A little boy fills his sound box with words beginning with the letters "x, y, z."

Dagmar Richter is radically reinventing urban design by giving voice to unusual elements-traces of a site's history, contemporary photos or drawings, and text or spoken words.

XYZ by Anna Katharine Green will shock you to your very core with its twists, turns, and dark and spooky secrets. An unnamed detective must uncover the mystery of a counterfeiting crime, without getting implicated in the process. Excerpt: "Sometimes in the course of his experience, a detective, while engaged in ferreting out the mystery of one crime, runs inadvertently upon the clue to another. But rarely has this been done in a manner more unexpected or with attendant circumstances of greater interest than in the instance I am now about to relate."

One day in Alphabetland, all the letters came out to begin their alphabet day. All the letters, that is, except for X, Y and Z, who were holed up in Z's house. Tired of always being last - and being crammed together on the final page of the Alphabet books - X, Y and Z set out to have their own showcase book.