"Guy Mannering" is the story of young Henry Bertram's kidnapping. The heir to a wealthy ancestral estate, his family's lawyer has him kidnapped in the hopes that with no male heir, the estate and its wealth, will revert to him. Henry is raised in Holland, with a new name completely unaware of the life stolen from him. In a globe-trotting adventure, filled with romance, conspiracy and violence, Henry will be forced to reckon with his past by fighting...

It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...

Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures (some famous, some infamous, some unknown) associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR from 1900-1968.

This classic of anthropological literature is a dramatic, revealing account of an anthropologist's first year in the field with a remote African tribe. Simply as a work of ethnographic interest, Return to Laughter provides deep insights into the culture of West Africa-me subtle web of its tribal life and the power of the institution of witchcraft. However, the author's fictional approach gives the book its lasting appeal. She focuses on the human...

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.

In these short stories it's the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly:...

Presents short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author O. Henry, including the title work about the Christmas sacrifices of a young married couple.