The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places of Lilliput, a land of people six inches high, Brobdingnag, a land of giants, and Glubbdubdrib, an island of sorcerers.

From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro. Fueled by a powerful curiosity—and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up—Michael Crichton's journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling—swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels—an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

The first major poem in English literature, Beowulf tells the story of the life and death of the legendary hero Beowulf in his three great battles with supernatural monsters. The ideal Anglo-Saxon warrior-aristocrat, Beowulf is an example of the heroic spirit at its finest. Leading Beowulf scholar Howell D. Chickering, Jr.’s, fresh and lively translation, featuring the Old English on facing pages, allows the reader to encounter Beowulf as poetry. This edition incorporates recent scholarship and provides historical and literary context for the modern reader. It includes the following: an introduction a guide to reading aloud a chart of royal genealogies notes on the background of the poem critical commentary glosses on the eight most famous passages, for the student who wishes to translate from the original an extensive bibliography

Can desire really transform reality? From award-winning novelist Jonathan Coe and distinguished Italian artist Chiara Coccorese comes The Broken Mirror, a political parable for children, a contemporary fairy tale for adults, and a fable for all ages. One day Claire, to escape her quarrelsome parents, takes refuge in the dump behind her house. There she finds a broken mirror, a nasty piece of sharp glass... yet she is strangely drawn to it. She soon discovers it has the power to transform even the most drab reality into a fairy-tale world: the grey sky is reflected blue, and Claire’s modest, suburban house is transformed into the most beautiful castle. As Claire grows older, always accompanied by her magic mirror, she can see her face without her teenage acne, and her town before it fell victim to thieving property developers. But, in reality, libraries are being turned into luxury flats wherever she looks, and the boy Claire loves is instead her worst enemy. Frustrated and angry with the mirror’s illusions, Claire is about to destroy it when the mysterious Peter steps in: he has also found a shard of broken mirror, and so begins their journey to piece together the larger puzzle... Previously published in Italian, French, Greek and Dutch, The Broken Mirror comes to life in English for the first time, to be read with equal pleasure by children and adults.