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The beloved real-life story of a woman in the Alaskan wilderness, the children she taught, and the man she loved “From the time I’d been a girl, I’d been thrilled with the idea of living on a frontier. So when I was offered the job of teaching school in a gold-mining settlement called Chicken, I accepted right away.” Anne Hobbs was only nineteen in 1927 when she came to harsh and beautiful Alaska. Running a ramshackle schoolhouse would expose her to more than just the elements. After she allowed Native American children into her class and fell in love with a half-Inuit man, she would learn the meanings of prejudice and perseverance, irrational hatred and unconditional love. “People get as mean as the weather,” she discovered, but they were also capable of great good. As told to Robert Specht, Anne Hobbs’s true story has captivated generations of readers. Now this beautiful new edition is available to inspire many more. “The memoir reads like an old-fashioned novel, a heartwarming love story with the added interest of frontier hardships and vividly portrayed characters.”—Publishers Weekly

In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. She also came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute—men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Here Sister Helen confronts both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the fears of a society shattered by violence and the Christian imperative of love. On its original publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking emerged as an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty. Now, some two decades later, this story—which has inspired a film, a stage play, an opera and a musical album—is more gut-wrenching than ever, stirring deep and life-changing reflection in all who encounter it. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Trapped within an eerie mist, the residents of Antonio Bay have become the unwitting victims of a horrifying vengeance. One hundred years earlier, a ship carrying lepers was purposely lured onto the rocky coastline and sank, drowning all aboard. Now they're back—long-dead mariners who've waited a century for their revenge.

The third installment in Tanya Huff's exciting military sci-fi adventure Confederation seriesGunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr was a Confederation Marine’s marine. She’d survived more deadly encounters—and kept more of her officers and enlisteds alive—than anyone in the Corps, and she was determined to keep the record intact. But since her last mission, she’d been sidelined into endless briefings and debriefings with no end in sight. So, of course, she’d jumped at the chance to go to the Crucible—the Marine Corps training planet—as temporary aide to Major Svensson. The major had been reduced to little more than a brain and spinal cord in his last combat, and he and his doctor were anxious to field test his newly re-grown body. It should have been an easy twenty-day run. After all, Crucible was only set up to simulate battle situations so recruits could be trained safely. But they were barely on-planet when someone started blasting the training scenarios to smithereens. And suddenly Kerr found herself not only responsible for the major and his doctor, but caught in a desperate fight to keep a platoon of Marine recruits alive until someone discovered what was happening on Crucible....

Follows two young Hungarian basketball players, Pataki and Gyuri, from the last years of World War II through the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956, as they search for food, lodging, and female companionship. Reprint.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection   As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious if distracted fifth-grader starts to daydream about baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo is one of America’s finest writers, and here, truthfully and with compassion, he unwinds the slow disillusionment of childhood.   A selection from Russo’s tenderhearted collection of short stories, The Whore’s Child.   An ebook short.

The satellite has vanished and the only clue is a trail leading to a small village nestled on the outskirts of forest line. As the team begins to investigate they quickly discover that something else came back from space, something not of this world. As their time runs out, the team must battle to unlock the terrifying truth behind the ill-fated mission.

Two of the New York Times bestselling Morganville Vampire novels-in one bloodthirsty volume. Midnight Alley Claire Danvers has pledged herself to Amelie, the most powerful vampire in town. But her protection doesn't offer much comfort when people start turning up dead and an ancient bloodsucker extends a chilling invitation for private lessons in his secluded home, giving a terrifying new meaning to "night school"... Feast of Fools The tenuous good-neighbor policy between the vampires and humans of Morganville is turned on its head with the arrival of bad-to-the-bone Mr. Bishop. What the ancient old-school vampire wants from the town is unthinkably sinister. It's only at a formal ball that Claire realized the elaborately evil trap Bishop has set for the warm-blooded souls of Morganville.

Charley Gray is about to be released from the state penitentiary after serving a long term for the robbery of a government gold shipment. The gold was never recovered, so the Texas Ranger chief has Ranger Panhandle Perkins planted in the prison as Charley's cell-mate in the hopes Charley will tell him where the loot is buried. Charley has a map of the location but is afraid it may be discovered so, while Panhandle is asleep, he draws a copy of it on the sole of Panhandle's foot. Charley then destroys the map but intends to keep "Panhandle" close to him upon their release from prison. Charley makes Panhandle accompany him back to the town where the rest of the hold-up gang is holed up. They go to the saloon owned by Steve Martin, also a member of the hold-up gang, but Charley was the one who buried the loot before he was captured and Charley has no intentions of divulging the location of the gold. Written by Les Adams

The Perfect American is a fictionalized biography of Walt Disney's final months, as narrated by Wilhelm Dantine, an Austrian cartoonist who worked for Disney in the 40s and 50s, illustrating sequences for Sleeping Beauty. It is also the story of Dantine himself, who desperately seeks Disney's recognition at the risk of his own ruin.Peter Stephan Jungk has infused a new energy into the genre of fictionalized biography. Dantine, imbued with a sense of European superiority, first refuses to submit to Disney's rule, but is nevertheless fascinated by the childlike omnipotence of a man who identifies with Mickey Mouse. We discover Walt's delusions of immortality via cryogenic preservation, his tirades alongside his Abraham Lincoln talking robot, his invitation of Nikita Khruschev to Disneyland once he learns that the Soviet Premier wants to visit the park, his utopian visions of his EPCOT project, and his backyard labyrinth of toy trains. Yet, if at first Walt seems to have a magic wand granting him all his wishes, we soon discover that he is as tortured as the man who tells his story.After Disney refuses to acknowledge Dantine's self-professed talent and hard work, he fires the frustrated cartoonist for writing, along with other staff members, an anonymous polemical memorandum regarding Disney's jingoistic politics. Years later, in the late 60s, still deeply wounded by his dismissal, Dantine follows Disney's trail to capture what makes Walt tick. Dantine wants us to grasp what it is like to live and breathe around the man who thought of himself as more famous than Santa Claus. Walt's wife Lillian, his confidante and perhaps his mistress Hazel, his brother Roy, his children Diane and Sharon, his close and ill-treated collaborators, and famous figures such as Peter Ustinov, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Geraldine Chaplin, all contribute to the novel's animation, its feel for the life of the Disney world. This deeply researched work not only provides interesting interpretations of what made Walt Disney a central figure in American popular culture, but also explores the complex expectations of gifted European immigrants who came to the United States after World War II with preconceived notions of how to achieve the American dream.