One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).

Risking her reputation… To reclaim her life! Lady Beatrice finally has a plan to escape her controlling brother by compromising herself with a gentleman friend so they are forced to wed. But things go awry when she accidentally throws herself at the wrong man! Now she is honor bound to marry the Duke of Brigham, her brother’s outrageous best friend. It’s not the safe, secure match she’d planned on—for he has sparked something in her untouched soul that explodes into flame! From Harlequin Historical: Your romantic escape to the past.

Step into this royal Cinderella romance by Millie Adams, where the boss is also the most powerful of kings! “Don’t tempt me, Matteo.” But their chemistry is royally irresistible! Countless women would be thrilled to marry King Matteo de la Cruz. Yet his brilliant personal assistant, Livia, flat-out refuses his proposal…and then quits! Matteo is outraged, then intrigued… Can anything make his ideal queen reconsider? Livia has loved Matteo since he plucked her from the gutter as a teenager. Wearing his crown yet not having his heart would be unbearable. Still, their mind-blowing kiss makes innocent Livia long for his touch. If she surrenders to their desire just once, will she be able to say goodbye for good? From Harlequin Presents: Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds. Read all The Kings of California books: Book 1: The Scandal Behind the Italian's Wedding Book 2: Stealing the Promised Princess Book 3: Crowning His Innocent Assistant Book 4: The Only King to Claim Her

A contract marriage with the man of my dreams… “This child’s father is Dante Fiori!” After a year away at school, Minerva shows up with a baby in tow, stunning wealthy Dante with her sudden confession. As childhood friends, Dante has always helped Minerva. Now she needs him to believe the lie in order to keep her friend’s orphaned child safe. Dante is livid but agrees to marry Minerva to protect the child he believes is his!

His revenge will ruin her… Could his passion set her free?Sold into marriage to repay a family debt, Lady Penelope Hastings is horrified. Especially by her powerful reaction to her new husband, barbarian Scottish laird Lachlan Bain! Penny may be a pawn in his game of revenge, but his untamed spirit calls directly to hers, and his touch ignites a craving she cannot deny. Could this merciless Highlander be the answer to every secret dream she’s had?

This collection of essays grew out of the "Reading Stephen King Conference" held at the University of Maine in 1996. Stephen King's books have become a lightning rod for the tensions around issues of including "mass market" popular literature in middle and high school English classes and of who chooses what students read. King's fiction is among the most popular of "pop" literature, and among the most controversial. These essays spotlight the ways in which King's work intersects with the themes of the literary canon and its construction and maintenance, censorship in public schools, and the need for adolescent readers to be able to choose books in school reading programs. The essays and their authors are: (1) "Reading Stephen King: An Ethnography of an Event" (Brenda Miller Power); (2) "I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie" (Stephen King); (3) "King and Controversy in Classrooms: A Conversation between Teachers and Students" (Kelly Chandler and others); (4) "Of Cornflakes, Hot Dogs, Cabbages, and King" (Jeffrey D. Wilhelm); (5) "The 'Wanna Read' Workshop: Reading for Love" (Kimberly Hill Campbell); (6) "When 'IT' Comes to the Classroom" (Ruth Shagoury Hubbard); (7) "If Students Own Their Learning, What Do Teachers Do?" (Curt Dudley-Marling); (8) "Disrupting Stephen King: Engaging in Alternative Reading Practices" (James Albright and Roberta F. Hammett); (9) "Because Stories Matter: Authorial Reading and the Threat of Censorship" (Michael W. Smith); (10) "Canon Construction Ahead" (Kelly Chandler); (11) "King in the Classroom" (Michael R. Collings); (12) "King's Works and the At-Risk Student: The Broad-Based Appeal of a Canon Basher" (John Skretta); (13) "Reading the Cool Stuff: Students Respond to 'Pet Sematary'" (Mark A Fabrizi); (14) "When Reading Horror Subliterature Isn't So Horrible" (Janice V. Kristo and Rosemary A. Bamford); (15) "One Book Can Hurt You...But a Thousand Never Will" (Janet S. Allen); (16) "In the Case of King: What May Follow" (Anne E. Pooler and Constance M. Perry); and (17) "Be Prepared: Developing a Censorship Policy for the Electronic Age" (Abigail C. Garthwait). Appended are a joint manifesto by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and International Reading Association (IRA) concerning intellectual freedom; an excerpt from a teacher's guide to selected horror short stories of Stephen King; and the conference program. Contains a 152-item reference list of literary works.(NKA)

Wed for protection, claimed by passion

With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.