A new selection for the NEA’s Big Read program

A compact selection of Poe’s greatest stories and poems, chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Read program.

This selection of eleven stories and seven poems contains such famously chilling masterpieces of the storyteller’s art as “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,”...

"Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself--and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which...

"Princess Violet is plain, reckless, and quite possibly too clever for her own good. Particularly when it comes to telling stories. One day she and her best friend, Demetrius, stumble upon a hidden room and find a peculiar book. A forbidden book. It tells a story of an evil being--called the Nybbas--imprisoned in their world. The story cannot be true--not really. But then the whispers start. Violet and Demetrius, along with an ancient, scarred dragon,...

"A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game--and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant...

A noted music critic who knew him tells the unvarnished truth about Cash, whose personal life was far more troubled and his artistry much more profound than even his most devoted fans have realized.

"In this lively book, Maggie Taft tells the story of how Danish modern furniture emerged in the wake of WWII and became all the rage in the US. By the 1950s Danish Modern furniture was everywhere-in living rooms and on the political stage. A Danish Modern chair was chosen for the first televised presidential debate, in 1960, between JFK and Richard Nixon. When the broadcast began, there were Nixon and Kennedy, sleekly seated in Hans Wegner's "Round...

No story is more beloved-or more often told-than the story of the first Christmas, when Jesus was born. In text that echoes the language of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus Is Born tells the entire story of the nativity, from the angel Gabriel's awe-inspiring message to the Virgin Mary to the miraculous birth of Christ in a lowly manger in Bethlehem; from the luminous star that led shepherds and three wise men to the newborn king to King Herod's...

A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother. Soon after arriving in this elegant East European city, however, she helps an elderly couple into a taxi-and realizes too late that she has accidentally kept one of their bags. Inside she finds an ornately carved wooden box engraved with a name: Stoyan Lazarov. Raising the hinged lid, she discovers...

From the racetracks of Seoul to the battlegrounds of the Korean War, Reckless was a horse whose strength, tenacity, and relentless spirit made her a hero amongst a regiment of U.S. Marines fighting for their lives on the front lines. Her Korean name was Ah-Chim-Hai-Flame-of-the-Morning. A four-year-old chestnut-colored Mongolian racehorse with a white blaze down her face and three white stockings, she once amazed the crowds in Seoul with her remarkable...

"An anthology of the best of feminist Jewish short stories published in Lilith Magazine by well-known and less-well known authors from all over the world"-- "A groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection. Short story collections focusing on Jewish writers have typically given women authors short shrift. This new volume represents the best Jewish feminist fiction published in Lilith Magazine and does what no other collection has done before...