Simple, rhyming verse presents many ways of being polite and using good manners, such as not laughing when a playmate makes a mistake, always wiping one's feet before going inside, and not interrupting when someone else is speaking.

Relates in rhyme what children eat in countries around the world.

"Welcome to Almost, Maine, a town that's so far north, it's almost not in the United States--it's almost in Canada. And it almost doesn't exist, because its residents never got around to getting organized. So it's just...Almost. One cold, clear Friday night in the middle of winter, while the northern lights hover in the sky above, Almost's residents find themselves falling in and out of love in the strangest ways. Knees are bruised. Hearts are broken....

The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a woman plagued by scandal whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870's New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution. In fact, Wharton considered this novel an "apology" for her earlier novel, The House of Mirth, which was more brutal and critical. Not...

Eleven stories on the vagaries of life. In Why China? a successful stockbroker yearns for the days when he was poor, in Passing the Hat, a wife observing a woman sleep around with men, is shocked to discover her own husband was one of them, while The Watch Trick compares the lives of two army friends, one who settled down, the other who didn't. By the author of The Invisible Circus.

A woman's nagging sense of deja vu leads her to discover the truth behind a series of terrorist bombings in the title story, in a collection of short fiction by a leading suspense writer.

The title story portrays the birth of democracy in Eastern Europe, Standing Ground is set in an abortion clinic and features a teenage girl, and the story, Poacher, offers a new twist on Sleeping Beauty.

In The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, has culled twenty-one of her best stories, here available in a single volume for the first time.

"... when patroller Dag Redwing Hickory rescued farmer girl Fawn Bluefield, neither expected to fall in love, join their lives in marriage, or defy both their kin to seek new solutions to the perilous split between their peoples. As Dag's maker abilities have grown, so has his concern about who, or what, he is becoming... Fawn and Dag see that their world is changing, and the traditional Lakewalker practices cannot hold every malice at bay forever......