Apples, blueberries, peppers, cucumbers, coffee, and vanilla. Do you like to eat and drink? Then you might want to thank a bee. Bees pollinate 75 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Around the world, bees pollinate $24 billion worth of crops each year. Without bees, humans would face a drastically reduced diet. We need bees to grow the foods that keep us healthy. But numbers of bees are falling, and that has scientists alarmed. What's causing the decline? Diseases, pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat are all threatening bee populations. Some bee species teeter on the brink of extinction. Learn about the many bee species on Earth -- their nests, their colonies, their life cycles, and their vital connection to flowering plants. Most importantly, find out how you can help these important pollinators. "If we had to try and do what bees do on a daily basis, if we had to come out here and hand pollinate all of our native plants and our agricultural plants, there is physically no way we could do it. . . . Our best bet is to conserve our native bees." --ecologist Rebecca Irwin, North Carolina State University

The Curse of the Deadly 7 is the last book in the funny, action-packed, exciting monster adventure series The Deadly 7 by the director of Sing Garth Jennings. 'A fantastic new voice in middle grade fiction. I loved it!' Robin Stevens, bestselling author of Murder Most Unladylike. Nelson Green has learned to live with the seven stinky monsters that were extracted from his soul. Sure, they sometimes get up to mischief and land him in trouble, but at least he hasn't had to fight any giant angry abominations in a while. But something still isn't right. Nelson's hair hasn't grown a single millimeter since the monsters were created. He hasn't got any taller, and his chewed off fingernails aren't growing back. Something strange is happening, and the Deadly 7 know more than they're letting on . . . But then someone else finds the soul extractor – someone with a grudge against Nelson. Soon Nelson has more to worry about than his fingernails: there's an army of angry monsters coming to get him, and his own monsters might not be there to help . . .

A Dalit, a Buddhist and a feminist: Urmila Pawar’s self-definition as all three identities informs her stories about women who are brave in the face of caste oppression, strong in the face of family pressures, defiant when at the receiving end of insult, and determined when guarding their interests and those of their sisters. Using the classic short story form with its surprise endings to great effect, Pawar brings to life strong and clever women who drive the reader to laughter, anger, tears or despair. Her harsh, sometimes vulgar and hard-hitting language subverts another stereotype — that of the soft-spoken woman writer. Pawar’s protagonists may not always be Dalit, and the mood not always one of anger, but caste is never far from the context and informs the subtext of each story. As critic Eleanor Zelliot notes, there is ‘tucked in every story, a note about a Buddhist vihara or Dr Ambedkar.... All her stories come from the Dalit world, revealing the great variety of Dalit life now.’ Published by Zubaan.

51 Best Short Stories' is a unique collection of short stories that have been written by well-known authors from around the world. Short stories from India, Britain, America, Russia, Brazil, Spain and many other countries have been included in this book. This collection features the best stories of authors such as O. Henry, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Virginia Woolf, Saki and several others. The stories explore a variety of ideas and themes such as love, hatred, humour, adventure, suspense, crime and punishment, sentiment and revenge. Each story in this book is compelling and brilliant, and tends to evoke emotional response from readers.

Under the Luscombe Bridge - Story set in the train from Brisbane. In describing the station layout, memories are evoked of an older Queensland when an old country station, which could be on any railway line anywhere, is described... A brief description of the town's Rainbow Café is given. -- Information from Writers' Footprints by JSD Mellick.

Stories that follow the lives of Jewish characters from the Midwest to the Middle East and beyond: “A profound debut from a writer of great talent.” —Adam Johnson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Orphan Master’s Son The characters of The Worlds We Think We Know are swept up by forces beyond their control: war, adulthood, family—and their own emotions, as powerful as the sandstorm that gusts through these stories. In Ohio, a college student cruelly enlists the help of the boy who loves her to attract the attention of her own crush. In Israel, a young American woman visits an uncommunicative Holocaust survivor and falls in love with a soldier. And from an unnamed Eastern European country, a woman haunts the husband who left her behind for a new life in New York City. The Worlds We Think We Know is a dazzling fiction debut—fiercely funny and entirely original. “Outstanding . . . Set in locales including present-day Jerusalem, the permafrost region of Russia and the streets of Manhattan, Rosenfeld’s best stories focus not only on loss, but on its aftermath: living in the presence of absence.” —Haaretz “Funny and poignant . . . The lush melancholy of this collection is bolstered by the characters’ deep intelligence and wit . . . Jewish history is shredded through with displacement, and many of Rosenfeld’s characters are caught in the position of a having a long cultural history and no sense of home.” —Electric Literature