As children, Jennifer Harris and Cameron Quick were both social outcasts. They were also one another's only friend. So when Cameron disappears without warning, Jennifer thinks she's lost the only person who will ever understand her. Now in high school, Jennifer has been transformed. Known as Jenna, she's popular, happy, and dating, everything "Jennifer" couldn't be -- but she still can't shake the memory of her long-lost friend. When Cameron suddenly reappears, they are both confronted with memories of their shared past and the drastically different paths their lives have taken. From National Book Award finalist Sara Zarr, Sweethearts is a story about the power of memory, the bond of friendship, and the quiet resilience of our childhood hearts.

More than just a collection of stories and essays by beloved writer Robert Drake, For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader is an introduction to the craft and art of short story writing, as the stories are accompanied by analyses of Drake as a short story writer and essayist.

How often have I overheard alluring snatches of song, only to be baffled by denial when I asked for more. Kindly black faces smile indulgently as at the vagaries of an imaginative child, when I persist in pleading for the rest. "Nawm, honey, I wa and n and t singing nothing — nothing a-tall! " How often have I been tricked into enthusiasm over the promise of folk-songs, only to hear age-worn phonograph records, — but perhaps so changed and worked upon by usage that they could possibly claim to be folk-songs after all! — or Broadway echoes, or conventional songs by white authors! Yet cajolements might be in vain, even though all the time I knew, by the uncanny instinct of folk-lorists, that there were folk-songs there. And even when you get a song started, when you are listening with your heart in your ear and the greed of the folk-lorist in your eye, you may lose out. If you seem too much interested, the song retreats, draws in like a turtle and s head, and no amount of coaxing will make it venture back. And there is something positively fatal about a pencil! Songs seem to be afraid of lead-poisoning. Or perhaps the pencil is secretly attached by a cord (a vocal cord?) to the singer and s tongue. It must be so, for otherwise, why has it so often happened that when I, distrustful of my tricky memory to hold a precious song, have sneaked a pencil out to take notes, the tongue has suddenly jerked back and refused to wag again? Yet that is not always the case, for sometimes the knowledge that his song is being written down inspires a bard with more respect for it and he gives it freely.

N January 30, 1944, Bela Bart6k, writing from Asheville, North O Carolina, where he had gone to regain his strength after a long period of ill-health in 1943, commented, Here I have started on a very interesting (and, as usual, lengthy) work, the kind I have never done before. Properly speaking, it is not a musical work: I am arranging and writing out fair copies of Rumanian folksong texts'! Although the date has not as yet been established, the first draft of the Rumanian folk texts as texts per se was written-if an apparent age of the MS. can be considered a clue-sometime before Bartok had emigrated to the United States in 1940. This draft (see description below) had been forwarded for etymological data, according to the non-Bart6kian autography appearing thereon. The identity of the informant or informants involved and the circumstances surrounding this matter remain unknown at the present writing. After Bart6k had made offset prints of the music examples of the 2 first two volumes of Rumanian F olk Music in 1940, the printed but incomplete draft of Vol. II (Vocal Melodies)-comprising 304 of the ultimate total of 659 pages-was sent to Nicholas Vama~escu, then di rector of "The Romanian Radio Hour" (Station W. ]. L. B. , Detroit, 3 Michigan), for correction of the texts, in April, 1941. 1 Letter to Joseph Szigeti, in Bartok Bela levelei (ed. Janos Demeny; Budapest: Miivelt Nep Konyvkiado, 1951), p. 184.

Sigrid Gassner-Roberts unique work evolves from her recollections of narrating her life story to her husband, who lies in a coma in a Viennese hospital after a brain aneurysm. The doctors tell her that he can hear her, so she begins by reminding him of their first date. Sigrid had been a young Austrian student who originally came to America to study on a Fulbright scholarship. She had a busy teaching career and her work took her from the US to Austria to Australia. It was in Australia that she met her future husband, a US naval officer who proposed only a few short weeks after they met in 1975. The couple had been married but four years when her husband had his stroke. Sigrid finds a path to caring for him while carrying on with her teaching duties and their love story continues until his death.