Someone dumped a body in an open grave at the cemetery, and the undertaker isn't happy about it. But he isn't happy about the police trying to solve it, either. In fact, the undertaker tries to solve it himself. The undertaker’s name is Yvgeny, and Yvgeny is an unlikeable and morally ambiguous Sherlock Holmes aficionado who lives with his mother in a mortuary in middle-Georgia. He wears Victorian era dress and speaks with a Polish accent. Don’t let Yvgeny’s career choice scare you away from the story- while some of Yvgeny’s antics will make you cringe, there is nothing gory or violent. The story begins with Yvgeny preparing for a funeral. He gets annoyed when he discovers someone dumped a body into a grave he had dug for someone else. Always looking for a way to make an extra buck, he hauls the body back to his office to inspect. After filching a nice watch, he calls the police. Of course, Yvgeny doesn’t like the police, and he eventually decides to solve the crime himself. With his love for Sherlock Holmes and inflated ego, he estimates his chances of solving the crime are far higher than those of the detectives. Yvgeny teams up with a motley assortment of not always like-minded characters in this small Georgia town, trying to stay one step ahead as the detectives close in. The local talent includes the mentally deficient one-eyed owner of the army-navy surplus store and the local doctor/deputy coroner who is a recovering hippie with a Tom Selleck fetish. In the middle of everything, Yvgeny falls for the crude and vulgar granddaughter of an old man buried in his cemetery. She is turned off by his bizarre fashion and strange interests, but Yvgeny is persistent. Will he solve the crime? Will he get the girl? Read and find out!

For every reader who grew up loving R.J. Palacio’s Wonder comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and magical YA debut about what it means to accept the body you’re given. What if the empty space was what made you whole? Morgan Stone was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. After seventeen years of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first she feels liberated . . . until a few online photos snowball into a media frenzy. Now Morgan is desperate to return to her own strange version of normal—when only her doctors, her divorced parents, and her best friend, Caro, knew the truth. Then a new doctor appears with a boy who may be both Morgan’s cure and her destiny. But what happens when you meet the person who is—literally—your perfect match? Is being whole really all it’s cracked up to be?

It's a cool, damp night, and a wriggling worm searches for food in a garden. Before the sun rises, it returns to its home in the soil. Tiny hairs on the worm's skin grab the dirt to help the crawler move forward. As the worm squirms underground, its long body breaks up the soil and creates tunnels. Welcome to the worm's hole! Clear text, colorful photos, and diagrams will engage young readers as they explore the habitat, physical characteristics, diet, and behavior of these curious creatures. Age-appropriate activities and critical-thinking questions give readers an opportunity to make observations and gain valuable insights.

“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

This groundbreaking classic is now available in a special anniversary edition with bonus content. Winner of the Newbery Medal as well as the National Book Award, HOLES is a New York Times bestseller and one of the strongest-selling middle-grade books to ever hit shelves! Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment —and redemption. Special anniversary edition bonus content includes: A New Note From the Author!; "Ten Things You May Not Know About HOLES" by Louis Sachar; and more!

A Harvard neurologist’s “gripping” account of his day-to-day work that “rarely falls into jargon and always keeps the narrative lively and engaging” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Tell the doctor where it hurts—it sounds simple enough, unless the problem affects the very organ that produces awareness and generates speech. What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell take us behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School’s neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound: • A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can’t stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth living How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarefied world where lives and minds hang in the balance. “Entertaining . . . Like an episode of the popular television series House, the book presents mysterious medical cases . . . In the hands of a lesser writer, this book might have been nothing more than a collection of colorful tales about the many ways a human brain can break down. But Dr. Ropper and Mr. Burrell manage to tell a more profound story about the value of men over machines.” —The New York Times Book Review “A captivating stroll through the concepts and realities of neurological science.” —Publishers Weekly “A must-read . . . each chapter reads like a detective story . . . This is medical writing at its best; in the tradition of Rouche, Lewis Thomas, and Oliver Sacks.” —V. S. Ramachandran, New York Times–bestselling author of The Tell-Tale Brain

On cover: "The hole, consumer culture, vol. 01: Open, a graphic novel by Damian Duffy + John Jennings."