Here is the story of an intransigent young architect, Howard Roark, of his violent battle against a mindless status quo, and of his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who worships him yet struggles to defeat him. In order to build his kind of buildings according to his own standards, Roark must fight against every variant of human corruption.

"Three women from very different circumstances around the world find their lives intertwined by a single object and discover what connects us--across cultures, across backgrounds, and across borders. In India, Smita is an untouchable. Desperate to give her daughter an education, she takes her child and flees her small village with nothing but resourcefulness, eventually heading to a temple where she will experience a rebirth. In Sicily, Giulia works...

Cleet Kinsolving's idealization of the friendship is destroyed when he realizes that Neil Reardon is disguising envy by using his wealth to turn Cleet into a hanger-on.

Grace and Katie are twins who love to draw. Grace loves everything to be organised and neat, while Katie loves everything to be bright, bold and messy. When they want to draw a map of their home and street, the girls can't agree on how it should be done so they each decide to create their own map. But that doesn't work out quite as well as they'd planned. Perhaps working together might be more fun after all! An imaginative exploration of individuality,...

"For as long as Sid could remember, most things were one way around...and he was the other."--Page [4] of cover.

In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell...