Bücher veröffentlicht von Houghton Mifflin

Ten-year-old Angel and her little brother Rags have to cope with an incompetent babysitter and several crises while their mother is away. "Angel's good humor and real child concerns carry the day. The book's episodic format will appeal to middle-graders." -- Booklist

Nearing sixty, diagnosed with heart disease and feeling his mortality, Gary Paulsen buys his first Harley-Davidson and rides from his home in New Mexico to Alaska-and from the present into his past, through the landmarks of a singular life. Paulsen's journey is peopled with familiar faces, from the tough cop who saved him from juvenile delinquency to the prostitute whose career advice stopped him from quitting the army. And the work he does while on his bike-the work of mapping his life to find meaning-is of a piece with the pure sweat and muscle of youthful days spent on farms in Minnesota, or at the bottom of septic tank pits in Colorado, or wrangling dogsleds through the Alaskan wilderness. Amid the silence and beauty of running the road on his Harley, Paulsen celebrates the comforts of hard work, the thrill of challenge met bravely, and the peculiar joys of life lived to its fullest.

A work of exceptional range, by the noted author of "I'm Not Stiller," this "sketchbook" combines a fascinating variety of material, part fictional, part autobiographical, part Socratic. It constitutes a new art form, immensely stimulating through its shifts of prism, including: A series of startling questions that probe attitudes toward marriage, women, friendship, property, death, and so on (Are you afraid of the poor? Why not?) Interrogations about the use of violence for political ends Reports on a society for self-determined euthanasia A number of short stories Impressions of trips abroad, two to Russia, two to America (the last of which describes lunch at the White House with Henry Kissinger) Recollections of meetings with Bertolt Brecht as well as a series of candid portraits of Gunter Grass, before and after fame. Frisch, a Swiss, considers contemporary society with the mind of a highly intelligent, observant, and troubled liberal, sharply, wryly, reflectively. Hailed as a masterpiece by German critics, the book became an instant and long-lived best-seller in the original edition.

When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Müller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day. Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.

Once in a while you get a second chance. For Travis Cody this is one of those times. His team, the Oil Camp Roughnecks, is facing the Pineview Pelicans for the state championship. Travis will have forty-eight minutes head-to-head with rival Jericho Grooms. Forty-eight minutes to redeem himself for letting Grooms break him on the play that cost the Roughnecks an undefeated season. Forty-eight minutes to prove he isn't a quitter.

"My mother loved me to pieces, as she often said," writes Roy Blount Jr., "and I'm still trying to pick up the pieces." In the book his readers have been waiting for, our generation's master of full-hearted humor lays open the soul of his life story. Blount-Georgia boy, New York wit, lover of baseball and interesting women, bumbling adventurer, salty-limerick virtuoso, and impassioned father-journeys into his past, and his psyche (and also to China, Manhattan, and sixty feet underwater) in search of the answers to three riddles that have haunted his life: one, the riddle of "the family curse"; two, the riddle of what drives him, or anyone, to be funny; and three, the riddle of what so cruelly tangled his bond to the beguiling orphan girl who became the impossible mother who raised him to Be Sweet. Sardonic and sentimental, hilarious and grieving, brazen and bashful, tough and tender, honest and wayward, Be Sweet resonates with the complex but bouncy chords of a whole man singing, clinkers and all.