Throughout her life Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings around half past ten Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. A mother, grandmother, wife, divorcée, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

"People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are" George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

Once upon a time . . . World Fantasy Award-winners Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling compiled an extraordinary anthology of adult fairy tales entitled Snow White, Blood Red. Now, once more, they return us to the realm of myth and the fantastic - with eighteen remarkable tales that remold our most cherished childhood fables into things darker and sexier, more resonant and appealing to grown-up tastes and sensibilities. Here are the wondrous works of masters who cloak the magical fictions we heard at grandma's knee in mantles of darkness and dread. Here are stories strange and miraculous, of rare and haunting beauty - from Roger Zelazny's delightful narrative of a contemporary knight's service to his godfather Death . . . to Peter Straub's blood-chilling examination of a gargantuan Cinderella and her terrible twisted "art." Between these covers Patricia C. Wrede entices and enthralls with a tale of a keep, a curse and a love stronger than death and time . . . while Storm Constantine transforms a charming and timeless fable into a decidedly horrific yarn about a conjured princess too good to be true. Once upon a time . . . the Gingerbread Man ran gleeful and free. Now he flees in terror from the baking pan to the fire. Once upon a time . . . Rampel stillskin was a heinous villain. Now he is a victim doomed to a cruel and tragic fate. Once upon a time . . . there was a childlike innocence. Now there is only the truth. "Words Like Pale Stones" by Nancy Kress "Stronger Than Time" by Patricia C. Wrede "Somnus's Fair Maid" by Ann Downer "The Frog King, or Iron Henry" by Daniel Quinn "Near-Beauty" by M.E. Beckett "Ogre" by Michael Kandel "Can't Catch Me" by Michael Cadnum "Journeybread Recipe" by Lawrence Schimel "The Brown Bear of Norway" by Isabel Cole "The Goose Girl" by Tim Wynne-Jones "Tattercoats" by Midori Snyder "Granny Rumple" by Jane Yolen "The Sawing Boys" by Howard Waldrop "Godson" by Roger Zelazny "Ashputtle" by Peter Straub "Silver and Gold" by Ellen Steiber "Sweet Bruising Skin" by Storm Constantine "The Black Swan" by Susan Wade

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar. With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Stories includes "Seasons of Glass and Iron," "The Green Book," "Madeleine," "The Lonely Sea in the Sky," "And Their Lips Rang with the Sun," "The Truth About Owls," "A Hollow Play," "Anabasis," "To Follow the Waves," "John Hollowback and the Witch," "Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers," "Pockets," and more.