A strange carnival brings terror to the population of a small midwestern town. Few American novels written this century have endured in the heart and mind, as has this one Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and...

"There was a time when the world was sweeter... when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats. Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister......

The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden...

"In the spirit of The Bartender's Tale, a lively and poignant coming-of-age story about a boy and his great-uncle on a cross-country odyssey. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Doig's beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old's imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for "female trouble" in the summer of 1951, all she...

Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, camped out in the library after hours. Addicted to reading, Ian needs help smuggling books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in antigay classes with Pastor Bob. Desperate to save Ian, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked--and the odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip.

In the realm of Alera, where people bond with the furies--elementals of earth, air, fire, water, wood, and metal--15-year-old Tavi struggles with his lack of fury crafting. As his homeland erupts in chaos--when rebels war with loyalists and furies clash with furies--Tavi's simple courage will turn the tides of war.

"Jake Whitmore is enjoying a rare bonding moment with his sixteen-year-old son, Kurt, when disaster strikes. They get in a terrible car accident that threatens to derail not only Kurt's chances at college, but his entire future. Jake makes a split-second decision that saves his son from formal punishment, but plunges them both into a world of guilt, lies, and secrecy. Just when Jake thinks he has everything under control, a malevolent outsider comes...

Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world. A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is...

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them ..." So begins David Hayden' s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David' s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David' s uncle Frank,...

The sudden and powerful attraction between a teenage boy and a summer guest at his parents' house on the Italian Riviera has a profound and lasting influence that will mark them both for a lifetime.