According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, ...more

Meet Laura Ingalls . . . . . . the little girl who would grow up to write the Little House books. Pa Ingalls decides to sell the little log house, and the family sets out for Indian country! They travel from Wisconsin to Kansas and there, finally, Pa builds their little house on the prairie. Sometimes farm life is difficult, even dangerous, but La...more

First published in 1958, this raw, devastatingly haunting Holocaust memoir is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's best known work. After the German army invades, they first confine the Jewish community of Sighet, Transylvania, into a ghetto, and then pack them into cattle cars bound for the concentration camps. Fifteen-year-old Eliezer and his f...more

Matilda is a little girl who is far too good to be true. At age five-and-a-half she's knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she's a super-nerd and the teacher's pet. But everything is not perfect in Matilda's world. For starters she has two of the m...more

When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, wh...more

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky."Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its read...more

Dr. Amin Jaafie, an Arab-Israeli citizen working as a respected surgeon at a Tel Aviv hospital, finds his life torn apart in the wake of a horrific terrorist bombing at a local restaurant, as he not only works to help the shattered survivors of the attack, but also must deal with the discovery that his own wife was the suicide bomber responsible. B...more