Blockade Billy works as well as it does for a couple of reasons. The first is the narrative voice that King has conjured up for Granny Grantham. Funny, sharply observant and casually profane, it is the voice of a quintessential baseball insider who happens to be a natural raconteur.
Blood and Smoke is a collection of three stories (two never before published) with a common thread of smoking binding them together. The first story, "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe," is a story of addiction and withdrawal, as a man tries to quit smoking on the same day that his wife leaves him. In "1408," a writer who chronicles "haunted" places visits a supposedly haunted hotel room, unable to imagine that there are some things more frightening than ghosts. The last story, "In the Deathroom," follows an American journalist who is being interrogated in a South American prison, where a cigarette may be his last request or his salvation.
Many of Ian Fleming's short stories have been the inspiration for the extremely successful James Bond film franchise, and included in this collection are such stories as Octopussy, The Living Daylights, and For Your Eyes Only. The title story, Quantum of Solace, lends its name to the upcoming James Bond film, slated to release in Fall 2008. This collection will be published to coincide with the film's release, as well as to continue Penguin's centenary celebrations of Fleming's birth.
Collection of Ray Bradbury short stories from the 40's, 50's, and 60's
*The Kilimanjaro Device * The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place * Tomorrow's Child * The Women *The Inspired Chicken Motel * Downwind from Gettysburg * Yes, We'll Gather at the River * The Cold Wind and the Warm * Night Call, Collec * The Haunting of the New * I Sing the Body Electric! * The Tombling Day * Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine * Heavy-Set * The Man in the Rorschach Shirt * Henry the Ninth * The Lost City of Mars * Christus Apollo
Considering the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Shakespeare, relatively little is known about the man himself. In the absence of much documentation about his life, we have the plays and poetry he wrote. In this addition to the Eminent Lives series, bestselling author Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered.
