As Marion Peck's magical and bucolic landscapes unfold, an uneasy melancholy fills the air - the birds are chirping but the sounds are not quite right. The viewer pauses and questions the reality Peck has created, as well as reality itself. Themes of hope, despair, mystery, nostalgia, love and death recur throughout Peck's work alongside motifs of dreams, big-eyed animals, natural landscapes, doe-eyed children, royalty and peasantry.

"[A] firecracker of a debut . . . Abreu's novel, in Julia Sanches's sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons." —The New York Times My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color in this lyrical debut novel set in a working-class neighborhood of the Canary Islands—a story about two girls coming of age in the early aughts and a friendship that simmers into erotic desire over the course of one hot summer. High near the volcano of northern Tenerife, an endless ceiling of cloud cover traps the working class in an abject, oppressive heat. Far away from the island’s posh resorts, two girls dream of hitching a ride down to the beach and escaping their horizonless town. It’s summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she’s also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That's why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts. But she's definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora's fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her—and as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence. Braiding prose poetry with bachata lyrics and the gritty humor of Canary dialect, Dogs of Summer is a story of exquisite yearning, a brutal picture of girlhood and a love song written for the vital community it portrays.

Illustrations and easy-to-read text reassure children that if they were calf, chick, larva, or fawn, they would always be loved by their moose, loon, bee, or deer.

"[This book is] for everyone who loves animals and wants to live a more animal-friendly life, even if they aren't ready to join a movement or give up bacon"--Amazon.com.

This is a story about a boy who was told if he kept digging he would end up in China. Because of his sister's fearlessness and some fantastic friends, he finds himself in Beijing. In this comical retelling, the group meets in Beijing to support the boy's sister, who is running The Great Wall Marathon. The run is a great excuse to extend the trip into an experience of a lifetime: enjoying local cuisine, checking out shopping hot spots, dispelling myths and pre-conceived notions, and putting the T back into tea--all the while laughing at themselves along the way.

Night tells himself Summer is his mother's physical therapist and nothing more. Until she's kidnapped on his watch and he realises how much he truly cares. Night, leader of the Wind Warriors, has little time for romance and no patience for his matchmaking mother's selections, too busy focusing on special missions. His orderly life falls apart when Summer, his mother's physical therapist and his budding romantic interest, is kidnapped at gunpoint. Summer never expects to meet a man like Night, intelligent and downright sexy. She bristles under his dictatorial tone, stands up to him, while beginning to see the man underneath. A man she could spend a lifetime with. The past comes back to haunt Night, dragging Summer into the midst of danger. Can he gather the team and rush to her rescue before it's too late and he loses the woman he's come to love?

"Summer" by Dallas Lore Sharp is the fourth last volume of the natural history - outdoor book series by the author. Excerpt: "I believe that a child's interest in outdoor life is a kind of hunger, as natural as his interest in bread and butter. He cannot live on bread and butter alone, but he ought not to try to live without them. He cannot be educated on nature-study alone, but he ought not to be educated without it. To learn to obey and reason and feel—these are the triple ends of education, and the greatest of these is to learn to feel. The teacher's word for obedience; the arithmetic for reasoning; and for feeling, for the cultivation of the imagination, for the power to respond quickly and deeply, give the child the out-of-doors."