Meryl Streep

Julie Powell is a frustrated insurance worker who wants to be a writer. Trying to find a challenge in her life, she decides to cook her way through Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' in one year, and to blog about it. As Julie begins to find her groove as a cook, and her voice as a writer, the project takes on a life of its own. The project provides the struggling young woman with her life's purpose, to her very pleasant surprise....

Novelist Alice Hughes boards an ocean liner with her two best friends from college to have some fun and heal old wounds, while her nephew - who tags along to look after them - falls for an alluring stowaway.

Karen Silkwood becomes contaminated with plutonium at her job, voices her protest at the indifference and denial of her company, and becomes a threat to the entire nuclear industry and the government agencies that monitor it. Based on a true story.

Set in 1985. Revolves around two very different men with AIDS, one fictional, one fictionalized. Roy Cohn personifies all the hypocrisy, delusion and callousness of the official response to the plague. Nothing shakes Roy's lack of empathy: even on his death bed, he's fighting with his gay nurse and taunting the woman he helped put to death, Ethel Rosenberg. The other patient is Prior Walter, who is visited by an angel and deserted by his self-pitying...

A dark comedy about greed, vanity, sex, immortality, life--and death.

Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it.

Sycamore seed siblings Merwin and Louise must use their wits and imaginations to navigate a mysterious and often dangerous world, filled with talking plants, monsters, meteors, and the fear of never finding the right conditions to set down roots and become big trees.

William Steig's Spinky Sulks is a 1988 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and Outstanding Book of the Year. Spinky is convinced that his family hates him and goes off to sulk in his hammock. His brother and sister try to make amends. His mom even brings him a beautiful tray of food. But nothing can get Spinky to stop sulking-not even a circus passing by on his street! Will Spinky ever cheer up? Spinky Sulks is another...

Here are twelve magnificent stories in which John Cheever celebrates -- with unequaled grace and tenderness -- the deepest feelings we have. As Cheever writes in his preface, 'These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.' John Cheever was born in...