When Tom, John, and Andy learn that simple herbs and spices are illegal in Sexton, they decide the people deserve food that tastes good. They "invent" fried chicken, and start smuggling herbs. They're already under a death sentence, so why not? ...Their actions bring Sexton and Crescens one step closer to war.

A Charles Dickens short story that was actually the inspiration for "A Christmas Carol." In this story, a gravedigger that hates Christmas gets kidnapped by goblins while digging a grave and then they help him get into the Christmas spirit. The beginning of this version has a biography of the author.

Eight-year-old Maria bears witness to her family's peculiar comings and goings in early 1940s New York City and at bedtime listens to the haunting, exhilarating stories of husbands lost to the front and of a strange pact made in desperation between an exotic Hungarian countess known as the Rat and the mystic faith healer Grigori Rasputin. From award-winning poet Kathleen Spivack comes a spellbinding and surreal debut novel about a tangled web of European emigres—including the Rat’s second cousin Herbert, a former Austrian civil servant now powerful in New York’s social scene, the Tolstoi String Quartet, who escaped to New York with their money sewn into the silk linings of their instrument cases, a German pediatrician dabbling in genetic engineering—and the strange and intoxicating secrets that bind them to each other.

"After Andrew's best friend is hit by a drunk driver and ends up in a coma, his enigmatic crush invites him to find comfort with her fundamentalist Christian group"--