Burlington Public Library

For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire, who leads a charmed, but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to stay, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He's wrong-but he survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family...

This account removes the Incas from the realm of prehistory and legend and shows the reality of their struggle against the Spanish invasion. Drawing on rediscovered sources and a firsthand knowledge of the Incan terrain, Hemming describes postconquest Peru and the integration of the Incas into the Spanish society.

In this mesmerizing first novel, a young American graduate student abandons her research deep in the Australian rain forest to investigate her professor's mysterious disappearance. Annabel Mendelssohn has an unusual but oddly satisfying life - studying spectacled fruit bats in the rain forest of Australia. She spends her free time discovering waterfalls and e-mailing her sister, Alice, who has settled for the more domesticated science of grant administration....

This exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers—Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber—mixes literary scholarship, social history, and gossip to evoke an era that continues to intrigue and captivate listeners.

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has...

Presents Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald's translation of ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles' three Oedipus tragedies--"Oedipus Rex," "Oedipus at Colonus," and "Antigone"--and includes an index of names.

Admirers of The Color Purple will find in these stories more evidence of Walker's power to depict black women-women who vary greatly in background yet are bound together. Dating back to the early 1970s and 1980s, respectively, these short stories cover the Pulitzer Prize winner's usual ground

Maigret, accompanying his physician on an emergency call, is drawn into one of his most stubborn cases yet. The victim, a son of a wealthy perfume manufacturer, had been enjoying an odd hobby before his death: collecting human voices with a tape recorder, often in the rougher districts of Paris. But his wallet and his tape recorder have been left untouched, so the killer's motive is unclear. The absence of clues begins to exasperate Maigret until...