Akron Public Library

Set in a variety of locales, from the Arctic to the South Seas and from city streets to the frontier, this collection of eleven short stories portrays men and women pushed to the limits of endurance.

Louis L'Amour is an American legend, a master storyteller whose tales of action and heroic adventure echo his own intrepid exploits. Relentless suspense, breathtaking danger, riveting characters -- these are the hallmarks of L'Amour's classic fiction. Off the Mangrove Coast collects for the first time in one volume nine of his extraordinary stories -- some long out of print and unavailable anywhere else, some never before published. This book is a...

"Jason has a problem. He doesn't remember anything before waking up in a bus full of kids on a field trip. Apparently, he has a girlfriend named Piper, and his best friend is a guy named Leo. They're all students at the Wilderness School, a boarding school for "bad kids," as Leo puts it. What did Jason do to end up here? And where is here, exactly? Jason doesn't know anything - except that everything seems very wrong. Piper has a secret. Her father,...

Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there, or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors discover hidden in his belongings. Langdon's world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever manuevering...

At the conclusion of The Mark of Athena, Annabeth and Percy tumble into a pit leading straight to the Underworld. The other five demigods have to put aside their grief and follow Percy's instructions to find the mortal side of the Doors of Death. If they can fight their way through Gaea's forces, and Percy and Annabeth can survive the House of Hades, then the Seven will be able to seal the Doors on both sides and prevent the giants from raising...

The twelve stories in this collection - appearing for the first time in one complete volume - run the spectrum of human emotions as they transport us from the fading majesty of the Old West to a small-town football field to the lonely canyons of one man's mind.

Welcome to another title in the Best Short Stories Collection. This time, we focus on Jack London, one of the greatest names in American literature. Jack London had a brief existence, but he lived it intensely and wrote about what he experienced. Perhaps this is why his stories are so vivid and thrilling, invariably drawing the reader into every moment and every adventure. In this exquisite selection of eleven of his best short stories, including...

A captivating retelling of Mark Twain's classic adventure story. True to the original in plot, character, themes and style, this is an excellent way for a young reader to meet Tom Sawyer for the first time. Tom Sawyer is a respectable boy in a little Mississippi River town. Huck Finn is a freedom-loving, neglected outcast. What better playmate could Tom want? One night, innocent games of pirates and Robin Hood turn serious when the boys witness a...

Born into poverty, Jack London led a knockabout existence before achieving success as one of the most popular authors of his era. In the course of his brief but active life, he sought adventure-as a hobo, prospector, sailor, and a dozen other occupations-along with self-education from the works of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Jung. The vitality and variety of London's experiences are reflected in his stories, which range from earthy accounts of survival...

First published in 1903, The Call of the Wild borught Jack London international acclaim and a readership that would span generations. Stolen from his comfortable California home, Buck -- a powerful half-St. Bernard, half-Scottish sheepdog -- is shipped to the Klondike and pressed into service as a sled dog. So begins an odyssey in which Buck suffers cruelty and neglect, learns the brutal skills of a survivor, finds a gentle master that he can respect...