As Amelia Bedelia helps Mrs. Rogers prepare for Christmas, she bakes a date cake with a calendar in it and stuffs the children's stockings with turkey stuffing.

"Rock breaks scissors is based on a simple principle: people are unable to act randomly. Instead they display unconscious patterns that the savvy person can outguess. The principle applies to friends playing rock, paper, scissors for a bar tab as well as to the crowds that create markets for homes and stocks. With a gift for distilling psychology and behavioral economics into accessible advice, Poundstone proves that outguessing is easy, fun, and...

When Lisa hangs her woolen clothes in the sun to air them out for winter, the hedgehog, to the amusement of the other animals, ends up wearing a stocking on his head.

As the Moonlight Magnolia Agency revisits old memories on Christmas Eve, Granny Reid takes the reins back thirty years to the 1980s, when everyone's hair was bigger, and sweaters were colorful disasters. She recalls the story of the scandalous Prissy Carr, who was found dead in an alley behind a tavern in McGill, Georgia just before Christmas. Stella "Granny" Reid decided to investigate and what she found put the lives of those she loved in danger....

After her novelist husband cheats on her, fellow writer and mother of two Sarah Price takes stock of her life and addresses all the things she put on hold for a family, including her writing, her best friend, the volumes of Proust on her shelves, and theman that tried to tempt her years ago.

Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. Possessing both the force of a parable and the excitement of a perfectly executed thriller, The Stranger is the work of one of the most engaged and intellectually alert writers...

"Since highland cattle ransacked his grandmother's vegetable patch when he was six, Roger Morgan-Grenville has been fascinated by cows. So at the age of 61, with no farming experience, he signed on as a part- time labourer on a beef cattle farm to tell their side of the story. The result is this lyrical and evocative book. For 10,000 years, cow and human lives have been intertwined. Cattle have existed alongside us, fed and shod us, quenched our thirst,...