The dead arise from their sleep in the cemetery of a small town to tell their individual stories about an entire community caught in a web of scandal, sin, and vice in the early twentieth century.

This modern edition of "Twas the night before Christmas," features four different homes and families, each on Christmas Eve, that reflect the diverse world we live in, lush landscapes and charming scenes capture the wonder and magic of Christmas. What do these four homes share? The excitement and anticipation of the most splendid night of the year. In this tale, the illustrator reminds us that no matter where we live, all children share the same wish...

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties Americas contemporary moment both to our nations fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy.

"Originally performed at the Kennedy Center for the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and later as a tribute to Walter Dean Myers, this stirring and inspirational poem is New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds's rallying cry to the dreamers of the world. Jump Anyway is for kids who dream. Kids who dream of being better than they are. Kids who dream of doing more than they almost dare to dream....

Five stories by the nineteenth-century American writer best known for his tales of horror.

"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their...

Allen Ginsberg reading a selection of his poems.

Poe's tales haunt and thrill, read with perfection. Includes The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, and more.

Describes how Miguel de Cervantes found refuge from his childhood troubles by daydreaming of a brave knight who would right the wrongs of the world, the inspiration for his famous character Don Quixote.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University's library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve"American culture" in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are...