Raymond Carver’s complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the five posthumously discovered “last” stories, found a decade after Carver’s death and published here in book form for the first time. Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver’s mature writing and give his devoted readers a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver’s writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

"The rope hung from top to bottom of his dream. The rope hung softly, saying nothing, doing nothing. Then the rope began to swing very softly, very gently...towards him." The need to face your fears; the comedy of family life; the pressure of others' expectations...Intense experiences of childhood are vividly brought to life in these eight atmospheric tales. A gripping collection of short stories from award-winning author Philippa Pearce.

While Jake is away at an out-of-town wedding, Tobias discovers the place where Visser Three feeds. There is a unanimous decision to acquire cheetah morphs and run him down. But which Animorph will lead the mission in Jake's absence?

From New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, now available in paperback—bestselling historical novelist Bernard Cornwell brings life to one of the most spectacular naval battles in history with SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR. "The greatest writer of historical adventures today." —Washington Post Critically acclaimed, perennial New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell (Agincourt, The Fort, the Saxon Tales) makes real history come alive in his breathtaking historical fiction. Praised as "the direct heir to Patrick O'Brian" (Agincourt, The Fort), Cornwell has brilliantly captured the fury, chaos, and excitement of battle as few writers have ever done—perhaps most vividly in his phenomenally popular novels following the illustrious military career of British Army officer Richard Sharpe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Chronicling Sharpe's involvement in the famous Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Sharpe's Trafalgar finds the young ensign captive on a French warship and in gravest peril on the eve of the one of the most spectacular naval confrontations in history. Perhaps the San Francisco Chronicle said it best: "If only all history lessons could be as vibrant."

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand. Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work. Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech. Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

Slim's a Texas bluesman of a certain age, down on his luck, and just about broke--but hey, that's what the blues are all about. Then, one day, in a single hot burst of lightning that comes straight up out of the ground, Slim finds himself in Tejas. Not Texas, but somewhere else. It's a little bit magic and a whole lot different, but the blues are the same. And the blues--manifest here in the form of a maple-necked pearl-gray Fender Stratocaster with blue-chrome pickups a.k.a. The Gutbucket--needs him and needs him bad. The Strat's fallen into the hands of T-Bone Pickens and his Vipers, who want to suck up all its power and turn it to evil. Slim's off and running on the Gutbucket Quest, with the help of his new mentor, rhythm guitarist Progress T. Hornsby, and a purely unstoppable blues singer named Nadine.

fiction; prose, Literature in Translation

When Sydney film producer Dimp Bettany discovers the memoirs of her ancestors, pioneer settler John Bettany and convict Sarah Bernard, she is convinced she has found the vehicle for her next film masterpiece. Filtered through Dimp's correspondence with her sister, Prim, an aid worker in the Sudan, we are drawn into the lives of John Bettany, a man far ahead of his time, as he shares his vivid impressions of a new colony, and his future wife Sarah and her close relationship with an English murderess.

fiction, prose, Women Writers

SUGAR, COCOA, CARAMEL, CHOCOLATE -- A MISSING CANDY FORMULA MAKES A STICKY MESS! What could be sweeter than a visit to Zuckerman's Zonked Candy Factory? Nancy and her class will see how their favorite candy is made, and even get free samples. Mr. Zuckerman himself gives the grand tour past the sparkling machines that spit out Sticky Gummy Goo, Karamel Krunchettes, Frostee Jewels, and more. Then Mr. Zuckerman tells the kids he has dreamed up the perfect candy. He even shows them the paper with the secret recipe. But when the visit is over, the recipe has disappeared and no one can find it! Is the greatest candy lost for good?

New York Times bestselling author Lynsay Sands returns with the unforgettable story of a reluctant bride and groom who soon find common ground in the bedroom . . . Bastard daughter to the king, Rosamunde was raised in a convent and wholly prepared to take the veil . . . until King Henry declared she would wed Aric, one of his most valiant knights. Suddenly she found herself promising to love, honor, and obey. Rosamunde's education had not covered a wedding night, but the handsome warrior she was now bound to seemed intent on giving her a lesson in the art of pleasure. In no time, Aric was certain she would surrender to the irresistible passion he promised. And while Rosamunde's spirited nature often put her at odds with her new husband, his mastery in seduction was quickly melting her resolve—and capturing her heart.

When Jesse went down to the marsh on that fateful day, he expected to find a turtle for terrapin soup. Instead, he comes across a dying slave woman who makes Jesse promise he’ll take her young son, Perry, to a relative in Baltimore. Aiding and abetting a slave is against the law, and it also goes against everything Jesse has been taught to believe. But he can’t break a promise to the dead, and, more important, he has to follow what he knows in his heart to be right.      The journey is more treacherous than Jesse ever imagined. At the crossroads of a country about to plunge into civil war, danger lurks around every corner. Will these boys on the run ever find a safe haven? * Includes an author's note.*

Her marriage to dashing American shipping magnate Jeff Birmingham signals the beginning of a wonderful new life for Raelynn Barrett. In the loving shelter of her husband's embrace, the pain of loss is diminished, as is her anger over her family's tragic and undeserved disgrace. But try as she might, Raelynn cannot close her ears to the cruel accusations and whispered rumors about her new spouse that buzz around her head like bees. And she cannot deny what her own eyes see, though the images before her seem to brand her darling Jeff as the worst sort of criminal, forcing her to flee his desire and his love. Yet Jeff knows he is innocent --- though he is unaware of the conspiracy that has shrouded his marriage in secrets and now imperils it with lies. And he will oppose the treachery with every fiber of his being in order to preserve his threatened happiness --- to win back the trust of the woman he cherishes ... and secure his place forever in his beloved Raelynn's heart.

Dakota Rawlings, Texas Ranger, is accustomed to big adventure…but nothing in his work has prepared him for the seemingly easy task of escorting Miss Darvi Wingate to the town of Stillwater and on to Aurora. Quick-witted, game for anything, and just as passionate about her newfound faith as Dakota is about his, Darvi seems to find trouble under every rock. When she becomes a pawn in one of the biggest rackets in town, she wonders if even a Texas Ranger can get her out of this one. Out here in the West, the stakes are high—for money, for power, and for love…under a Texas sky.

Have you ever wondered just what was going on when that odd little man with the long name stepped up and volunteered to spin straw into gold for the miller’s daughter? If you stop and think about it, there are some very peculiar and rather hard-to-explain components to the story. Vivian Vande Velde has wondered too, and she’s come up with these six alternative versions of the old legend. A bevy of miller’s daughters confront their perilous situation in very different ways — sometimes comic, sometimes scary. Most of the time, it’s the daughter who gets off safely, but sometimes, amazingly, Rumpelstiltskin himself wins the day. And in one tale, it is the king who cleverly escapes a quite unexpected fate.