Norman Dietz

"This edition prints the first and only text of Mark Twain's masterpiece ever based on his complete manuscript - including its first 663 pages, half the book, lost for over a hundred years until discovered in 1990 in a Los Angeles attic. Using this newly restored manuscript, the editors have recovered thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation which were misread, "corrected," or simply overlooked by Mark Twain's "typewriter copyist"...

"When Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad was published in 1990, critics and scholars alike hailed it as a masterpiece." "Now Robert Fagles presents us with the Odyssey, Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the arduous wanderings of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war story, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey...

The author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer enjoys an unexpected fantasy as a 19th century Yankee finds himself whisked back in time to an age of chivalry and knighthood with some unusual consequences.

Curiosity, courage and a touch of recklessness: these are the qualities of a true explorer! And yet Axel, the protagonist of this masterpiece by Jules Verne, does not feel particularly courageous when he decides to take part in the mad plan conceived by his uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock, to discover what is in the center of the Earth. Following the indications in an ancient book, they descend into the depths of our planet, where they make incredible...

At once a romantic history of the mighty Mississippi River, an autobiographical account of Twain's early steamboat days, and a storehouse of anecdotes and sketches, this stirring account of America's vanished past is the raw material from which Twain wrote his finest novel--"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". A new introduction is provided by Twain biographer, Justin Kaplan.

In 1948, a mysterious and charismatic man arrives in a small Virginia town carrying two suitcases; one contains his worldly possessions, the other is full of money. He soon inserts himself into the town's daily life, taking a job in the local butcher shop and befriending the owner and his wife and their son. But the passion that develops between the man and the wife of the town's wealthiest citizen sets in motion a series of events that not only upset...

A great food critic who can make or destroy the reputation of a chef with a stroke of his pen, Pierre Arthens faces his imminent death by trying to recall the one perfect flavor he sampled in his youth, a flavor that he believes forms the ultimate truth of his life.

In 1871, an entire fleet of whaling ships was caught in an arctic ice storm and destroyed. Though few lives were lost, the damage would forever shape one of America's most distinctive commodities: oil.New Bedford, Massachusetts, was fertile ground for this country's first multimillion-dollar industry. Founded by assiduous Quaker merchants seeking refuge for their austere religion, the town also lent unparalleled access to the high seas. The combination...

Eric Foner gives us the history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although "naturally anti-slavery" for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states....

She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egypt--which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake.