Michel Vaillant Short Story Classics

In 1957, Jean Graton created the legendary race car driver Michel Vaillant, who was featured in a series of short stories published in Tintin magazine. These stories marked the beginning of a long-running adventure saga that continues to this day. This collection includes seven early stories that brought Vaillant onto the scene and made him what he is today. A fascinating look into the origins of a classic, with a vibrant retro style.

This sixth volume contains five tales set in feudal Japan, presented in English for the first time: Tanka, Kimura, Sato, Ogari 1650, and Momotaro. Featuring a new foreword by celebrated artist Kent Williams.

"What... a... darn... stupid... contraption!" The 1st Columbia San Francisco Bicycle Race seems like the perfect opportunity for Albert Overman to impress the nation with his revolutionary design. But when a rival manufacturer hires two goons to intercept him, it‘s up to Lucky Luke to save the day once more. The lonesome cowboy will find himself swapping stirrups for pedals as he heads west in the saddle of Overman‘s invention. Will he make it to the starting line in time, or will the dawning of the modern age be stopped by ruthless thugs, stubborn hillbillies, and wary Apache? And what will Jolly Jumper think of his cowboy changing steeds?

Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in Canadian forests. In this book, she examines the environmental impact of logging and celebrates the value of forests from a perspective of some one whose work caught them between environmentalists and loggers.

When Mary's parents die, she moves to England, where she is sent to a strange mansion in the middle of the Yorkshire moors, belonging to her uncle. It is here that she discovers the comfort of friendship... and a wonderful secret that she soon shares with her new companions: a garden forgotten by everyone, whose key, as if by magic, also opens the doors to broken hearts. This is a two-part graphic adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1912 classic of children's literature.

Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years. Nearly forty years later, George E. Vaillant, director of the Study, took the measure of the Grant Study men. The result was the compelling, provocative classic, Adaptation to Life, which poses fundamental questions about the individual differences in confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise? George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with case histories, each method of coping.

The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. The novel's narrator Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."

In this collection, Michel Faber revisits the world of his bestselling novel 'The Crimson Petal and the White', briefly opening doors onto the lives of its characters to give us tantalising glimpses of where they sprang from and what happened to them.

Even a hero from the Far West needs a vacation from time to time, and looking after a few Swiss cows seems like the perfect opportunity for Lucky Luke. These milk cows happen to produce the precious substance necessary for the production of authentic Swiss chocolate! The West has just discovered cocoa, and chocolate should soon be a commodity in all mouths. And yet... between vicious autograph hounds, the chief of the Chicoree tribe, and two cowboys whose frustrated love leads to even more frustrating brawling, will Lucky Luke end up yearning for a reunion with the Daltons?

Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, Antarctica is the debut collection of one of Ireland's most exciting and versatile new talents. Claire Keegan, winner of several prestigious awards including the William Trevor Prize, writes stories that have a razor-sharp narrative style and unembellished tone, and move from the cruel, hard life of rural Ireland to the hot landscape of the southern United States. From the title story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man—Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. In "Love in the Tall Grass," Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In "Passport Soup," Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Moving in its quiet intensity, the award-winning Antarctica is a rare and arresting debut.