Sixty Stories

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

"Sixty original tales of Sherlock Holmes -- which one is the best? In sixty essays, sixty Sherlockians make the case for each of the stories. Their arguments range from the playful to the academic, and are as varied as the authors themselves. As editor Christopher Redmond says, ""What they have written is compelling evidence that any one of the Sherlock Holmes stories can be the best; it’s all a matter of what the reader is looking for."" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales range from Victorian horror, to jewel heists, to society scandals. As these authors show, there's a Sherlock Holmes adventure for every taste. This volume benefits the Beacon Society. No royalties from the sale of this volume will be paid to either the authors or the editor. Royalties earned will, with the cooperation of the publisher, be turned over in their entirety to the Beacon Society, a not-for-profit organization of Sherlockians with the purpose of introducing young people to Sherlock Holmes through classrooms and libraries."

Spiritual awakenings, whether quiet and subtle or dramatic and breathtaking, are deeply personal events. More than half of us have undergone a spiritual transformation, each unique and life-changing. We may only have a moment or two to act or we may have a few months to sort things out. We may curse the gods or sink to our knees in gratitude. Th e circumstances vary but two things are certain. One, our life is about to change. And two, it's a day we will not soon forget. Sixty Seconds is an uplifting collection of intimate, heartfelt stories from prominent people who graciously share their personal experiences with the profound. Their moving, life-altering interviews powerfully illustrate that sacred moments of illumination and insight are available to us all.

Almost everybody who has grown up in Chicago knows about the Thorne Rooms. Housed in the Children’s Galleries of the Chicago Art Institute, they are a collection of 68 exquisitely crafted miniature rooms made in the 1930s by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. Each of the 68 rooms is designed in the style of a different historic period, and every detail is perfect, from the knobs on the doors to the candles in the candlesticks. Some might even say, the rooms are magic. Imagine—what if you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you were small enough to sneak inside and explore the rooms’ secrets? What if you discovered that others had done so before you? And that someone had left something important behind? Fans of Chasing Vermeer, The Doll People, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler will be swept up in the magic of this exciting art adventure!

Welcome to Baltimore, 1966, a quiet Eastern city of row houses, blue-collar neighborhoods, and burgeoning suburbs, a place as yet untouched by the upheavals of 1960's America. A place where everything is about to change. What was once so simple now seems complicated. Delicatessens that served delicious slabs of pastrami are now serving sprouts. Song lyrics are angry and raw. Acid is being dropped and the normal life paths--school, marriage, a safe career--seem irrelevant. Or, worse, boring. Even friendship is more complicated. As society's shifts begin to take hold, the people at the heart of "Sixty-Six know they have something to hold on to: each other . . . Bobby Shine, an intern at the local television station; the soulful and rebellious Neil; Ben Kallin, the "King of the Teenagers"; Turko and Eggy, comic philosophers extraordinaire. They spend their time together hanging out at the Hilltop Diner, wisecracking, coping, falling in and out of love, planning for a glorious future. As the decade explodes, however, these young people are caught between the staid and traditional values of the fifties, and the confusion, turbulence, and exhilaration of the sixties. As the fighting in Vietnam escalates and the antiwar movement at home reaches fever pitch, their insular world will be rocked by violence and tragedy. As the growing Civil Rights movement sweeps across the country, they will see the best and worst of their parents' generation. And as the hippie movement rockets across the cultural landscape, they will both embrace and be torn apart by the new freedoms afforded them. Together, they will have to confront as bewildering and wrenching a set of transformations asAmerica has ever faced_--and each one of them will leave 1966 changed forever. Barry Levinson has moved us with such superb films as "Rain Man, "Good Morning, Vietnam, "The Natural, and, of course, the much-loved "Diner. With the same humor, depth of insight, affection for his characters, and glorious dialogue that make his movies so memorable, Levinson has written a first novel of enormous heart, a book that takes us back to a time in our history when everything was at stake and nothing would ever be the same.

One day Judy was working in Abingdon Library, on her novel ‘The Story Traveller’, when she was approached by Brother Cedric- a ghost who died in 1327.At first she thought she was having a weird day dream, however on her next visit to the Library Brother Cedric again made himself known and asked her to ghost write his book for him. But then as Judy says in her foreword: ‘What writer wouldn’t jump at the chance to be a ‘ghost writer’ to a real ghost.’Brother Cedric, who used to illustrate the manuscripts at the Abbey, has been haunting the town ever since his untimely death. He has witnessed all the major events that have occurred since then and, as he has always taken an enormous interest in the local printers to the point of haunting them, he knows a great deal of other information about the town and its people.He is well aware that many wonderful history books have been written about Abingdon, but he wanted to write a book more specifically for children, to whet their appetites. That is why he sees this book as a ‘pick and mix’, in the hope that his young readers will want to delve even closer into the rich tapestry that makes up the stories of Abingdon.

Reflections on women’s aging from the New York Times–bestselling author who inspired the film The Glorias. One day I woke up and there was a seventy-year-old woman in my bed . . . Gloria Steinem has been an eloquent and outspoken voice for women’s rights and equality for more than four decades. In Doing Sixty & Seventy she addresses an essential concern of people everywhere—and especially of women: the issue of aging. Whereas turning fifty, in her experience, is “leaving a much-loved and familiar country,” turning sixty means “arriving at the border of a new one.” With insight, intelligence, wit, and heartfelt honesty, she explores the landscapes of this new country and celebrates what she has called “the greatest adventure of our lives.” While appreciating everybody’s experiences as different, Steinem sees these years as charged with possibilities. Dealing with stereotypes and the “invisibility” that often accompany a woman’s senior years can be as liberating as it is frustrating. It frees women as well as men to embrace that “full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now.” This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gloria Steinem including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.