Be(e) Empathetic Volume 2 - A compilation of two unBEElievably cute, Empathy themed stories with hand-painted images. Follow along as a bee host explains what it means to BE(E) GRATEFUL and HAPPY with examples that children can relate to and emulate. Ages 2+.

Be(e) Empathetic Volume 1 - A compilation of two unBEElievably cute, Empathy themed stories with hand-painted images. Follow along as a bee host explains what it means to BE(E) KIND and BRAVE with examples that children can relate to and emulate. Ages 2+.

There are two sides to every story. A little girl finds a strange beast in the woods and takes it home as a pet. She feeds it, shows it off to her friends and gives it a hat. But that night it escapes. Then the beast tells the story of being kidnapped by the girl, who forcefed it squirrel food, scared it with a group of beasts and wrapped it in wool. Can the two beasts resolve their differences? An eye-opening story that makes you look at things from a different perspective. 'Roberton's premise is as sublime as it is simple, with a subtle message. [...] Totally delightful.' - Kirkus Reviews

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

Mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, The Washington Post Book World says these masterful stories mark T. Coraghessan Boyle's development from "a prodigy's audacity to something that packs even more of a wallop: mature artistry." They cover everything, from a terrifying encounter between a bunch of suburban adolescents and a murderous, drug-dealing biker, to a touching though doomed love affair between Eisenhower and Nina Khruschev.

After winning international acclaim with his first novel, the Man Booker-nominated Hystopia, David Means returns to the form that made his name in Instructions for a Funeral, a collection of fourteen masterful stories that run the gamut from the playful to the personal. 'The Terminal Artist,' originally published in Vice, skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder; 'The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934,' from the New Yorker, is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong; while 'The Chair,' from The Paris Review, gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Poe, Chekhov, and Carver - but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

A million pounds of honey. Produced by a billion bees! This memoir reconstructs the life of a young man from Pennsylvania as he drops into the bald prairie badlands of southern Saskatchewan. He buys a honey ranch and keeps the bees that make the honey. But he also spends winters in Florida swamps, nurse-maid to ten thousand dainty queen bees. From the dusty Canadian prairie to the thick palmetto swamps of the American south, the reader meets with simple folks who shape the protagonist's character - including a Cree rancher with three sons playing NHL hockey, a Hutterite preacher who yearns to roam the globe, a reclusive bee-eating homesteader, and a grey-headed widow who grows grapefruit, plays a nasty game of scrabble, and lives with four vicious dogs. Encompassing a ten-year period, this true story evolves from the earnest inexperience of the young man as he learns an art and builds a business. Carefully researched natural biology runs counterpoint to human social activities. Bee craft serves as the setting for expositions that contrast American and Canadian lifestyles, while exemplifying the harsh reality of a man working with and against the physical environment.