It is 1943 in Sicily. The pension from America has stopped, the countryside is not producing food, and winter will soon be upon the Sicilians. Salvatore Campo is a desperate man. With five children and a wife to support, he resorts to stealing grain?a crime that eventually lands him in jail. As sorrow and despair falls on Salvatore's family, his wife prays for a miracle. As time goes on, she begins to realize that her only hope for overcoming starvation lies within her eight-year-old son, Lillo. Three years later as little Lillo is sent away to work on a country farm to help his family, his only possessions are an extra shirt and pair of pants. With a fear bigger than himself, Lillo embarks on an unforgettable coming-of-age journey that opens his eyes to the world around him and forces him to face all the challenges that accompany his new destiny as a sheepherder. From sleeping on the cold floor to assuming responsibility for over seventy sheep, little Lillo grows up quickly while learning how to travel alone, live without his family, and most importantly, become a man. In this autobiographical novel, a Sicilian boy must rely on his inner-strength and perseverance as he helps his family survive starvation after World War II and walks into a new future.

Karen Kingsbury's sweet and poignant message about how quickly childhood passes and the special bond between parents and sons will delight moms and dads no matter how old or young their sons are.

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Index to more than 30,000 plays written from Antiquity to the present and published from 1949 to the present; includes mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama. All Play master records contain a link to the results of an Internet metasearch of specially selected Web sites to link to full text, criticism, and other useful information.

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”