"How to Tell a Story and Other Essays" is a collection of essays on various subjects by America's most famous satirist, Mark Twain. Contained in this volume you will find the following essays: How to Tell a Story, In Defense of Harriet Shelley, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, Travelling With a Reformer, Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story, Mental Telegraphy Again, What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us, A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget, The Invalid's...

Little Red Chicken wants Papa to read her a bedtime story, but interrupts him almost as soon as he begins each tale.

Late afternoon in a passport and visa office in California, nine people are in the office when an earthquake rips through the building trapping these nine together struggling to survive

A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

A most unusual new student who loves to be the center of attention entertains her teacher and fellow second graders by telling absolutely true stories about herself, including how she got her name.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would...

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched...

In his prime, Edward Bloom was an extraordinary man. He could outrun anybody. He never missed a day of school. He saved lives and tamed giants. Animals loved him, people loved him, women loved him. He knew more jokes than any man alive. At least thats what he told his son, William. But now Edward Bloom is dying, and William wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive fatherthis indefatigable teller of tall talesbefore its too late. So, using...

One rainy day while his father listens to his old records, his mother polishes a silver platter, and his brother enjoys his baseball card collection, Little Bill discovers his own treasure, a talent for storytelling

"As Paris teeters on the edge of the German occupation, a young French woman closes the door to her late grandmother's treasure-filled apartment, unsure if she'll ever return "--