William Dean Howells's warm, intimate portrait of Mark Twain begins with their first meeting in Boston and grows into a lifelong friendship marked by laughter, admiration, and repeated visits in Hartford and New York. Twain emerges as a dazzling presence: theatrically dressed, mischievous, endlessly talkative, and yet rooted in a boyish originality that made his humor feel inseparable from deeper wisdom. Howells moves through literary gatherings with Fields, Aldrich, Bret Harte, and Ralph ...

An Ohio family — a judge, his wife, and a daughter recovering from an unsuitable attachment — is taken to Europe to get over it, and the Atlantic and the Dutch canals do not much help. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1902 novel is his quiet study of ordinary decent people being wrong about their own children, and the father is beautifully done.

A middle-aged American in Florence, comfortable and finished with life, is courted by a girl of twenty and by her chaperone, who is his own age — and behaves badly, then better, then badly again. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1886 novel is his lightest and his best, and the humiliation of a man discovering he is not young is done with no cruelty at all.

The Marches, married twenty-five years, take the European tour they could not afford as newlyweds — the ship, the Rhine, Carlsbad, a young couple in trouble whom they cannot help minding about. Howells edited The Atlantic and wrote for Harper's, and was the most powerful literary broker in America; here he does middle age exactly, and the kindness of the book is not softness.

With a million or more business books available in print and digital, THRIVE attempts to be different. Whilst we touch on aspects of leadership and inspiration, this book has been written to give you immediate actionable insights wherever you are in your career. The structure of the book allows you to 'plug in and play' wherever you want to start, rather than following a traditional linear reading approach. Outlining a tried and tested roadmap, aspiring individuals, who are after continued...

Bartley Hubbard, a sharp-eyed Boston journalist, arrives to profile Silas Lapham for a series on "solid men," and the interview quickly becomes a vivid portrait of American self-making. Lapham, prosperous, plainspoken, and proud, recounts his Vermont boyhood, his mother's exhausting labor, and the hard-won path that took him from sawmills and stage driving to a hotel, a marriage to the schoolteacher Persis, and finally a business fortune. At the center of his rise is the accidental discove...

A Vermont girl of no family is taken up by a rich woman as a companion and carried to Italy — where the arrangement, and everyone's exact idea of what she is owed, comes apart. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1899 novel is his quietest anatomy of patronage, and the girl's refusal to be grateful on cue is the whole book.

A self-made paint millionaire from Vermont builds a house on the water side of Beacon Street and discovers that Boston's old families will accept his money and not his daughters. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary man in America; he made his hero's crisis a matter of business ethics rather than romance, which nobody had thought to do.

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs. Inside you'll find: · Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Andersen, O. He...

As the city teeters on the brink of collapse, a small group of survivalists retreats into the mountains, determined to endure. Driven by fear of an impending apocalypse, they build a self-sufficient sanctuary, stocked with supplies and survival skills. When news of a potential threat from Russia shakes their community, they isolate themselves even further.What begins as a united effort to prepare soon devolves into distrust and paranoia. The members turn on each other, driven by fea...

From high atop a hill in his New Mexico home, Dean Rudoy surveys eight decades of "this hard, sweet life." Psychologist, teacher, activist, son, friend, he offers inspirational stories of indelible encounters with the extraordinary, arising from familiar and uncanny events alike.Growing up with a necessary secret in a small Midwestern town, Rudoy awakens to the private yearnings of others. Troubled young men in a New York hospital struggle for clarity; children proclaim truths that...

Different girls is a collection of interwoven short narratives that examine the varied experiences of young women within American society. Each story offers a distinct portrait of personal aspiration, emotional conflict, and social expectation, presenting individuality within shared cultural frameworks. The anthology reflects on family duty, romantic attachment, independence, and the subtle pressures that shape identity. Through carefully drawn situations and restrained realism, the collec...