"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel's wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of...

"It is 1864 and Eliza Spooner's husband Will has joined the Kansas volunteers to fight the Confederates, leaving her with their two children and in charge of their home and land. Eliza is confident that he will return home, and she helps pass the months making a special quilt to keep Will warm during his winter months in the army. When the unthinkable happens, she takes in a a woman and child who have been left alone and made vulnerable by the war,...

In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is retreating toward Texas, and being replaced by Red Legs, irregulars commanded by a maniacal figure, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with...

"Russell's Knob is not paradise. But already in 1849 this New Jersey highlands settlement is home to a diverse population of blacks, whites, and reds who have intermarried and lived in relative harmony for generations. It is a haven for Dossie Bird, who has escaped north along the Underground Railroad and now feels the embrace of the Smoot family. Duncan Smoot presides as accidental patriarch, protector of his enterprising sister, Hattie, and his...

"Remembrance...It's a rumor, a whisper passed in the fields and veiled behind sheets of laundry. A hidden stop on the underground road to freedom, a safe haven protected by more than secrecy...if you can make it there. Ohio, present day. A refugee struggling to rebuild her life in America after the devastating Haitian earthquake is suddenly inexplicably bound to a mysterious old woman who is not at all what she seems. Haiti, 1791, on the brink of...

When it burst onto the literary scene in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin galvanized anti-slavery sentiment in America. So much so that when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he half-jokingly said that she instigated the Civil War. Few books, if any, have been as widely circulated as Unlce Tom's Cabin was when it was first published. And over 100 years later, it remains controversial ... The book engages readers with the compelling adventures of...

"Because something is happening, in the distance, approaching from above and below. Weird holes are appearing. I'm often drawn by a void. And that might be the reason I have started to speak. So says the Scatterwind, the narrator in Robert Perisic's latest novel, A Cat at the Edge of the World. Defying the realms of time and space, the Scatterwind is a knowing presence throughout this story, which spans from the time of ancient Sparta to our contemporary...

"The reader is invited to blaze a trail through this forest of symbols. The last chapter will shed light on the profound meaning of the fable. But the point is less to capture than to be captivated by the energy, the luxuriance, and the playful solemnity of writing that masterfully melds French, Creole, and yet other voices as well."--L'Express. From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a "writer of exceptional and...

"By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild--a one-armed, impassioned abolitionist--set out from Portsmouth to...