Mrs Gaskell's first novel, 'Mary Barton' portrays city life in the hungry forties of the 19th century. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell, and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

Our hero confronts a large and varied cast, including Wackford Squeers, the fantastic ogre of a schoolmaster, and Vincent Crummles, the grandiloquent ham actor, on his comic and satirical adventures up and down the country. Punishing wickedness, befriending the helpless, strutting the stage, and falling in love, Nicholas shares some of his creator's energy and earnestness as he faces the pressing issues of early Victorian society. -provided by publisher....

Shug Akins is a lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old boy. His mother, Glenda, is the one person who loves him -- she calls him Sweet Mister and attempts to boost his confidence and give him hope for his future. Shuggie's purported father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises the boy. Into this small-town Ozarks mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce, with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. When he and Glenda begin a torrid...

The tragic story of Tess, who is victimized by lust, poverty, and Victorian hypocrisy.

An unlikely friendship begins between a superstar and a poor barber and his family.

"At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've...

"This harrowing tale of a young girl in the slums is a searing portrayal of turn-of-the-century New York, and Stephen Crane's most innovative work. Published in 1893, when the author was just twenty-one, it broke new ground with its vivid characters, its brutal naturalism, and its empathic rendering of the lives of the poor. It remains both "powerful, severe, and harshly comic" (in Alfred Kazin's words) and a masterpiece of modern American prose."...

Lincoln Jones is always working on the latest story he's got going in his notebook. Those stories are his refuge. A place where the hero always prevails and the bad guy goes to jail. Real life is messy and complicated, so Lincoln sticks to fiction and keeps to himself. Which works fine until a nosy girl at his new school starts prying into his private business. She wants to know what he's writing, where he disappears to after school, and why he never...

First published in 1948, this timeless classic, released for a new generation of readers, follows Margy Shannon, a shy, eager, joyfully optimistic woman, as she searches for something better from life than the hard misery of poverty in which she lives.

Life would be hard for anyone following the unexpected death of their father. But life is harder for young Adrian, Sheila, and Alfredo, because their family is not normal. Theirs is a family of cannibals and their father was the hunter. So not only do they have to cope with their grief, they also have to deal with the hunger. One of them must learn to kill if any of them are going to survive. Cuando su padre muere, Adrian, Sheila y Alfredo deben...