Grade 7 Up—In this prequel to the "His Dark Materials" trilogy (Knopf), Texas aeronaut Lee Scoresby meets armored bear Iorek Byrnison for the first time. In this short, fantastic adventure, young Scoresby finds himself on the Arctic island of Novy Odense, a community set in an alternate past world.
Here we have 22 comic and dramatic short stories. Two are French, a few more American, and the majority are by British Victorian and Edwardian writers. The overall atmosphere of the volume is gothic. (Only F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles" seems out of place.) The stories vary in familiarity, from W.W. Jacobs's relatively obscure "For Better or Worse" to the same author's overexposed "Monkey's Paw." In between are short works by Kipling, Mansfield, Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, and other masters.
A Book about Pirates"Pirates" was written by LB favourite L.Du Garde Peach and illustrated by Frank Humphris. The subject is typically well-researched and the infamous characters are presented in a fairly objective and non-violent manner, even with such pirates such as Barbarossa and Blackbeard! In his first job for Ladybird, Humphris can perhaps be forgiven for assuming all female pirates were young and voluptuous, since his artwork is well up to the usual Ladybird standard. Clearly the company thought so, since he went solo on his next project.
This is a collection of 22 short stories about pirates.
There are certain similarities between science fiction and medical thrillers (futuristic technology, nature subverted) so it's not really surprising that a master of the medical genre like Cook (Acceptable Risk) would try to combine the two. The story starts with a small college town and a flurry of unusual black rocks. Those who pick them up are stung and, after a short fever, come up with a curious list of aftereffects. They become extroverted, environmentally conscious, attached to dogs and telepathically connected.
Stephen King - Night Shift Night Shift is Stephen King's first collection of short stories, and features 20 tales. Not every story is perfect, but all in all Night Shift is a fantastic anthology stuffed with great ideas. Stephen King has subsequently published 3 more short story collections (Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and Everything's Eventual) but Night Shift remains the best of..
