"Guy Mannering" is the story of young Henry Bertram's kidnapping. The heir to a wealthy ancestral estate, his family's lawyer has him kidnapped in the hopes that with no male heir, the estate and its wealth, will revert to him. Henry is raised in Holland, with a new name completely unaware of the life stolen from him. In a globe-trotting adventure, filled with romance, conspiracy and violence, Henry will be forced to reckon with his past by fighting...

Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.

This classic of anthropological literature is a dramatic, revealing account of an anthropologist's first year in the field with a remote African tribe. Simply as a work of ethnographic interest, Return to Laughter provides deep insights into the culture of West Africa-me subtle web of its tribal life and the power of the institution of witchcraft. However, the author's fictional approach gives the book its lasting appeal. She focuses on the human...

From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, a collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful.
In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the hansomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is...