Catherine Morland meets all the trappings of Gothic horror and imagines the worst. Disaster does eventually strike, as it does in the real world as distinct from the romantic one, but without spoiling the wonderful atmosphere of this story.

"In this book with no pictures, the reader has to say every silly word, no matter what"--

A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California. Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements...

In a fantastical illustrated short novel, three people imprisoned in a nightmarish library plot their escape.

Startling, unusual, and irresistibly readable, Among others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and science fiction, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment

"One brilliant June day when Mia Jacob can no longer see a way to survive, the power of words saves her. The Scarlet Letter was written almost two hundred years earlier, but it seems to tell the story of Mia's mother, Ivy, and their life inside the Community -- an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. But how could this be? How could Nathaniel Hawthorne have so perfectly...

Follows the true story of Dita Kraus, a fourteen-year-old girl from Prague who after being sent to Auschwitz is chosen to protect the eight volumes prisoners have smuggled past the guards.

"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...

Rufus Leroy Williams III wants to go to school to learn to read but the principal at first refuses because Rufus is a pig.

Morris Lessmore loves words, stories and books; after a powerful storm carries him to another land, dreary and colorless, he finds a single book in color that leads him to an amazing library where, he learns, the books need him as much as he needs them