Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an 11-year-old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar. Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce — these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What. Driven by an ear for how we talk, how we feel, how we fail, and how we love, these are tough and tender stories that take hold, and linger.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway AwardThe place is the chilly border between Russia and China. The time is the early 1970s when the two giants were poised on the brink of war. And the characters in this thrilling collection of stories are Chinese soldiers who must constantly scrutinize the enemy even as they themselves are watched for signs of the fatal disease of bourgeois liberalism.In Ocean of Words, the Chinese writer Ha Jin explores the predicament of these simple, barely literate men with breathtaking concision and humanity. From amorous telegraphers to a pugnacious militiaman, from an inscrutable Russian prisoner to an effeminate but enthusiastic recruit, Ha Jin's characters possess a depth and liveliness that suggest Isaac Babel's Cossacks and Tim O'Brien's GIs. Ocean of Words is a triumphant volume, poignant, hilarious, and harrowing."A compelling collection of stories, powerful in their unity of theme and rich in their diversity of...

We live across the thousand dunes with grit in our teeth and sand in our homes. No one will come for us. No one will save us. This is our life, diving for remnants of the old world so that we may build what the wind destroys. No one is looking down on us. Those constellations in the night sky? Those are the backs of gods we see.**

In February 2000, Rolling Stone magazine sent David Foster Wallace, "NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST," on the road for a week with Senator John McCain's campaign to win the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Here is the iPublish "Director's Cut" (three times longer than the RS article) of this incisive, funny, thoughtful piece about life on "Bullshit One" -- the nickname for the press bus that followed McCain's Straight Talk Express.

Romance/Mainstream. 60964 words long. First published in 2011

Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations.

An unsettling novel that traces the faltering orbits of the members of one family from a hidden love triangle to the ten-year-old son whose problem may pull everyone down.

Flat Stanley is back to save the day in another exciting Worldwide Adventures chapter book, just in time to celebrate his fiftieth anniversary! This time, he explores Paris, France. And not only will kids love going on a fun adventure with Stanley, this eleventh installment of Jeff Brown's Worldwide Adventures series has fun, fascinating facts about Paris in the back of the book, and is perfect for common core state standards, like multicultural adventure, plot and character development story elements, and compare and contrast.Stanley Lambchop is headed to France to the most famous museum in Paris--the Louvre. Readers will experience the city of light, soar to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and solve a mystery when one of the most famous paintings in history is stolen. And when Stanley Lambchop is asked to help catch an art thief, he can't help but be excited! Posing as a painting in the Louvre on a wall across from the famous Mona Lisa?--c'est magnifique!...