Random House Inc.

The Grinch, whose heart is two sizes too small, hates Who-ville's holiday celebrations, and plans to steal all the presents to prevent Christmas from coming. To his amazement, Christmas comes anyway, and the Grinch discovers the true meaning of the holiday.

Mr Jones, a quiet unprepossessing man who works as a translator in a Swiss chocolate factory, meets and falls in love with Anna-Luise, many years his junior and the daughter of Doctor Fischer, the notorious toothpaste millionaire.

This collection contains Gogols finest tales — from the demon-haunted St Johns Eve and Viy to the surrealism of The Nose, from the trials of the copyist in The Overcoat to those of the delusional clerk in The Diary of a Madman.

At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history — one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale...

Tom Newquist had been a detective in the Nota Lake sheriff's office — a tough, honest cop respected by everyone. When he died suddenly, the townsfolk were saddened but not surprised: Just shy of sixty-five, Newquist worked too hard, smoked too much, and exercised too little. Newquist's widow didn't doubt the coroner's report. But what Selma couldn't accept was not knowing what had so bothered Tom in the last six weeks of his life. What was it that had made him prowl restlessly at night, that had him brooding constantly? Selma Newquist wanted closure, and the only way she'd get it was if she found out what it was that had so bedeviled her husband. Kinsey should have dumped the case. It was vague and hopeless, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, she set up shop in Nota Lake, where she found that looking for a needle in a haystack can draw blood. Very likely, her own.

An extraordinary new novel of love, family, and man's struggle with the wild. A pack of wolves makes a sudden savage return to the Rocky Mountain ranching town of Hope, Montana, where a century earlier they were slaughtered by the thousands. Biologist Helen Ross has come to Hope from the East, fleeing a life in shambles, determined to save the wolves from those who seek to destroy them. But an ancient hatred awaits her in Hope, a hatred that will tear a family and ultimately the community apart. And soon Helen is at the center of the storm, by loving the wrong man, by defying the wrong man... by daring to lead a town out of the violent darkness of its past...

This story set during the infamous McCarthy era revolves around the son of an American government official who is discovered to be a Russian spy. Readers follow the father and son over 20 years in an ordeal that involves murder, spies, shocking revelations about the past, and a passionate affair.

So writes Jack Prelutsky in his introduction to this exciting companion volume to the highly successful 20th Century Children's Book Treasury. Prelutsky has selected over 200 short, fun-to-read poems by 137 outstanding poets of this century. Though every decade is represented, the majority of the poems were written since children's poetry entered its golden age, about 35 years ago. The poems are arranged by topics, such as sports, sibling rivalry, outer space, food fights, and just plain silliness, as well as the ageless themes of children's poetry-imagination, nature, the seasons, weather, and the many moods of human beings. Every page of the book is beautifully designed and illustrated with evocative watercolor paintings by Meilo So, who last collaborated with Prelutsky on The Beauty of the Beast. An excellent value, The 20th Century Children's Poetry Treasury is a stunning gift edition that belongs in every child's home library.

To look at one was to see the other. For family, even the girls' own father, it was a constant guessing game. For strangers, the surprise was overwhelming. And for the twins Olivia and Victoria Henderson, two remarkable young women coming of age at the turn of the century, their bond was mysterious, marvelous, and often playful — a secret realm only they inhabited. Olivia and Victoria were the beloved daughters of a man who never fully recovered from his wife's death bearing them in 1893. Shy, serious Olivia, born eleven minutes before her sister, had taken over the role of mother in their lush New York estate, managing not only a household but her rebellious twin's flights of fancy. Free-spirited Victoria wanted to change the world. She embraced the women's suffrage movement and dreamed of sailing to war-torn Europe. Then, in the girls' twenty-first year, as the first world war escalated overseas, a fateful choice changed their lives forever. It began when Victoria's life was about to become a public scandal. It led to a painful decision, and brought handsome lawyer Charles Dawson into the Henderson's life and family. Hand-picked by the twins' father to save his daughter's reputation, Charles was still mourning his wife's death aboard the Titanic, struggling to raise his nine year-old son alone, determined never to lose his heart again. Charles wanted to believe that, for the sake of his son, he could make an unwanted marriage work. But in an act of deception that only Olivia and Victoria could manage, the twins took an irrevocable step, which changed both their lives forever; and took one of the twins to the battlefields of France, the other into a marriage she longed for butcould not have. From Manhattan society to the trenches of war-ravaged France, Mirror Image moves elegantly and dramatically through a rich and troubled era. With startling insight, Danielle Steel explores women's choices: between home and adventure, between the love for family and the passion for a cause, between sacrifice and desire. But at the heart of Mirror Image is a fascinating, realistic portrait of identical twins, two vastly different sisters who lead their lives and follow their destinies against a vivid backdrop of a world at war.

Originally published in 1958, this book contains a selection of 28 traditional stories from the French, German, Danish, Russian and Japanese traditions. Includes The Sleeping Beauty, The Frog Prince, Puss in Boots, Thumbelina, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast...

The magic of Anne McCaffrey's dragons and their riders lives on, in this exciting new adventure for all McCaffrey fans — and especially for lovers of her bestselling Dragonriders of Pern series. Now that Pern can look forward to a future without the threat of Threadfall, the people are free to leave their protective stone holds and spread across more of the planet, as well as improve their lives with the newly discovered ancient technology. Not everyone is happy, though. Some resist any change, and consider anything new to be an abomination. And the dragonriders are uncertain: without Thread, what will their purpose be in Pernese society? Then a new danger — again from the skies — looms. Once again, the people must pull together... and turn to the only ones who can solve the crisis: the dragonriders of Pern!

This beautiful board book edition of My Many Colored Days presents Dr. Seuss at his very youngest. Use it as an innovative color concept book. Use it to help toddlers express how they feel. Use it to introduce the fun of Dr. Seuss!

Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story — and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man's careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.

A sardonic novel follows the bored wife of an anti-nuclear activist on a fantastic adventure from Canada to Italy, involving literary fame, a blackmailing reporter, menacing plots, passionate trysts, and life in death. Reissue.

It was the quiet ones you had to watch. That's where the real passion was lurking. They came together at Mountainview College, a down-at-the-heels secondary school on the seamy side of Dublin, to take a course in Italian. It was Latin teacher Aidan Dunne's last chance to revive a failing marriage and a dead-end career. But Aidan's dream was headed for disaster until the mysterious Signora appeared, transforming a shared passion for Italy into a life-altering adventure for them all...bank clerk Bill and his dizzy fiance Lizzie: a couple headed for trouble... Kathy, a hardworking innocent propelled into adulthood in a shocking moment of truth... Connie, the gorgeous rich lady with a scandal ready to explode... glowering Lou, who joined the class as a cover for crime. And Signora, whose passionate past remained a secret as she changed all their lives forever... From the New York Times bestselling author of This Year It Will Be Different, The Glass Lake, and Circle of Friends, comes a novel filled with Maeve Binchy's signature warmth, wit, and sheer storytelling genius — a spellbinding tale of men and women whose quiet lives hide the most unexpected things...

A lion, a dog, and a tiger are having a contest — can they get ten apples piled up on top of their heads? You better believe it! This first counting book works as a teaching tool as well as a funny story.

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), a screaming comes across the sky, heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. Gravity's Rainbow, however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. Gravity's Rainbow is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

With the same meticulous scholarship and narrative legerdemain she brought to her hugely popular Lymond Chronicles, our foremost historical novelist travels further into the past. In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland. Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue. He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth. Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself. She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable — and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair — one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic — from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

They watched Danilo Silva for days before they finally grabbed him. He was living alone, a quiet life on a shady street in a small town in Brazil; a simple life in a modest home, certainly not one of luxury. Certainly no evidence of the fortune they thought he had stolen. He was much thinner and his face had been altered. He spoke a different language, and spoke it very well. But Danilo had a past with many chapters. Four years earlier he had been Patrick Lanigan, a young partner in a prominent Biloxi law firm. He had a pretty wife, a new daughter, and a bright future. Then one cold winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car and died a horrible death. When he was buried his casket held nothing more than his ashes. From a short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial. Then he fled. Six weeks later, a fortune was stolen from his ex-law firm's offshore account. And Patrick fled some more. But they found him.

The Collector Collector takes a conventional boy-meets-girl story and turns it into a brilliant comic romp. The hero of Tibor Fischer's tale is an antique bowl that comes into the possession of a lovelorn, young London art appraiser named Rosa. Rosa's bowl is no ordinary piece of clay, however: it is a ceramic sage, an urn of uncommon erudition that has witnessed all of history's major convulsions — revolutions, famines, massacres, wars — and has survived more than four hundred breakages and three thousand thefts. By investing his bowl with soul, Fischer give us a hilarious, mantel-eye view of depravity and redemption, sex and lust, burglary and archaeology. A writer gifted with a formidable imagination (The Washington Post Book World), Fischer takes us on a thrilling ride from the primitive societies of prehistory to the equally primitive society of present-day London.

A delightfully contemporary story that explores the fun, the challenges, and the occasional absurdity of new beginnings, Steel's 40th novel — the third in a series of special format books — tells the story of two people who find love where and when they least expect it.

A lavish erotic historical set in 1875. The morals of Queen Victoria mean nothing to London's wayward and debauched elite. Young but naive Clarissa Longleigh is visiting London for the first time. She is eager to meet Lord Marldon — the man to whom she's been promised — knowing only that he's handsome, dark and sophisticated. In fact he is depraved, louche, and has a taste for sexual excess. Clarissa has also struck up a friendship with a young Italian artist, Gabriel. When Marldon hears of this he is incensed, and imprisons Clarissa in his opulent London mansion. When Gabriel tries to free her, he too is captured and the young lovers find themselves at the mercy of the debauched lord.

The apology and confession of a minor mid-19th century Russian official, Notes From Underground, is a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique and a powerful, at times absurdly comical, account of man's breakaway from society and descent underground.