Elizabeth Bennet is young, vivacious, strong-willed, and unmarried. Mr. Darcy is rich, handsome, unbearably arrogant, and also unmarried. The two are reluctantly attracted to one another. Yet they each fight against the love they feel with fierce pride and willful prejudice.

Life in the small English town of Cranford seems very quiet and peaceful. The ladies of Cranford lead tidy, regular lives. They make their visits between the hours of twelve and three, give little evening parties, and worry about their maid-servants. But life is not always smooth - there are little arguments and jealousies, sudden deaths and unexpected marriages... Mrs Gaskell's timeless picture of small-town life in the first half of the nineteenth...

Approaching his seventh birthday after writing five books, young Bertie learns a lesson about the dangers of wish-fulfillment, while Angus and Domenica contemplate a vacation romance, and Big Lou evaluates the merits of cosmetic surgery.

Pioneer homesteaders facing drought and debt give way to modern-day hippies trying to lose themselves in the vanishing wilderness and real estate developers out to make a buck--unforgettable characters in nine stories that range in tone from crude cowboy humor to heartbreaking American tragedy.

Emma Woodhouse imagines that she dominates those around her in the small town of Highbury, but her inept matchmaking creates problems for herself and others.

Introduces the Chinese New Year, including the Chinese calendar and the animals that symbolize each year, and describes how the holiday is celebrated, from wrapping money in red paper to attending the Lantern Festival and the Dragon Dance.

Hassan is a culinary ingenue with the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Displaced from their native India, his family settles in a quaint village in the south of France. They plan to open an Indian restaurant, that is, until Madame Mallory, the owner of a classical French restaurant, gets wind of it. Her icy protests against the new Indian restaurant so near her own escalate to all out war; until Hassan's cooking talent and love for Mme. Mallory's...

This is the title story from the collection Wild Child and was originally published in McSweeney's. It is at the end of the eighteenth century, in the new French Republic, when the savage is first seen outside the village of Lacaune. The boy quickly becomes a legend among the townsfolk. Is he truly a human child or a wild beast? "Wild Child" is based on the story of Victor of Aveyron, the feral child brought from the French wilderness to Paris in...

In [this book], Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan is must reading to fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century. Though more than eighty years...

Roach takes a magnifying glass to everyday life, exposing moments of hilarity in the mundane and revealing amusing musings about marriage, automated customer service, and mazelike bargain stories.