"A private eye starts to follow a possibly adulterous husband, but little does he know that the twisted trail will lead back to the woman who hired him"-- When Joan turns up at private investigator Henry Kimball's office asking him to investigate her husband, he can't help feeling ill at ease. He knew Joan in his previous life as a high school English teacher, when he was at the center of a tragedy. Joan wants his help to prove her husband is cheating,...

"Mab is the "normal" one, never mind Bourne Memorial High School has banned that term, and besides, she's a stickler for words and definitions and knows normal isn't normal in Bourne. Monday is a stickler for everything else. She doesn't like abbreviations, contractions, lies, typos, or wearing green clothes on yellow days. When the Bourne library shut down--funds desperately needed elsewhere--she stashed the books under her bed, behind the sofa,...

"Lucia has been kicked out of school, again, this time for stabbing a boy in the neck with a pencil. Her father is dead; her mother is in a mental institute; and she's living in a garage-turned-bedroom with her aunt. Making her way through the world with only a book, a Zippo lighter, and a pocket full of stolen licorice, Lucia spends her days riding the bus to visit her mother in The Home, avoiding the landlord who hates her, and following the only...

"This hilarious, inspirational, and wise collection of personal essays and humor from a longtime educator explores all the joys, challenges, and absurdities of being a teacher, following in the footsteps of such classics as Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire, The Courage to Teach, and Up the Down Staircase. Shannon Reed did not want to be a teacher, but now, after twenty years of working with children from preschool to college, there's nothing she'd rather...

"Young, searching, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year, 1963. Today, Nike's annual sales top $30 billion. In this Age of Startups, Knight's Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is more...

Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in the past year, selected from American periodicals.