Three of a Kind

Betsy and Tacy are best friends. Then Tib moves into the neighborhood and the three of them start to play together. The grown-ups think they will quarrel, but they don't. Sometimes they quarrel with Betsy's and Tacy's bossy big sisters, but they never quarrel among themselves.

They are not as good as they might be. They cook up awful messes in the kitchen, throw mud on each other and pretend to be beggars, and cut off each other's hair. But Betsy, Tacy, and Tib always manage to have a good time.

Ever since their first publication in the 1940s, the Betsy-Tacy stories have been loved by each generation of young readers.

High School is Heaven

It's Betsy Ray's freshman year at Deep Valley High School, and she and her best childhood chum, Tacy Kelly, are loving every minute. Betsy and Tacy find themselves in the midst of a new crowd of friends, with studies aplenty (including Latin and—ugh—algebra), parties and picnics galore, Sunday night lunches at home—and boys!

There's Cab Edwards, the jolly boy next door; handsome Herbert Humphreys; and the mysteriously unfriendly, but maddeningly attractive, Joe Willard. Betsy likes them all, but no boy in particular catches her fancy until she meets the new boy in town, Tony Markham . . . the one she and Tacy call the Tall Dark Handsome Stranger. He's sophisticated, funny, and dashing—and treats Betsy just like a sister. Can Betsy turn him into a beau?

An entertaining picture of school clubs, fudge parties, sings around the piano, and Sunday-night suppers in Betsy's hospitable home.' 'Chicago Tribune.

The #1 bestselling children's book of all time. This classic tale about a curious little puppy has been enjoyed by children for over 50 years. Look for all new Poky & Friends videos and stories to be available this fall!

On the rocks or straight up, with lemons or limes, with salt or without, nothing conjures up the festive spirit of Mexico and the Southwest quite like a margarita. This book includes more than 75 formulas for everyone's favorite party drink, plus information on more than 60 premium tequilas. Full color.

There's something a little sad about the fact that shopping has become the Western world's favorite leisure activity, but I guess if we're trapped in a post-capitalist consumer society the best we can do is follow Paul Lukas's advice and treat the corporate wastelands of our industrial decline as playgrounds and art galleries beyond the scope of shrinking government entitlements and endowments. In Inconspicuous Consumption the fetish value of the obscure and bizarre products that occupy the back shelves of supermarkets is explored in loving detail. If you wish to know the pleasures of sauerkraut juice, toothpick dispensers, and adhesive nipple covers then this collection of articles from the zine Beer Frame should be your Baedeker to the land of ironic shopping.

Suggestions for taking weight off and keeping it off through modifying attitudes, eating nutritiously, and exercising.

Every morning, Mr. Bowman and his dog deliver the mail. Larabee likes riding in the mail truck. He likes carrying the mail bag, too. He likes delivering the mail and he always makes sure it is delivered on time. But there is one thing Larabee doesn't like: there is never a letter addressed to him!

I was nine years old the first time I hit my father and made him bleed. He was proud.

It's now five years after his father's death, and fourteen-year-old George is the man of the family. He knows all too well how brutal the life of a fighter can be. Didn't it kill his father?

But Monty, George's younger brother, has a completely different attitude. Boxing comes naturally to him. It's in his blood. He thinks of it as his father's legacy.

Unless George figures out a way to stop it, will boxing kill Monty, too?

In her twenties, journalist Sarah Macdonald backpacked around India and came away with a lasting impression of heat, pollution and poverty. So when an airport beggar read her palm and told her she would return to India—and for love—she screamed, “Never!” and gave the country, and him, the finger.

But eleven years later, the prophecy comes true. When the love of Sarah’s life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. For Sarah this seems like the ultimate sacrifice for love, and it almost kills her, literally. Just settled, she falls dangerously ill with double pneumonia, an experience that compels her to face some serious questions about her own fragile mortality and inner spiritual void. “I must find peace in the only place possible in India,” she concludes. “Within.” Thus begins her journey of discovery through India in search of the meaning of life and death.

Holy Cow is Macdonald’s often hilarious chronicle of her adventures in a land of chaos and contradiction, of encounters with Hinduism, Islam and Jainism, Sufis, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians and a kaleidoscope of yogis, swamis and Bollywood stars. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, it is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life—and her sanity—can survive.

Fourteen-year-old, tongue-tied Jed spends Christmas break working on a school project filming a documentary about his East Village, New York City, neighborhood, where he is continually reminded of his older brother, Zeke, a promising poet who died the year before.

A collection of images and information from an exhibition we saw in Madrid.

“Women’s work” has never been so much fun! Girl magazine, launched in the UK in 1951, and its popular strip “Mother Tells You How” provided inspiration and guidance for millions of teenage girls during the ’50s. Each week, Mother would teach her exemplary-in-every-way daughter, Judy, one of life’s most essential skills. Now a whole new generation can learn such traditional tasks as how to properly make a bed or bathe a baby, but also read whimsical and charming tips on how to make a Burmese skirt, use old cheese, prepare baked Alaska, pack for a weekend holiday, and camp in comfort!

Using the original archives from Girl, these strips appear to be a spoof, however the earnest and practical advice is wholly genuine. Why should girls fill their little heads with science and business they won’t understand when they can experiment with unusual sandwiches! Neatness and comfort go hand-in-hand in the kitschy and retro-chic Mother Tells You How. Now all modern women can be primed and poised for domestic success.

Gregory Maguire's chilling, wonderful retelling of Cinderella is a study in contrasts. Love and hate, beauty and ugliness, cruelty and charity—each idea is stripped of its ethical trappings, smashed up against its opposite number, and laid bare for our examination. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister begins in 17th-century Holland, where the two Fisher sisters and their mother have fled to escape a hostile England. Maguire's characters are at once more human and more fanciful than their fairy-tale originals. Plain but smart Iris and her sister, Ruth, a hulking simpleton, are dazed and terrified as their mother, Margarethe, urges them into the strange Dutch streets. Within days, purposeful Margarethe has secured the family a place in the home of an aspiring painter, where for a short time, they find happiness.

But this is Cinderella, after all, and tragedy is inevitable. When a wealthy tulip speculator commissions the painter to capture his blindingly lovely daughter, Clara, on canvas, Margarethe jumps at the chance to better their lot. "Give me room to cast my eel spear, and let follow what may," she crows, and the Fisher family abandons the artist for the upper-crust Van den Meers.

When Van den Meer's wife dies during childbirth, the stage is set for Margarethe to take over the household and for Clara to adopt the role of "Cinderling" in order to survive. What follows is a changeling adventure, and of course a ball, a handsome prince, a lost slipper, and what might even be a fairy godmother. In a single magic night, the exquisite and the ugly swirl around in a heated mix: Everything about this moment hovers, trembles, all their sweet, unreasonable hopes on view before anything has had the chance to go wrong. A stepsister spins on black and white tiles, in glass slippers and a gold gown, and two stepsisters watch with unrelieved admiration. The light pours in, strengthening in its golden hue as the sun sinks and the evening approaches. Clara is as otherworldly as the Donkeywoman, the Girl-Boy. Extreme beauty is an affliction... But beyond these familiar elements, Maguire's second novel becomes something else altogether—a morality play, a psychological study, a feminist manifesto, or perhaps a plain explanation of what it is to be human. Villains turn out to be heroes, and heroes disappoint. The story's narrator wryly observes, "In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats." —Therese Littleton