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Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition. Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof." As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations."

Thomas Alva Edison died on October, 1931, but not before completing his greatest invention; a device for talking to the dead. Thought to be lost forever, Megan Goss, a gifted engineering student, tracks down the legendary blueprints. She rallies a group of friends to build it in a dilapidated house. What she doesn't tell the others is that this house has a history steeped in blood. A family brutally killed one another within its walls, and now that evil force lies in wait for someone to breach the tenuous membrane between worlds. Four students will learn some things are better left unknown when the flip of a switch frees a terror that forces them to the brink... and beyond.

It's the start of WWII in Northern Australia. The Japanese are getting close. People are evacuating and burning everything in a "scorched earth" policy. Rather than kill all their cattle, a disparate group decides to drive them overland half way across the continent, from Wyndham in Western Australia through the Northern Territory outback of Australia to pastures north of Brisbane, Queensland.

A couple visits the husband's family in India and finds itself in the middle of a fratricidal battle.

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In America and Britain, an era of weary consensus was displaced by the arrival of a political marriage of fiery idealists: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher transformed politics with a combination of breezy charm and assertive "Victorian values." In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of idiocy, the proof of which was to be found in every state, every work-place, and every library. In Idiot Proof, columnist Francis Wheen brilliantly evokes the key personalities of the post-political era—including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama bin Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer—while lamenting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. In turn comic, indignant, outraged and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, Idiot Proof is a masterful depiction of the daftness of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.

Shawn Stone is having a bad day. The funding for his film project is not there, his personal life is in shambles, he's out of time and money. He sees only one way to solve his problems - he must turn to the dark side and ask the King of Porn for some cash

A man proves that against all odds, he can turn tragedy into inspiration by becoming a world class champion, in this gripping tale of survival and courage.

The lives of several people take a terrifying turn after discovering the attic in an old house with a mysterious past.

Featuring interviews with former employees, fellow musicians, family members and journalists, and supported by original and exclusive never-seen-before footage, this star-studded rockumentary offers a fascinating insight into the creation and recording of one of the most ground-breaking and influential albums in pop history.

One year after a tragic incident tore their family apart, a grieving son and his estranged father embark on a journey into the wild to reconcile their past. When a horrifying accident leaves Russell badly injured, and strands them in the wild, it is up to October to save them both. However, this wilderness is not what it seems, and as they deteriorate, so to does their concept of reality.