Tired of living on a failing farm and suffering oppressive poverty, bored housewife Dellarobia Turnbow, on the way to meet a potential lover, is detoured by a miraculous event on the Appalachian mountainside that ignites a media and religious firestorm that changes her life forever.

"'Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?' I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer." At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate...

Reprint of 1947 edition. Above the town of Monterey on the California coast lies the shabby district of Tortilla Flat where Danny and his colorful group of friends live and where their revels recall the exploits of King Arthur's knights.

When thirteen-year-old Koly enters into an ill-fated arranged marriage, she must either suffer a destiny dictated by India's tradition or find the courage to oppose it.

Delly Porter enjoys the feel of soft dirt beneath her feet as she walks to and from school, but after a classmate makes her feel ashamed of having no shoes she learns that her parents and others, too, see value in things that do not cost money.

When she is tricked by her stepfather and sold into prostitution, thirteen-year-old Lakshmi becomes submerged in a nightmare where her only comfort is the friendship she forms with the other girls, which helps her survive and eventually escape.

"Life is hard for ten-year-old Safiyah in the Kibera slum outside Nairobi. Too poor to go to school, she makes a meager living for herself and her grandmother by selling things she finds at the garbage dump. The pages of the glossy magazines she finds at the dump are full of pictures of beautiful people doing things Safiyah can only dream about. But the magazines also inspire Safiyah to create something that may give her and Cucu the chance of a better...

Financial difficulties resulting from an extravagant lifestyle and excessive gambling led Fyodor Dostoevsky to pen his first novel "Poor Folk". First published in 1846, "Poor Folk" is the story of impoverished cousins Varvara Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin. The two live in run-down apartments across the street from each other in St. Petersburg. Through a series of letters to each other we learn of the suffering, humiliation, and isolation that results...

Wallace Shawn's deeply personal play about the high cost of enlightenment, and the ever-widening gap between those who have and those who have not.

"Tom Lowe's identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. He designed and built his family's dream home, working extra hours to pay off the adjustable rate mortgage he took on the property, convinced he is making every sacrifice for the happiness of his wife and son. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls. In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the...