Forget about reading boring Italian textbooks that are so long you'll never reach the end. With Italian Short Stories: 9 Simple and Captivating Stories for Effective Italian Learning for Beginners, you will experience relief from the frustrations you might have experienced when trying to learn Italian through a more rigid approach. In this audiobook, you will encounter rich and new but not too complex vocabulary, which is translated at the end of the chapter, avoiding the hassle of having to stop the listening rhythm to look up every word in the dictionary.

Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. “It is true poetry she is writing,” M. F.K . Fisher has observed, “not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity.... It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night...it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes.”

Raised in a small Native American village by the sea, Thomas Witka Just has just married his childhood sweetheart when an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever. Cut off from his community and traumatized by war, he finds refuge in another tribal village there and fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home many years later, he finds his tribe in conflict over a decision to hunt a whale, a spiritual symbol for his people.

Following the success of several recent inspirational and practical books for would-be writers, Poemcrazy is a perfect guide for everyone who ever wanted to write a poem but was afraid to try. Writing workshop leader Susan Wooldridge shows how to think, use one's senses, and practice exercises that will make poems more likely to happen.

Ana Rosa is a blossoming young writer growing up in a poor seaside village in the Dominican Republic. At the young age of 12, she finds herself faced with turning points that will make up who she is, watching her brother's search for a future, learning to dance and to love, and finding out what it means to be a part of a community.

When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is famous for its up-to-the-minute shock therapies and for Dr. Carroll's revolutionary theory of the benefits of non-introspection. Evalina finds herself in the midst of a kaleidoscope of characters, including the estranged wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.

Glowing with narrator Virginia Leishman’s finely tuned phrasing, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is the perfect introduction to A.S. Byatt, an author who continues to receive international awards and acclaim. Her wondrous fairy tales are iridescent stories full of spells, marvelous creatures, and beautiful princesses.

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today—not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.

Lanky lizards and rubber chickens, slinkster dogs and Lanka girls - Weetzie Bat knows them all in the glitzy never-never land of L.A. With her blonde flat-top and trendy clothes, Weetzie Bat cruises from high school to neon clubs, looking for her Secret Agent Lover Man. When she meets dark-haired Dirk and his red Pontiac, their search for love is a funky, off-beat fable. And when three wishes come true, their adventures create a modern fairy tale.

The definitive anthology of Jim Morrison's writings with rare photographs and numerous handwritten excerpts of unpublished and published poetry and lyrics from his 28 privately held notebooks.

One of the best-known collections of W. B. Yeats' prose, The Celtic Twilight explores the old connection between the Irish people and the magical world of fairies. Yeats, by traveling the land in the early 20th century and talking to the common people about their experiences with the creatures, yielded a colorful overview of Celtic fairy folklore.

Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.

Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean American boy and a newly named section leader of the first sopranos in his local boys' choir. But when Fee learns how the director treats his section leaders, he is so ashamed he says nothing of the abuse, not even when Peter, his best friend, is in line to be next. When the director is arrested, Fee tries to forgive himself for his silence. But when Peter takes his own life, Fee blames only himself.

Li Po (AD 701-762) lived in T'ang Dynasty China, but his influence has spanned the centuries: the pure lyricism of his poems has awed readers in China and Japan for over a millennium, and through Ezra Pound’s translations, Li Po became central to the modernist revolution in the West. However ethereal in spirit, his poems remain grounded in the everyday experience we all share. He wrote 1,200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed.