Twelve-year-old Sven Jorgenson is battling feelings of inadequacy while trying to prove himself to his overbearing father. It has been four years since Sven and his family moved to the Minnesota prairie, a "promised land" where wheat grew as high as the cattle. But the grasshoppers put an end to any hope of prosperity, and smallpox had taken his mother. Sven survived but still had the scars that tore at his confidence. With his father preoccupied, he turns to his uncle for comfort and finds companionship with his cousin Nicolai. With Nicolai's encouragement and training, Sven grows physically stronger. And inspired by his mother's faithfulness, his belief in God grows stronger as well. But will Sven's faith be enough to save the harvest? What lies ahead for this prairie community will be unlike anything anyone could ever imagine.

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics.

A 2015 Michael L. Printz Honor Book Winner of the 2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction "Raunchy, bizarre, smart and compelling." --Rolling Stone “Grasshopper Jungle is simultaneously creepy and hilarious. Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s in “Slaughterhouse Five,” in the best sense.” --New York Times Book Review In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend, Robby, have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things. This is the truth. This is history. It’s the end of the world. And nobody knows anything about it. You know what I mean. Funny, intense, complex, and brave, Grasshopper Jungle brilliantly weaves together everything from testicle-dissolving genetically modified corn to the struggles of recession-era, small-town America in this groundbreaking coming-of-age stunner.