Bøger i Harvest Original serien

Are you so sure about "assure," "ensure," and "insure"? Can you determine whether a knob of butter is equivalent to a lump or a pat or a scosh? Can you say which word in the English language has the most definitions, or who put the H in Jesus H. Christ? If you can't, be assured that Charles Harrington Elster, author of several well-loved works on language, can-and does in his latest book, a delightfully designed compendium of the most common, interesting, and entertaining conundrums in our language. Drawing upon esoteric sources and his own inimitable expertise, Elster uses a lively question-and-answer format to cover a variety of topics-word and phrase origins, slang, style, usage, punctuation, and pronunciation. Every chapter features original brainteasers, challenging puzzles, and a trove of literary trivia.

These fourteen short stories, written over the past ten years but never before collected, deal with the struggles between mothers and their wayward daughters, the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and the complex games masters and servants play with one another. In spare, elegant prose, Freed delivers surprise after surprise as she shakes the truth from life. Whether it's her portrayal of a mother mired in senile dementia in "Ma," a young girl experiencing her first sexual encounter with an itinerant knife-sharpener in "Under the House," or a young woman incapable of loving conventionally in "An Error of Desire," Freed portrays the absurdity, the delusions, the dramas, and the dignity of her characters' lives. These masterful stories reinforce her reputation as one of our most fearless and sophisticated explorers of sexual and filial love.

Test of Time is a captivating time-travel adventure that incorporates vocabulary words from the SAT and ACT, boldfacing them throughout the novel and providing definitions in a handy back-of-the book glossary. The result is a fun and effective study method for the thousands of diligent students who take these tests each year. For Orlando Garcia Ortiz and his friends at prestigious Hadleyburg University, it's finals week. That same week, but many, many years before, a famously eccentric writer in Hartford, Connecticut, is putting the finishing touches on a manuscript about a rebellious boy named Huck. Suddenly, a bizarre thing happens: The manuscript disappears and in its place appears a strange contraption-a college student's laptop that has traveled through time. It's a mysterious set of circumstances, but our intrepid heroes at Hadleyburg, joined by Mark Twain, endeavor to retrieve their valued possessions and return to their proper places in time.