Here is a story with a boy hero, and a boy of whom you have never before heard. There are girls in the story, too, including our old friend Dorothy, and some of the characters wander a good way from the Land of Oz before they all assemble in the Emerald City to take part in Ozma's banquet. Indeed, I think you will find this story quite different from the other histories of Oz, but I hope you will not like it the less on that account.

Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists--Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who's Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez--not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors--Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective. Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedented and penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter.

Henry and his wife, Frances, live an idyllic life as two of the Caribbean's most charming ex-pats (and professional assassins). But when Donnie, a powerful capo, is relocated to the island the scene is set for an Elmore Leonard-style mix of low life and high comedy.

David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favorites as the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris's tales of tardy trick-or-treaters ("Us and Them"); the difficulties of explaining the Easter Bunny to the French ("Jesus Shaves"); what to do when you've been locked out in a snowstorm ("Let It Snow"); the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations ("Six to Eight Black Men"); what Halloween at the medical examiner's looks like ("The Monster Mash"); and a barnyard secret Santa scheme gone awry ("Cow and Turkey"). No matter what your favorite holiday, you won't want to miss celebrating it with the author who has been called "one of the funniest writers alive" (Economist).

Rachel's got some pretty strange stuff happening. She can't control her morphing. One minute, she's doing homework. The next, she's morphing a full-grown crocodile, and -- without returning to human form -- she becomes an elephant. That's when the floor gives way and Rachel finds herself looking up at what used to be the kitchen ceiling. What's going on? No one's sure, but Rachel and the other Animorphs have to figure it out -- quickly. Because if someone sees Rachel's out-of-control morphing, the other Animorphs and Ax are in some serious trouble...

Rachel Connery is on a seek-and-destroy mission, out for revenge against the mysterious, charismatic man who enticed millions of dollars from her dying mother and cheated her out of her inheritance. She wants retribution and is willing to use every seductive trick at her disposal to obtain it. But desire is a dangerous weapon that cuts both ways, and her trap could end up catching her in a nightmare of forbidden feelings.

Excited about dressing up for the Halloween parade, Ms. Colman's students are disappointed when the costumes fail to arrive, but they have plenty of fun wearing funny Groucho Marx eyeglasses instead. Original."

While visiting their aunt and uncle in San Francisco the Alden children visit Fisherman's Wharf. After they ride on their uncle's boat they discover something fishy is going on in the wharf and someone doesn't want Uncle Andy to catch any fish.

When Claudia is told that her friend Rebecca's grandmother burned all of her own famous artworks before she died, she is suspicious and sets out to find the real truth.

Dating both a vampire and a werewolf isn't easy. But just to complicate Anita's already messy life, someone has put a price on her head. Love cannot save her this time, so she turns to Edward, hitman extraordinaire, for help. But finding the person behind the threat won't be easy, because as both a vampire hunter and zombie reanimator, Anita has made a lot of enemies-both human and otherwise.

One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted in space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left behind--and just as the Monolith may be stirring once again . . .

The Cobra Event is set in motion one spring morning in New York City, when a seventeen-year-old student wakes up feeling vaguely ill. Hours later she is having violent seizures, blood is pouring out of her nose, and she has begun a hideous process of self-cannibalization. Soon, other gruesome deaths of a similar nature have been discovered, and the Centers for Disease Control sends a forensic pathologist to investigate. What she finds precipitates a federal crisis. The details of this story are fictional, but they are based on a scrupulously thorough inquiry into the history of biological weapons and their use by civilian and military terrorists. Richard Preston's sources include members of the FBI and the United States military, public health officials, intelligence officers in foreign governments, and scientists who have been involved in the testing of strategic bioweapons. The accounts of what they have seen and what they expect to happen are chilling. The Cobra Event is a dramatic, heart-stopping account of a very real threat, told with the skill and authority that made Preston's The Hot Zone an internationally acclaimed bestseller. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A stranger arrives in a Russian backwater community with a bizarre proposition for the local landowners: cash for their "dead souls," the serfs who have died in their service and for whom they must continue to pay taxes until the next census. The landowner receives a payment and a relief of his tax burden, and the stranger receives — what? Gogol\'s comic masterpiece offers the answer in a vast and satirical painting of the Russian panorama, as it traces the path and encounters of its mysterious protagonist, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, in pursuit of his dubious scheme.The plot of Dead Souls is reputed to have been inspired by an actual episode related to the author by his friend, the poet Pushkin. Although intended as a three-part novel, only the first part and a few fragments of a draft of the second part exist; Gogol completed and destroyed the second part, and died in the course of his ascetic preparations for writing the third. Some readers consider his novel a realistic portrait of nineteenth-century Russia; others regard it as a work of great symbolism, proclaiming the trickster Chichikov an accurate image of commercial travelers the world over, whose success rests less upon their actual wares than on their grasp of human nature and powers of persuasion. Among the greatest nineteenth-century Russian novels, Dead Souls continues to inspire twenty-first century authors and readers.

The doctor's diagnosis for April Lancaster is not good. April has a brain tumor which cannot be operated on. She's only 18, and her future is uncertain. But when she meets Mark Gianni, a 21-year-old with a passionfor car racing, things change. Mark is handsome and charming--and has cystic fibrosis. Despite herself, April falls completely in love with him. April says yes whenMark asks her to marry him. But a racing accident aggravates Mark's CF, and April must make a decision that will change the course of her life forever. "From the Paperback edition."

Alfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short stories—two of them previously unpublished—that have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time. Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Make a deal with the Devil—but not without calling your agent. Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers. CONTENTS: Disappearing Act Oddy and Id Star Light, Star Bright (1953) 5,271,009 (1954) Fondly Fahrenheit (1954) Hobson's Choice (1952) Of Time and Third Avenue (1952) Time is the Traitor (1953) The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (1958) The Pi Man (1959) They Don't Make Life Like They Used To (1963) Will You Wait? (1959) The Flowered Thundermug (1964) Adam and No Eve (1941) And 3 1/2 to Go Galatea Galante (1979) The Devil Without Glasses