a clear challenge to his standing.

Bird Eat Bird, Katrina Best's first book of short stories, is a funny, smart, offbeat and insightful collection that explores themes that are equally poignant and hilarious. A thirty-year-old woman who still lives at home anticipates the experience of a third date; a teenaged vegetarian supermarket cashier struggles to scan a package of offal; an inscrutable pelican in a crowded London park decides to try something different for dinner. These artful stories are tinged with social commentary and reflect their author in that they feature characters and sensibilities from both Britain and Canada.

These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct after the Korean War. Written during the chaos of 1945, "Booze" recounts a fight between Koreans for control of a former Japanese-owned distillery. "Toad" relates the suffering created by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, and stories from the 1950s confront the catastrophes of the Korean War and the problematic desire for autonomy.

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor-and self-professed Nazi. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology.

In 1903, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell and five followers founded a colony called the House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they prepared for eternal life by creating a heaven on earth. Eden Springs follows a growing scandal within the colony's walls. A gravedigger has seen something suspicious in a recently buried casket, a loyal assistant to Benjamin is plotting a cover-up, talk is swirling about unmarried girls having babies, and a rebellious girl named Lena is ready to tell the truth.

In this sequel to The Beasts of Tarzan, the Lord of the Apes' old nemesis (Alexis Paulvitch) lures Tarzan's son, Jack, to Africa, where he plans to kill him. His plan is foiled when Jack escapes with the help of Akut, the great ape. The pair flee to the jungle where Tarzan was raised a generation earlier, and Jack establishes his own reputation among the apes as Korak the Killer. He also rescues Meriem, a beautiful young woman, from a band of Arab raiders. She turns out to be the daughter of Ar.

One of the preeminent authors of the early twentieth century, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) produced fourteen ground-breaking plays, nine novels, and more than fifty short stories. Her work was popular and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, with her novels appearing on best-seller lists and her stories published in major magazines and in The Best American Short Stories. Many of her short works display her remarkable abilities as a humorist, satirizing cultural conventions and the narrowness of small-town life.

An all time classic, this version of Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 days has been specially formatted for today's e-readers. Follow Phileas Fogg and Passepartout as Fogg takes a wager to travel around the world in what was - at the time - an unthinkably short amount of time!

The Stories contained in Arabian Nights have been handed down from generation to generation and are just as compelling today as they were when first told. This collection, specially selected and edited by Andrew Lang is a wonderful anthology, and will delight readers young and old.

Britain is in crisis. Unrest and inner city tensions feed on unemployment. Divisions in the Cabinet force the premier's resignation. Because circumstances are too dire to afford the luxury of an election, the Queen calls a meeting of the three main party leaders. The Leader of the Opposition had been asked to form a national government. With the support of the other two party leaders, he sets out to win over the cabinet, parliament and the country to implement reform.

This edition of Wuthering Heights has been specially formatted for today's e-readers by Andrews UK. Emily Bronte's first and only novel was first published in 1847; It is set in Yorkshire and tells of the turbulent relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw that eventually destroys them and those around them. Even though it had limited success on publication it has become a classic of English Literature.

In Creekside, dedicated archaeologist Meg Harrington guides her students in a race against time to protect the legacy of the past before bulldozers rip it to shreds. The setting is a Kentucky pasture slated for development--the construction of the new Creekside subdivision. Once, that same beautiful stretch of land was home to three generations who experienced love, loss, and tragedy in their log cabin beside the creek. It was here during the late 18th century that Estelle Mullins struggled to build her home on the dangerous frontier.

In Lynn K. Kilpatrick's In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shorts--lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions--In the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry. In a home suffused with fragility or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatrick's men and women navigate around one another's eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine.

Their conquest was measured not in miles but in degrees of longitude. They smashed the gates of empires, overthrew kingdoms, diverted rivers, and depopulated entire countries. They were the Mongols of Genghis Khan, swift and merciless but also resourceful, bold, and cunning. Their tale has seldom been told in the West, and never by an author with the acumen of Harold Lamb.

The dust has cleared from the 1911 revolution, and Peking's diplomatic set languish in an exotic world suspended somewhere between East and West, between propriety and decadence. Against this backdrop, Jean Maugrais finds himself the target of two married women's affections. But he longs for something more than the endless frivolities of the "smart set" and yearns to be more than a silhouette, an outsider skimming on the surface of a great civilization he doesn't fully understand.

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience, a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more, these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life.

Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it's not long before the preacher finds he's come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life's work: to die in front of a group of strangers. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely congregation must reckon with his or her own dark past.

For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen's stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.

The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than him.

A fictional meditation on time and experience--part journal, part meditation, part dreamscape. In language that is frank and uncompromising, Rob Stephenson's debut novel, Passes Through, moves forward in a rare and daring manner. Part journal, part meditation on aesthetics, part dreamscape, Passes Through investigates experience, identity, beauty, and sexuality, while provocatively complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagination versus observation.

The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost incorporates Korean folk tales, ghost stories, and myth into a phenomenal depiction of epic tragedy. The novel tells the story of Mandogi, a young priest living on the island of Cheju-do. Mandogi becomes unwittingly involved in the Four-Three Incident of 1948, in which the South Korean government brutally suppressed an armed peasant uprising and purged Cheju-do of communist sympathizers. Although Mandogi is sentenced to death for his part in the riot, he survives (in a sense) to take revenge on his enemies and fully commit himself to the resistance.

This generous volume of new and selected poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a storyteller's informality. It also shows the development of his signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in poems "connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ in small details."

In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein's accounts "stretch like a tightrope across a chasm," writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction.

When it comes to divining motives, deciphering ambiguous pronouncements, detecting delusions, and foiling the tricks memory plays, famed French analyst Jacques Lacan - turned self-proclaimed retired Inspector Quesjac Canal - is second to none. Reluctantly drawn into helping hapless New York City police detectives with crimes reported by luminaries like Rolland Saalem, music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and involving prominent personages like Tobias Trickler, Mayor of New York City, and Sandra Errand, Vice-President at YVEH Distributors of Spirits, Canal solves cases that are anything but what they appear to be.

The Fifth Principle is the first of three books that take as their subject aspects of the author's life. This book reflects upon a period between birth and eight years of age; the second book will address adolescence and the third, adulthood. It would be misleading to consider what follows to be autobiography, or the "case history" of an individual. The author of the book, and the individual written about, are not the same person. It is a piece of literature that furnishes an account of the methods of a mind in its efforts to prevail in oppressive circumstances.

Ben Wesley has lost his job as agricultural agent for Ames County. He is soon hired as a research application specialist for Osborne University, a for-profit institution that has developed "Cranberry Red," a new chemical that promises not only to improve cranberry crop yields but also to endow the fruits with the power to prevent heart disease, reduce brain damage from strokes, and ward off Alzheimer's disease. Ben must promote the new product to cranberry growers in Ames County and beyond, but he worries whether the promised results are credible.

The landscape of this novel in stories--Joseph Cardinale's first book-length work of fiction--is as familiar as childhood yet beguilingly surreal. The question of whether or not the child in the first fiction and the man in the last story are the same person--and whether any person is the same from one moment to the next--is perhaps the book's main question. In prose as spare as it is meticulous, The Size of the Universe is a debut work that is inviting, perplexing, and bold.

The stories in "The Thin Line" engage and reel in the reader on that 'thin line' from the start. The carefully drawn characters are haunting: Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, and poor skinny Mark, as he sees his love teeter away from him. Ten Minutes to Hate tells of an armed robbery in a packed theatre, and its effect, emotionally and psychologically, on two of the people involved. Collage is the story of a possessive love so fierce, that only death can resolve it.

This first collection of Father Brown mysteries, widely considered the author's best, includes The Blue Cross, The Hammer of God, The Eye of Apollo, and more. Father Brown is the opposite of Sherlock Holmes, the quiet, nondescript little priest whom nobody notices. Readers who enjoy classic fiction - and a good mystery - will love this special hand-crafted, digitally-formatted ebook edition.

Friendly Fallout 1953 is a hybrid work of literature that combines the actual history of aboveground atomic testing in the Nevada desert in 1953 with fictional vignettes that explore the impact of the tests on the people who participated in them and on civilian "downwinders. While most of the details are factual, the characters are imaginary composites of men, women, and children affected by the testing program in that fateful year. Their stories bring to life a turbulent era when Cold War fears, patriotic enthusiasm, scientific progress, and unacknowledged political agendas often collided with the welfare of ordinary citizens and the environment.

New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

Juanita Hutchins serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station--and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson.

The Beasts of Tarzan is the third pulp fiction novel about the Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This book finds the ape lord settled in civilized London as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. But he becomes the target of his enemy, Nikolas Rokoff and his henchman Alexis Paulvitch. The pair abduct Tarzan's Jane and their infant son Jack. Tarzan ends up stranded on a desert island, but with the help of Sheeta the panther and Akut the great ape he makes it back to the mainland.