These letters, From Jeanie Arthur to Frank Arthur, were written in the year of their engagement between July 1882 and May 1883. The correspondence served as the inspiration for their great-great granddaughter, Kathleen Shoop's, novel, The Last Letter. Her novel is fiction, of course, but these heartfelt, optimistic love words have their own story arc, and tell an old-fashioned love tale that has a surprisingly modern tone that deserves to see the light of day.

In 2007 a file of letters between University of Heidelberg roommates and lifelong friends, Otto Frank and Nathan Straus Jr., was found in the archives of YIVO: The Institute for Jewish Research. The letters revealed for the first time that Otto Frank, diarist Anne's father, tried desperately to get his family out of war torn Holland in 1941, fifteen months before they went into hiding in the now famous attic at Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam. The letters also show the lengths Nathan Straus Jr., then Housing Administrator under FDR, and many others, went to to help. But the tightening restrictions of the U.S. State Department, along with the deteriorating conditions in Europe, prevented even those with powerful connections and money, from securing the necessary documents that would allow the Frank family to immigrate. We have long known of the relationship between these two men. The story of the letters, however, is being published in a book for the first time. It enriches our understanding of the relationship between Otto Frank and Nathan Straus Jr., about the history of the Frank family and gives us greater insight into this tragic era.

In this volume, the story told in The Diary of Anne Frank continues and expands. Through his letters, Otto, Anne's father and the only survivor in the Frank family, became a treasured wise friend to thousands of young people around the world, by giving simple, honest responses to their questions. Cara, a young American girl, kept his letters, followed his advice, and honored Otto as a surrogate father. Nearly 20 years later, as a grown woman and mother, Cara journeyed to Amsterdam to see the home where Anne had been hidden in an attic for two years before her murder. Cara listened to some of the holocaust stories from the Dutch people who had sheltered the Franks, and then traveled to Switzerland to fulfill a life-long dream: to finally meet her mentor in Switzerland. There she found Otto, who had not forgotten those who had betrayed their wartime hiding place, but neither did he wish for revenge. He had managed, through his own radiant spirit and the poignant words of his dead daughter, to embrace the best in people - and forgive those who had been the worst.

In the late 1980s, two bachelor farmers, brothers in their eighties, are brutally killed in their farmhouse in rural Southern Minnesota. Martin Prescott, a mailman relatively new to the area, happens upon the bodies of his two friends. Martin has doubts about Sheriff Trout's explanation of the deaths. Diane Kraus, the attractive niece of the two brothers, also disagrees with the sheriff. Martin and Diane face danger when they decide to investigate the murders on their own--Cover.

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Nancy Horan's Under the Wide and Starry Sky. Advance praise for Loving Frank: “Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.” –Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light “This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.” ——Scott Turow “It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.” ——Jane Hamilton “I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ ll ever leave.” –Elizabeth Berg

I don't know why the hell I write so many letters, Raymond Chandler once mused to a correspondent. "I guess my mind is just to active for its own good." In the seven novels from The Big Sleep (1939) to Playback (1958) and in a handful of short stories, Raymond Chandler recorded a vision of Southern California life sparked by acerbic observations on every level of coast society, from drug dealers and crooked cops to heiresses. But Chandler's gifts of observation and analysis extended well past the streets, alleyways, roadhouses, and stately homes that made up the world of his detective-hero Phillip Marlowe. Brought together in this volume are some of the hundreds of letters Chandler wrote-many of them composed during long, insomniac nights. Chandler commented on all that he saw around him, from his own personal foibles, to the works of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, to education, English society, and world events. Acute, sometimes impassioned, often witty, the Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler contains lively anecdotes of Hollywood, critical dissections of his fellow writers of detective fiction, lengthy discussions of the art of writing and of his own fiction, and, above all, amused, sometimes outraged glimpses of the Southern California society that was his inspiration. Chandler once wrote that "in letters I sometimes seem to have been more penetrating than in any other kind of writing." But his letters could also be combative, as when he wrote to an editor at the Atlantic that "when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I intend that it should stay split," or dismissive, as when he said of James M. Cain that "everything he writes smells like a billy goat." He could also be painfully revealing, as when he wrote of his despair over the death of his wife. "It was my great and now useless regret," Chandler confessed, "that I never wrote anything really worthy her attention, no book that I could dedicate to her." Lively, entertaining, and sometimes touching, these letters fully present for the first time the complex sensibilities of a man who was one of America's greatest writers of detective novels, and one of its most astute observers.

Paper back

A factual account of how I prevented three (3) nuclear attacks on American soil and let President Bush hang when he invaded Iraq.

Buckle your seatbelt for the first-ever follow up to Ian Fleming's only children's story. When the Tooting family finds an old engine and fits it to their camper van, they have no idea what kind of adventure lies ahead. The engine used to belong to an extraordinary car . . . and it wants its bodywork back! But as the Tootings hurtle across the world rebuilding the original Chitty, a sinister baddie is on their trail — one who will stop at nothing to get the magnificent car for himself. Fueled by wry humor , this much-anticipated sequel to the children’s classic by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond — fe aturing a contemporary family and a camper van with a mind of its own — is driven by best-selling, award-winning author Frank Cottrell Boyce and revved up by Joe Berger’s black-and-white illustrations.

"[In 1905 Des Moines, Iowa], Katherine Arthur's dying mother arrives on her doorstep, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent them running for the prairie, into the unknown. Taking her family, including young Katherine, to live off the land was the last thing Jeanie Arthur had wanted, but she would do her best to make a go of it. For Jeanie's husband Frank it had been a world of opportunity. Dreaming, lazy Frank. But, it was a society of uncertainty--a domain of natural disasters, temptation, hatred, even death. ... After years of anger, can Katherine find it in her heart to understand why her mother made the decisions that changed them all? Can she forgive and finally begin to heal before it's too late?"--P. [4] of cover.