Little Kingdoms

From the author of City of Bohane and Dark Lies the Island, a debut collection that "could easily have been titled ‘These Are Little Masterpieces'" (The Irish Times) This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity—and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a 2007 book of the year in the Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.

Cartoons that draw their creator into another world; demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to such marvelous—and often disquieting—effect in Little Kingdoms, a collection whose three novellas suggest magical companion pieces to his acclaimed longer fictions. In "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a gentle eccentric constructs an elaborate alternate universe that is all the more appealing for being transparently unreal. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" is at once a gothic tale of nightmarish jealousy and a meditation on the human need for exaltation and horror. And "Catalogue of the Exhibition" introduces us to the oeuvre of Edmund Moorash, a Romantic painter who might have been imagined by Nabokov or Poe. Exuberantly inventive, as mysterious as dreams, these novellas will delight, mesmerize, and transport anyone who reads them.

Kentucky's counties though theoretically provinces of the state were in reality powerful semi-sovereign entities during the latter half of the 19th century. Their positive accomplishments were many. Government funds were wisely invested in internal improvements, road construction, law enforcement, tax collection, and relief of the poor. Keen competition for county offices, placed on an electoral basis by the Constitution of 1850, brought added vitality to Kentucky's uniquely intense political life, and the official day on which the county courts met continued to be the foremost social and economic day of the month. Despite these positive facets and the good intentions of the reformers of 1849-1850, however, Kentucky's counties retained a tradition of parochialism, corruption, and inefficiency. The establishment of elective offices eliminated few of the deficiencies of the county system. The railroads were the focus of rivalry and scandal. Prevailing lawlessness compounded the semi-anarchical condition of many of the counties. Rising crime rates rendered insecure the lives of many Kentuckians. Nineteenth-century Kentucky left no legacy of law and order. A grasp of this paradoxical situation is essential to an understanding of late 19th-century Kentucky history. In this probing study, Robert M. Ireland offers the first thorough examination of the impact of Kentucky's counties on the state's constitutional, political, social, and economic development during this period.

Dive into a world of tiny, magical kingdoms full of surprises! King Smidgen and Queen Minutiae are busy preparing for the fashionable Queen Couture's visit when they embark on an adventure to the Wardrobe Kingdom. Travelling through stormy skies and spooky swamps in their airship, they land in Underwhere, a kingdom clothed in discarded garments! Will King Smidgen be able to find the perfect dress for his queen? And can he help his new friend Chief Crotch protect his kingdom from mountains of wardrobe waste? Little Kingdoms Hidden within an old house in a misty valley is a multitude of little kingdoms, each brimming with tiny folk proud of their unique traditions. Watch them hilariously interact across stories, subtly imparting moral lessons amid their whimsical escapades. A delightful blend of fantasy and humour, the "Little Kingdoms"-series is an absolute treat for kids and adults alike! Jeffrey Archer (1940-) is a bestselling British author and former politician, renowned for his captivating novels, short stories, and children's books published in over 97 countries and over 37 languages. His best-known works include ‘First Among Equals’, ‘Kane and Abel’ and ‘Only Time Will Tell’.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

For fans of The 7 1⁄2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and David Mitchell, a genre bending, time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved. Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. Swept out to sea with a hardened British sea captain named Kite, who might know more about Joe's past than he's willing to let on, Joe will remake history, and himself. From bestselling author Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms is an epic, romantic, wildly original novel that bends genre as easily as it twists time.

Set in Kuwait during the ominous years between the two Gulf wars, Small Kingdoms traces the intersecting lives of five people--rich and poor, native and foreigner, Muslim, Christian, and non-believer--when they discover that a teenaged Indian housemaid is being brutally abused by her employer.